It’s my favourite time of year when love is in the air everywhere you go. At every corner you see couples stopping to kiss each other, love songs play on every radio station, and the air has an iridescent glow of romance. As soon as the Christmas season has commenced, every supermarket, independent store, high-street shop, and any business under the sun begins to dress their shelves with pink and red galore. As I scanned my wardrobe for the perfect Valentine’s date outfit my eyes only gravitated towards the colours that ooze femininity and romance. When choosing my makeup, I immediately dressed my eyelids with the Natasha Denona ‘Love’ eyeshadow palette. All of this came as an automatic thought process, but I started to wonder why are pink and red associated with Valentine’s Day?
The colour red’s symbolic history is timeless, but in a nutshell red radiates romance, passion, lust, love, and allure. The association with romance is commonly believed to gain popularity through Greek mythology. Allegedly, red roses first appeared from the blood of Adonis – these red roses were dedicated to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. This explains why red roses also feature as a very typical Valentine’s Day present. From a biological point of view, many people blush red/pink when they are flustered by a crush, so by incorporating makeup with rosy tones it symbolises our attraction or infatuation towards our date. Red is also commonly worn on the day of romance because we want our significant other to feel attracted to us – red is the colour of attraction. In a study conducted by Elliot and Niesta (2008), male subjects were shown a photo of a woman and asked to rate her attractiveness. A photo of the woman wearing a red shirt was shown to half of the participants, whilst the other half were shown a photo of the same woman wearing a blue shirt. Those who had been shown the woman wearing the red shirt rated her as more attractive and sexually desirable. It is clear that psychologically we are attracted to those we see sexual appeal in, and it’s no surprise that we want to symbolise this appeal on Valentine’s Day.
So now we know why red is associated with romance, but why is pink? Well, pink is a combination of red and pink – a combination of sexual passion and purity. By wearing pink, it symbolises an intertwinement of hot passion, and a gentle kind of love – a purer, delicate, approach that makes us appear prettier instead of hotter. Pink oozes femininity and love, aspects of ourselves we wish to embrace on a day dedicated to love and romance.
The Natasha Denona Love Palette (£60) was released in 2020 for Valentine’s Day and it immediately became a hit for February – and it’s no surprise why! This palette, which is cruelty-free and paraben-free, delivers the perfect quality to which no other brand compares. A palette that has no fall-out; a perfectly smooth texture, a glitter that captures the light and glistens seamlessly, a matte that blends by itself. No one does it like Natasha Denona. Fitting with the theme of love and romance, her 15 shades mostly incorporate reds and pinks, with fleeting shades of purple (another typically feminine shade) and glitter shades of gold and silver for variety. This palette is named perfectly – it is love captured in 15 pans. Finish this look with a dusting of red or pink blusher (depending on the depth and tone of your skin tone) and a red lipstick for passion, or a pink lip gloss for gentle love, and you are ready for all of the love and romance in the world.