A personal and Western history of the colour pink

My relationship with the colour pink is surprisingly complicated. During my ballerinas-Barbies-and-princesses phase, it was the default answer to ‘What colour do you want this in?’ – whether that referred to clothes, plastic jewellery or heavily dyed food products. But when I hit about 13, I started to rethink this apparently easy loyalty.

At that age, when you’re just starting to look at the world around you and decide who you want to be, I realised I didn’t really like the stereotypical feminine identity society was holding out, like a frilly straight jacket.

At this point, third wave feminism was a ripple somewhere in the ocean. It's after Girl Power, Riot Grrl and Buffy, but before ‘This Girl Can’, Everyday Sexism and Leslie Knope. Being ‘girly’ meant being silly, bitchy to your friends but also totally reliant on them, obsessed with boys and shoes, unable to look after yourself or go anywhere alone. I could be cattier than Garfield and was pretty confident I was going to marry Leonardo DiCaprio, but I was not very good at the other things on this list.

After a few lacklustre attempts to get better, I found I didn’t want to be. I don’t like being told what to do, so I hit back against things I felt were tying me to this expectation, like bras, dresses, fancy shoes – and, of course, pink.

Turns out I was not so much ahead of my time as behind it. Pink has not been a ‘girl’ colour for very long. This is one of those myths we all know, like people thinking the world was flat and Marie Antoinette suggesting that peasants eat cake.

Before the 19th century, people in Western society assumed that we were all born knowing our gender identity innately, therefore they weren’t so much worried about confusing babies by putting them in the ‘wrong’ colour, but about making sure they looked different from adults. Boys and girls wore pastel coloured dresses decked out with frills and lace, and cherubic golden curls were encouraged on every child.

In 1927, Time magazine prodded a bunch of experts at department stores to come down on one side or the other. They weren’t just selected for their grip on psychological trickery, but because prescribing colours to each gender would mean that parents who had a daughter then a son would have to buy a whole new collection of clothes instead of letting him run around in pink Hello Kitty skirts. Or whatever the kids were wearing then. All of them tried to assign girls the daintier, more delicate hue, but there was an equal split between whether this should be blue or pink.

This blissful confusion ended not with a bang but a wave of new thought that gradually grew and crashed in on society in about the 1940s. Psychologists in the 1890s had started to introduce the idea of nature vs nurture when it came to genders, suggesting that parents who didn’t want their little boys to grow up ‘soft’ while their daughters climbed trees and scared off potential husbands by arm wrestling them to the floor should think carefully about what their little darlings were dressing in. This was also a post-Oscar Wilde trial world, when people thought that homosexuality was caused by confused gender identity – that gay men were actually women – rather than an innate part of a person’s personhood.

So on the one hand, pink is just a colour, but thanks to human meddling, it’s also not. Associating yourself with pink still signifies that you’re ready to embrace feminine qualities. For example, when a company producing ‘manly’ things like power tools or computer equipment or pens (thanks Bic) wants to show us lady folk that they have taken our extensive needs into consideration, the first thing they tend to do it dye the stuff pink.

Fake ad: real product

Far from coming across as an excellent colour choice, this just seems patronising. By all means make pink hammers, but don’t pitch them to me as your women’s range. If the only thing you’ve changed is the colour, you have to wonder why they haven’t been marketed to us before. And if you’ve changed more than the colour, you might want to let me know useful modifications instead of chirping on about how good it will look in my handbag. I’ll do the accessorising, love.

However, patronising marketing campaigns aside, the future of pink is looking brighter. It’s been reclaimed and transformed into a colour of resistance – and not just for feminists. Alongside the rainbow, it’s the colour you'll see most of at gay pride. This is not because 'all gay men love pink, right?' but as a punch in the face to the pink triangle, which was the symbol forced on gay men sent to Nazi concentration camps for their sexuality. (The same symbol was also used to identify rapists and paedophiles, so you can see exactly how they were viewed.)

Where once associating homosexuality with pink was intended to shame gay men as both sexually deviant and separate from typically masculine characteristics, it's no longer a symbol of submission but a bold show of defiance – a celebration of an identity that some people may not understand but which isn’t going anywhere.

In a very different display of resistance, it’s also the colour of Breast Cancer Care. Since breast cancer affects mostly women, the charity has adopted the colour that we understand as representing this gender to show that for all the things that might separate those who get this disease, they have a sisterhood to draw on and teams of volunteers and scientists united under this colourful banner.

Once you’ve distanced yourself from an identity the world would force upon you, and realised that humans have the chance to be more complicated than that, you have space and time to start bringing back individual bits that you quite liked. You get to open up the box and discard the ideas, traits and symbols you don’t like and keep the stuff you do. Now that we’re swimming in the waters of third wave feminism, to use yet another ocean metaphor, our understanding of what is feminine has expanded. It can mean capable, independent, intelligent, resilient, thoughtful, organised and creative.

Rediscovering pink as an adult with a better sense of your own identity is like going through your wardrobe and finding a jumper you loved two winters ago but totally forgot about when the weather warmed up. It fits me even better now because I have more ways to wear it.

Now, when someone asks me my favourite colour, I’m happy to tell them it’s pink. Except on days when it’s yellow or blue or orange. Pink is lively. It’s fun. It reminds us of sunsets, flamingos and cupcakes. It’s playful but also bold and defiant. It comes from red, after all, the colour of blood, anger, love, power and strawberries. I still don’t like being told what to do, but now I’m doing what I want in a loud and proud shade of pink.

You can't re-fusch-her...

How it felt to be proposed to

Dramatic re-enactment

Being proposed to is something that girls are supposed to think about. I know this because I have read magazines, watched more than one rom com and went to an all girls’ school. Once, in a year 10 geography lesson, I overheard one girl confidently telling another that she intended her intended to propose to her in a hot air balloon. Never mind that we were about 15 at the time, and as far as I know the proposer in this plan was nowhere on the scene.

I reckon that we first learn this narrative from fairy tales and their Disney rehashes. After a bit of angst you’re going to stumble across the prince, face minor peril along the lines of losing your voice/having a hit put out by your murderous stepmother/being put into coma, or some other routine Jerry Springer-type stuff, and then after a snog or two you get married.

This storyboard is further backed up by a swathe of bossy novels, which spend about 300 pages pretending that the dashing hero is never going to propose to the plucky heroine and then, bam, 83 hours of your life later that is exactly what happens. You nearly had me there Austen, you wily minx. When those have started to seem a bit samey, you move on to glossy rom coms starring beautiful, funny, successful grown women all pining over the question of getting to that moment. Oh do shut up, Bridget.

Obviously, the initial reasoning behind this obsession was based on what for most women in the Western world is now a thankfully defunct social order. Since women can now earn our own money and pay our own bills and live alone, we’re not relying on some guy to come along and provide a way out of the parental home, plus a bit of cash. We get to find other purposes in life, like a high flying career as a trapeze artist or travelling to every abandoned McDonalds in America, or learning how to do the scorpion pose.

And yet society is still so in love with love that there remains to this day sensible adult people who spend time fantasising about their ideal proposal. There are hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube to give you ideas, like the guy who buttered his girlfriend up with a puppy first (cue hysterical tears) and put the ring around its neck (cue sounds only the puppy could hear). There’s the guy who ropes his family and friends into performing a choreographed parade to Bruno Mars’ Marry You. You will cry. And hate yourself for it. And then, of course, there are the ones that don’t go so well, generally at sports games, but before we start dying inside for these guys, remember that these are probably staged. Or that’s what they’ll claim.

I am not someone who planned out how I wanted a future mystical man to propose. This is partly because, as the child of divorced parents, I didn’t think I would ever be getting married. Maybe some time after 35. And more likely never.

I had fully planned to be an old lady with purple hair, living in a New York apartment crammed with books and mad artefacts from my global travels, eating granola all day and wearing ballgowns and Converse because there was no guy around to be confused about my eclectic fashion sense. And then I went to Berlin and met someone who switched the gear on that grand life plan. Insert long story involving a deployment to Iraq and lots of Skype and over a year waiting to see each other again. I was sitting alone in Phoenix Airport, waiting for my flight back to Heathrow, when I knew that I was going to marry him, in the same unquestioning and total way that I know where the Tube doors will stop and which is the squeaky stair in my childhood home and that it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.

Four months and a trip to London and a trip to Vegas and more Skype and many discussions later, including a 6am inquiry about what ring I wanted (er, huh?), we’re walking back to my flat after watching Bridge of Spies. Because nothing says romance like Cold War dramas starring Tom Hanks.

It’s a bit damp but mercifully mild, and late enough on a Tuesday night before Christmas that the Southbank has mostly cleared of tourists. I’m full because I've had nearly an entire bag of slightly stale-tasting sweet cinema popcorn and a cheeseburger and chips. My hair is all over the place because of the drizzle. But I don’t really care because he’s actually here, in 3D, and he has warm hands, and I have a sneaky suspicion I know what’s coming.

I’m intuitive, OK.

We get to our favourite bridge, which has a view east of Waterloo Bridge, Southbank, St Paul’s and the Shard in the distance. He pulls me gently over to the silver railings. And he gets out this white box. And time stands still.

Turns out getting proposed to is a lot like deciding to have sex for the first time. Throughout your life you’ve heard that this is a pivotal moment that will mark a dividing line between the time before you knew what all the fuss was about, and the time when you’re in the know. But it’s actually the decision itself that is more important, more formative, than the exact moment.

Standing in front of this man, who is funny and kind and maddening and caring, I decided that despite years of being steadfastly against the idea of committing to one person forever, actually, I’m more than willing to give it everything for him.

And like sex, you’re still the same person after it. That moment doesn’t change you. It’s more that you're knowingly going from one stage of your life to the next. Like levelling up or birthdays in The Sims when they spin round, lights burst out and now they’re a spotty teenager.

Then a drunk guy will come up and congratulate you on being madly in love, and you will smile and nod until he leaves.

I still don’t think everyone should get married, because you know what works for you better than some tax man or priest or nosy relative or diamond salesman. And there's no point planning how to get proposed to, whatever gender you are, because you won't know how it feels until you're there. If the method of question-asking is the most important thing to you, you've kind of missed the long-term implications.

I remember looking across the water as we turned to walk the rest of the way home. The view was the same, we were the same, but while crossing from one end of the bridge to the other, my life had definitely changed in a way I wouldn't have predicted for myself, despite all that Disney. So instead of trying to guess where my steps would fall, I squeezed his warm hand with mine and kept walking.

This old thing?

Long to rain over us: why rain is sometimes pretty wonderful

Rain has a bad reputation. It is the ruiner of barbecues, outdoor weddings and once immaculate hairstyles. Many artists have turned it into a metaphor for horrible, soul-crushing sadness. It's hard to hold a candle in it in cold November. Don't leave cakes out in it. The 15 July, St Swithin's Day, is even dedicated to determining whether we're going to have to put up with 40 more days of it.

But really, everyone, most of the time it's not all that bad. Here's a short tribute to the stuff that got Gene Kelly singin'.

You get to wear wellies
While everyone else is doing the oh-shit-I'm-wearing-Uggs two step around all the puddles, you, the master of the weather, stride confidently through them, feeling like the genius you are. And some even have jelly bean designs.

It is the bringer of rainbows
The symbol of wonderful institutions such as peace and Pride and Skittles only exists because of rain.

It inspires human resourcefulness
Rain is nature's version of a surprise quiz, designed to see who on our streets can handle this bonus obstacle. Faced with a rainstorm, people are forced to get creative. Will you cover up with a free newspaper and be scrubbing ink off your hands for days? Will you sacrifice 5p to rig up a fetching plastic bag head scarf? Or are you going to just make a run for it, as if you can outpace the weather? Total Wipeout for the masses.

We suddenly have something to talk about
'Horrible weather isn't it?' 'Did you hear that storm last night?' 'It's a bit damp outside!' are considered riveting conversational openers in Britain.

Sometimes it understands you
I don't want to walk through brilliant sunshine, surrounded by singing birds and smug daffodils when I'm feeling enraged. I want moody rock video, mascara-smudging, hair-drenching, splashing-off-the-pavement rain. Call it pathetic fallacy if you will, but I'm not ashamed.

You finally get to use the umbrella you've been lugging around
They called you paranoid but who's laughing now? You can get three, maybe three and a half, uses out of this thing before it surrenders to the wind and snaps like an After Eight, so you're not missing an opportunity to get it out. Plus some even have jelly bean designs.

It's sexy
Books and movies and TV shows aren't just using rain to show us that their characters are deeply emotionally perturbed at how things turned out. How many times have writers sat around agonising over the missing quality to make that romantic climax scene really work and suddenly thought, 'I know - we'll add rain!' It makes sense: we know they've got to really want that snog if they're willing to get soaked to the skin for it.

No, it's not The Notebook. Yes, that is a cat.

Pavements look ridiculously good in rain
Not just because it washes the layer of crap off them, either. Street lamps glimmer and gleam like a light show beneath your feet. Here's the photographic version.

It clears the streets quicker than a tiger on the loose
Goodbye, pesky slow-moving tourists and families with five children spread across the pavement. Hello intrepid rain lovers, charging through the water with purpose. Just be sure to dodge the umbrellas.

There's that magical 'smell after the rain'
I vaguely remember the air smelling better after a good old rainstorm, but that was before I moved to London, where it always smells vaguely like the colour grey.

It's better than snow
Take all your issues with rain, freeze them, and let them linger around for a week before turning to brown mush. Feel like hugging a raindrop yet?

It makes being inside that much better
You won't appreciate the sheer joy of being dry and warm and drinking tea until you've got a storm to compare it against.