Rose-tinted means the colour of a pink rose — a soft pink light or a pink wash over something. You can have rose-tinted glasses in the plain sense: the lenses are pink. Though actually, the phrase people really live by is look at something through rose-tinted glasses (Americans often say rose-colored glasses; British English likes spectacles too). That does not mean the glasses are pink. It means you see a person, a country, or the past as kinder and prettier than it really was. Teachers, newspapers, and ordinary talk all use that picture. The word itself is a little literary when it is only about colour; the glasses idiom is the everyday one.