Plaster Pink
Plaster pink is less a colour than a family of colours: the range of soft, slightly dirty pinks that appear when a white or lime ground is tinted with a small quantity of red or earth pigment. Historically these tones arrived by accident as much as by design, from ochres and red earths in the plaster itself, and from the brick dust and marble dust once added to lime renders.
What distinguishes a plaster pink from a decorator's pink is the grey inside it. The greyed pinks read as a neutral in most light and only declare themselves as pink at the edges of the day. That makes them unusually easy to live with in rooms that would look bleak in white, particularly north-facing rooms where a plain white ground turns blue.
The colour is also very sensitive to sheen. In a flat, chalky finish it stays quiet and slightly powdery. The same pigment in an eggshell or a satin finish becomes noticeably sweeter and more modern, because the reflected light strips out the grey. If the aim is the older, softer effect, the finish matters at least as much as the mix.
Plaster pinks sit well with unbleached linen, old gilding, dark stained wood and any green that has some earth in it. They fight with clean primary colours and with cool greys, which tend to make them look tired rather than soft.