How pink became a "feminine" color
Perhaps no more gender Dyed color than pink. He has been haunting us since childhood, forcing girls to play with a pink Barbie machine, wear pink dresses and wear pink baby makeup. The girls are designed posters and covers of women's magazines, from which various shades literally flow from pale baby pink to loud fuchsia. Pink becomes the object of research and photo projects, men bypass it, fearing conviction, and so on. Someone considers it a symbol of oppression, someone - emancipation. Meanwhile, the situation is not so simple: in modern Western culture, pink has acquired a large number of connotations and cultural overtones. We decided to bring this controversial color to clean water and figure out how it happened that he became "feminine."
Who first called pink "pink"?
Mentions of pink color in one form or another go back to Roman poetry, where you can find, for example, descriptions of the color of the dawn associated with the word "rose" - "roseus", as in Lucretius. In English, his name "pink" he received in a complex associative way from the name of carnations: in the XIV century, the verb "to pink" appeared, which meant giving a figured shape to the edge of a fabric like a petal of a carnation. The first mention of "pink" as a noun is found in the texts of the XVII century. In the XVIII-XIX, in its turn, in the Russian language, the borrowing “pink” appeared, formed from the French “rose” - along with the “orange”, “purple”, “cream” and other verbal and pronounced names of flowers. Pink color is generally often called with the help of flowers. In addition to roses and carnations, as in European languages, in Japanese, for example, there are two primordial names referring to the flowers of peach and sakura.
It should be understood that the idea of color exclusively as a wavelength is very relative. All people see each color individually, depending on their physiological characteristics. In addition, many colors do not receive individual names simply because they are considered shades of the existing ones, or because such a selection is not particularly important for culture. There is a study dedicated to the assumption that the names of flowers among the ancient peoples were extremely undeveloped, which is why Homer called the sea "wine". This does not mean that people did not see any colors, just the cultural code associated with them was different from the one we are used to. Some languages generally do not go beyond dividing the idea of "color" into two or three subspecies, and some consider it to be inseparable from other characteristics like humidity or temperature. This can be read, for example, in the book of the famous Polish linguist Anna Wezhbitskaya "Language. Culture. Knowledge."
Why is pink really not a color?
Scientifically, pink does not exist: we see what is not. Since the physics school course many of us have long forgotten, this is what you need to understand about what color is in terms of optics and physiology. Light behaves both as a wave and as a particle: it has both length and frequency. If we expand white light into a spectrum, we get rainbow colors, each of which (with the exception of pink) in fact is one of the visible radiation segments with a different length and frequency, respectively.
The human eye with the help of rods and cones operates with three primary colors: green, red and blue - and, working all together, they give us color vision. Only some of the waves we perceive as color, and all the radiation that is between red and purple and is not available to us, and is completed by our brain to pink thanks to their mixing. Here is the most simplified version of the explanation of why this is so. Someone even calls pink "minus green", because this is exactly the effect that can be achieved by subtracting the green spectrum from white light.
Was the girls always supposed to be pink, and the boys always blue?
Today in Western culture there is a clear gender confrontation in two colors: blue for boys, pink for girls. Even in the Soviet maternity hospitals they picked up the appropriate ribbons to wrap the newborn. Nevertheless, such a division can be considered an innovation of the last century. In European culture at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, children often wore identical white dresses that were easy to bleach. Blue was considered the color of youth, because it was associated with integrity and wore religious connotations: for example, the Virgin Mary was often depicted in blue clothes.
Gradually, for exactly this reason, blue became one of the favorite colors of dresses for girls, and boys were sometimes offered to dress in pink as a muted version of red — an active color associated with masculinity. Note that even the outfit of the fictional Cinderella in the 50s Disney cartoon is blue. In modern pop culture, there is a path “True Blue Femininity” following the designated historical tradition.
Until the middle of the last century, many perceived pastel colors, in particular, blue and pink, as symbols of youth rather than sex. If you pay attention, then many women depicted in portraits before the 20th century often have blue dresses, although, of course, there are pink ones. Nevertheless, these two colors did not have such a strong and absolute gender color as today, and various artists of the 18th-19th centuries interpreted pink each in their own way, associating it with fashion, youth or seduction. A search for documents in Google Books for "pink for girls", "blue for boys" and vice versa showed that starting from the 19th century, color preferences for identifying the sex of children gradually came into use.
In 2007, a study was published that proposed a rationale for separating color preferences according to gender. Evolutionary psychologists from the University of Newcastle put forward the following rationale. In their opinion, women may be evolutionarily predisposed to red hues, since their ancestors were engaged in gathering and they needed to notice red and pink berries. Men, in turn, were guided by the blue sky, to determine the good weather for hunting and the location of the water, to know where the animals are going to drink. After the hype subsided, many agreed that such arguments are very far-fetched, and evolutionary psychology as a whole is an entertaining, but extremely inaccurate discipline.
When did pink become "feminine"?
So far, there is no consensus about the decisive moment when pink has become a “feminine” color. There are several theories, and, most likely, several factors simply come together. The United States, which in the last century became the main supplier of pop culture for the whole world, had the greatest influence in establishing the pink / blue dichotomy, to which we are accustomed today. Professor of the University of Maryland and author of the book "Pink and Blue" Joe Paoletti believes that the answer is unequivocally the question "when?" impossible, but most researchers nevertheless agree that it was after the war that the distinction between these two colors by gender became clear, and pink became a symbol of femininity.
Sources agree that the idea of the need to distinguish children by sex with the help of colors began to come into fashion at the beginning of the 20th century. It seems that in many respects it was a marketing strategy: forcing parents to buy more children's clothes, or even a completely new wardrobe, because its production was on the line. One of the most famous documents is an excerpt from Earnshaw's Infants' Department’s publication, which offered to buy pink for boys, and blue for girls. In the 40s there was a reverse change - someone thinks this is another not too tricky, but effective trick to sell more, someone associates it with the increased popularity of sailor suits for boys and blue school uniforms, which, thus, transferred blue color "serious" male.
Blogger Kristen Konger, author of the popular explanatory YouTube channel "Stuff Mom Never Told You", draws attention to the popular version of the connection of the pink color as a feminine trait and the Nazi practice of stripes. In German concentration camps, prisoners, in particular, homosexual orientation, they drew a pink triangle on their clothes in order to distinguish them from the rest. Despite the fact that such a theory seems logical to many, this fact is still widely unknown, and many researchers, such as the author of the book above, are inclined to believe that if the link exists, it is rather the opposite: a similar color could have been chosen precisely because of the conception of pink as a “color for girls” that had already appeared at that time.
Jennifer Wright, a specialist in fashion history and the author of the Racked site in a recent video of the Vox portal, suggests that it was Mamie Eisenhower, the wife of the 34th President of the States, who popularized pink. Starting with the inauguration ceremony, she loved to go out in pink, becoming an example to follow for the whole nation. Around the same time, the heroine of the musical "Funny Face", the editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine, written in many respects from Diana Vreeland, sings about the love of pink. She contrasts it with the colors women wore during the war, black and blue, calling, therefore, to distance themselves from the events of World War II and leave them behind. At that time, pink was rather associated with women who wanted to break out of traditional gender roles, however, over time, this interpretation became blurred and pink lost its rebellious spirit, becoming, on the contrary, a color that pushes women into narrow limits.
What else does pink mean?
Pink is not just entrenched in modern culture. Since from childhood, girls and boys are often surrounded by a specific color, which is immediately served as a symbol of their sex, they are strongly attached to it. In early growing up, it is very important for children to associate themselves with their peers and their gender. Thus, the pink color implanted by society sometimes turns into an obsession in little girls, smoothly flowing into adulthood.
Modern associations with pink at first glance are pretty obvious. Strong coupling with the gender at the same time tied him to such characteristics as naivety, weakness and ultimate femininity, bordering on lightheadedness, which is not always good for him. For example, respondents who were shown pink advertisements with information about breast cancer, were inclined to sacrifice less money and not donate at all, because they perceived the pink color as aggressive tactics that deliberately remind them of their gender. “We wear pink on Wednesdays”: feministic plastics from “Mean Girls” seem to be purposely dressed up in a “weak” color, either covering their true nature, or giving it a new meaning. In the same vein, today the Blonde in Law is also perceived, giving pink strength and equating him to pride in his gender.
As the example shows with a pink ribbon, a symbol of struggle with breast cancer, pink today is much more multifaceted than it seems at first glance. The pink triangle, for example, was rethought by the LGBT community as a symbol of pride in spite of its monstrous history. Pink is one of the most "delicious" colors, many desserts are purposely made pink to evoke associations with sweetness and pleasure. In addition, the color today has become much more sexualized and politicized. The slang designation of "pink" in one way or another often hints at sexual topics, and political activists sometimes use it as a symbol of the fight against oppression, such as the Swedish feminist party and the American women's anti-war organization "Code Pink".
How to exploit a bunch of "pink - women"?
From the beginning of the forties to the present, pink became the favorite color of women, then lost its popularity, as it was during the second wave of feminism, which sought gender-neutrality. In addition to non-commercial use as a symbol of struggle or self-assertion, pink still remains a powerful marketing weapon, as it was at the moment of its popularity. It's not just about baby clothes for girls. The best-selling doll in the world lives in a pink house, drives a pink car and, in general, loves everything pink.
A whole section of Victoria's Secret is called "Pink", a huge amount of visual advertising aimed at women contains shades of pink. Recently, the link to the sale of pink items under the banner of charity was made public solely for the sake of profit. As it turned out, during the month of attracting attention to the fight against breast cancer, many brands hide behind donations to the fund from each themed pink item just to boost sales. The other side is marketing for the purpose of charity products suspected of causing cancer. This phenomenon is called "Pinkwashing".
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 via Shutterstock, 1 via flickr
