The colour of pink

A lot of colours hold a symbol. Some of them are more typical than others. Black is one of them. Black can symbolize strength and sexiness. It’s also a very manly colour. Pink is the opposite, it symbolizes femininity and weakness. Symbols make us see the world in a simpler way. Icons give us a common ground where we can understand the world. Symbols can be good for that but can’t replace how we see the world. The symbols are also very culturally dependent and one thing can mean something in one culture and something entirely different in another. For instance four means death in the Japanese culture and you can never buy a set of four cups there. I needed to buy two sets, to get the traditional four, as in the western culture, where four can mean the ideal number of people in a family. A mum, a dad and a boy and a girl.

Symbols can also change over time. Originally, the “feminine” colour pink was the colour of choice for little boys. Since red was considered the masculine and strong colour, the colour of war and blood, small boys should wear the lighter version – pink. For girls, light blue was preferable since blue was the colour of Virgin Mary, a symbol of purity and femininity. In today’s society, media has a greater impact on people than it used to. While before, the most important source of information was the church on Sundays, we now get our information faster and faster.

Media create symbols a lot faster now too. No other colour is more symbolic than the colour pink. I’m not referring to the simple symbolism that I mentioned in the first paragraph, meaning pink equals femininity. No media has given it a much stronger symbolism than that. I’ll give you a few examples. A few years back there was this ad campaign, I’m sure you’ve seen this or something similar, about a mobile phone for girls. It was called a girl phone, but the focus group wasn’t pre-teen girls, but girls of all ages, ie the adult women too. The ads only contained a few words, all of them about the surface of the phone. Nothing about the functions. I don’t know if all the other mobile phones they had were “boy phones”, but all the other ads contained info about functions and nothing about the surface.

The girl phone was pink and that seemed to be enough. For instance, have you ever seen ads directed at men only mention that the phone is black? So it seems like the pink held a lot more symbolism than merely the colour. I’m not certain what it was, but it seemed to hold the meaning that if you just paint something pink, then every girl, 10 or 40 years old would just run to the store and get a new phone. I am convinced that girls, not only myself, buy phones for what they can do, as well as the looks of it. And the looks – I admit they’re really important – isn’t just in the colour.

Another example, if you read a fashion magazine, and look at the kid pages. Most of the clothes on the girl pages are pink. I have nothing against the colour itself, it’s a nice colour, but with the clothes it implies so much more. The clothes are very princess like with lace and accessories like tiaras etc. The poses of the young models are also very different from those of the young boys. The boys look tough and assertive while the girls look like they are waiting to be looked at. Boys are active, girls are passive. The girls are fostered into a roll of passiveness.

I used to work in a school. It was an artistic school with music, drama and media major subjects. You could easily spot the “pink girls” among the students. All other colours differed. One day they could wear green another red and so on. That is, the boys and the girls, but the “pink girls” were always pink. They also had bleached hair, they had blinged phones and wore all sorts of cute accessories. They spoke softly and always let the boys make the decisions. They also played dumb. I knew from the results of the test that they were far from stupid, but they acted like they were. These were also the girls who didn’t object to being called a whore or a bitch. They accepted it. In context I’m convinced that they didn’t choose the colour pink because they liked that colour, but because of the symbolism that came with it.

If I wanted got to a store and try to buy something in the pink colour, I wouldn’t be able to. That’s because it’s not like other colours. I can’t find a garment I like and just choose between green, blue or pink. If I choose pink, I probably need to put up with the lace, frills and the other cute details. I want the colour pink to be just a colour, like it used to. Like blue or green.

Tags: anti-pink, pink, pink-stink