I’ve been doing a lot of research on pink electronics lately, and as I read about one pink device after another, I started thinking about the color pink and what it means to people. Why do we dress the girls in pink and the boys in blue? When did that start? Why do girls and women like pink? So I temporarily put my research on pink electronics on hold and started looking for the color pink. And I have to say that I found a lot of interesting data.
The whole “pink for the girls and blue for the boys” idea wasn’t common practice in the US until the 20th century. In the 1800s, all babies wore white dresses, which extended below the legs (which doesn’t seem like a practical garment, but apparently crawling wasn’t encouraged back then). In the early 1900s, the color became popular and people who chose to dress their children in conventional colors were advised to dress girls in blue and boys in pink. Blue was considered delicate and exquisite and pink strong and masculine. In one of its 1927 issues, Time magazine wrote: “In Belgium, Princess Astrid gave birth a fortnight ago to a 7-pound baby daughter. The cradle . . . had been optimistically dressed in pink, the color for boys, blue for a girl.” It wasn’t until the 1950s that we started doing the opposite, and these days few people would decorate their toddler’s room in pink. It does help identify the sex of a baby;
Regardless of how boys dress, it seems that girls all over the world have always loved the color pink. Why is that? Research done on gender preference for colors suggests it’s in our genes. Two neuroscientists at the University of Newcastle in England, Dr. Anya Hulbert and Dr. Yazhu Ling, asked 208 volunteers (mostly British, but also included 37 Chinese men and women to determine if there was a cultural difference) to choose their preferred color from a variety of colors on a computer screen. The colors were divided into two: red-green and blue-yellow. When presented with the basic colors, all of the volunteers selected blue (long known as the favorite color of most people), but when tested with mixed colors, the women in both groups (British and Chinese) showed a strong preference for colors on the red side of the spectrum (i.e., pinks and purples). The results were so consistent that the researchers concluded that a person’s gender can usually be identified from their color preferences.
According to this study, there seems to be a genetic reason why women like pink. One line of thought is that this shape evolved when we were still living in caves and women were the berry and fruit pickers and they had to be able to recognize what was ripe. Another suggestion is that women needed to know if a family member was sick, and a red (or dark pink) face would suggest that the person had a fever.
Of course, more research needs to be done, and Dr. Hulbert plans to modify the study to do research on babies, who have not yet been subjected to the cultural use of color. She states that “another way to separate ‘nature versus nurture’ when it comes to favorite colors will be to test babies’ preferences.” It will be very interesting to hear what they find.