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.

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