To pink or to not pink?

I must confess, I am totally lost with what I should think about the color pink.

Should I take it off of my daughter’s wardrobe? Should I reclaim my right to wear a pink jacket? Should I scream every time a women’s event uses a pink flyer? Should I use pink as a statement?

I hate pink for all the time I had to wear pink because I was a girl. I hate pink when it’s used to tell me “this product is for you woman”. I hate pink when I can only get a free pink rose for women’s day.

I love pink when my son wants to wear it. I love pink when my husband wants to buy a pink sofa. I love pink when I see a pink BMW car in the street.

I hate how we have made us hate pink, and I love how we are starting to use it again just because we want to.

Pink involves everything from gender roles to ideas of beauty, evolution, and science.

“If you go back to the 18th century, little boys and little girls of the upper classes both wore pink and blue and other colors uniformly,” said Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York.

“In America by the 1890s and the early 20th century, manufacturers attempted to sell more children’s and infants’ clothes by color-coding them,” she said. Some manufacturers branded pink for boys and blue for girls, and vice versa.

In the 1940s manufacturers settled on pink for girls and blue for boys, so Baby Boomers were raised wearing the two colors. But due to the women’s liberation movement, more unisex baby clothes came into style in the late ’60s and ’70s. Yet pink and blue came back in the mid-’80s, with the development of prenatal testing. Once parents could find out whether they were having a boy or a girl, they could outfit their nursery in the “appropriate” color.

I did wear a lot of pink when I was a kid. I can remember how happy I was when I discovered my pink bed, pink wall and pink new stationery for my first day in grade1. But very soon, pink became a bad color. Pink became a dirty word associated with stereotypical ‘girliness’.

Choosing pink was making me girly. And being girly meant being weak.

Pink is the perfect representation of how women are often encouraged to question their identity:“Is it too pink?”, or “Am I being too loud?” “Am I too inexperienced for this position?”, “Am I too emotional?”

Pink has been questioned for the effect on young girls of playing with pink toys, with research connecting pink to career choices and body dysmorphia.

But pink is subtly being reappropriated, with writers and artists interrogating its identity. Roxane Gay writes “I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink – all shades of pink. If I have an accessory it is probably pink.”

For Nicki Minaj, hot pink is a visual trademark: in her video for Anaconda, she wears a pink-fringed wig. But the colour was not just an aesthetic identity but her “blueprint for female rappers to come”.

Millennial pink has been everywhere since 2016, from sofa to fridges, all over your pinterest or canva recommendations. Designers keep asking when the trend will fade, and apparently COVID 19 will take it away from our new normal. But only to be replaced by BRIGHT PINK!