Pink razors. Pink earplugs. Pink guns. If you want to market something to, or claim something for, women or girls, best to cover it in a healthy, bright coat of pink.
But, err, why?
As recently as 100 years ago, pink didn’t have a distinct female connotation in Western culture. While some late 19th-Century texts suggest it did, there were just as many suggesting pink was a male color. Take this pearl from 1918: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” That reverse of the current Western color divide is still the case in places like the Middle East.
While long thought of as a “youthful” or “energetic” color, pink’s feminization really took hold through gender-specific marketing of gender-specific infant and children’s clothes in the pre- and post-World War II eras. According to Jo B. Paoletti, a historian and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, that divide only became fully uniform in the 1980s.
So why did pink break girly? Even Paoletti, the expert, doesn’t claim to understand the beginning of the trend. Rather, she notes, “it eventually crowded out other colors in the options for babies and little girls,” becoming more than, “just a color.” It became a broader signifier for, well, broads.
Yet, the beginning of pink’s girlification doesn’t explain why professional, 240-pound linebackers spend a month out the season wearing fuchsia cleats for breast cancer awareness. For that, you have to look at the social and commercial factors that amplified the trend after the 1980s.
First , without a “woman” flag, pink has become a handy go-to theme for feminist political and social campaigns and causes (and there’s one of those born every minute). Don’t forget the modern woman’s need to have products created just super special for her (and the general unoriginality of the people trying to sell her those products). Add to that the ongoing fascination Gen-Xers and Millennials have with staying in their own childhoods and you’ve got girly pink guitars, girly pink pens, and even girly pink politicians.
