When you’re a kid, you don’t really think about what a color means; you just like it. I loved pink growing up. My room had pink walls, and I always wanted to be the pink characters, whether it was Draculaura, Barbie, or Sleeping Beauty. It felt fun and natural, not like some big statement about who I was.
That’s why the shift that happened later was kind of weird. At some point, having pink as my favorite color stopped feeling natural. It started feeling as if I had to make a choice: to justify or move away from.
I remember hitting middle school and suddenly wanting to rebrand (because, obviously, everybody needed to know exactly who I was). I told myself that turquoise was my favorite color to make me seem different or less predictable. It wasn’t really about the color; it was about how I thought people would react to it.
Being “not like other girls” was a personality trait, and that whole mindset showed up socially for a while. It meant not liking anything too feminine, not caring about appearance, acting low-maintenance, and distancing yourself from anything that could be seen as stereotypical. Pink just became an easy symbol for what was considered to be “girly”; it stood in for everything people were trying to avoid.
Where that mindset came from
A lot of this discourse around the color pink didn’t come out of nowhere. It also lines up with how femininity was being treated from the 1990s through the 2010s. There was a strong push to prove that women could succeed in spaces that weren’t built for them, whether that was school, careers, or anything traditionally male-dominated.
While the development of women in professional careers mattered, it sometimes came with the idea that femininity itself wasn’t helping accomplish that goal. If anything, femininity felt like it should be toned down. Being taken seriously as a woman meant being less “girly,” not more.
Instead of expanding what femininity could look like, a lot of people started stepping away from it altogether. Pink ended up being pulled into that, not because of anything about the color itself, but because of what people attached to it.
If a color is looked down on just because it’s associated with girls, then rejecting it doesn’t really fix the problem. It just keeps the same idea going, that anything feminine is automatically less important or less worth choosing.
The Barbie effect
Now it feels different, and a big part of that became visible with Barbie (2023).
The movie didn’t try to make pink subtle or toned down; it did the exact opposite. Everything was bright, exaggerated, and impossible to ignore; it wasn’t treated as something shallow. The whole point was that something could look traditionally feminine and still carry complexity, humor, and meaning.
The marketing around it did the same thing. Everyone was wearing pink to the theatres, posting it, styling it, and, at least for a summer, pink was everywhere. The best part was that it felt like people were choosing it on purpose, knowing exactly what it represents.
Barbie wasn’t the only movie playing on the color pink. You see the same thing with characters like Glinda the Good, especially when you look at how she’s being presented now compared to before.
In The Wizard of Oz and even in the Broadway version of Wicked, pink isn’t her main color. Her most recognizable dress in the musical is blue, and pink is just one part of her overall look.
The newer movie marketing has changed that completely. The pink and green contrast between Glinda and Elphaba was pushed, and pink became a bigger part of how she was defined visually.
That choice was very intentional; pink already carries certain assumptions, so leaning into it made her immediately recognizable in a certain way. At the same time, her character isn’t limited by it. She’s still self-aware, growing, and making decisions that complicate that first impression one would have of her.
Pink is doing two things at once; it’s signaling something familiar, but it’s not controlling how she’s perceived. Barbie did a similar approach; it didn’t get rid of pink or try to distance itself from it. It leaned into it and then complicated it.
Back to pink
Before, femininity was something people felt like they had to move away from to be taken seriously. However, you can look traditionally feminine and still be seen as complex, capable, and in control.
That doesn’t mean those assumptions are completely gone, but people are more aware of them now. There’s more of a willingness to question why something like a color ended up carrying so much weight in the first place.
Going back to pink now feels different from how it did in middle school. Back then, avoiding it felt like I was trying to prove something. Now it just doesn’t feel that serious. I just like the color again.
To be clear, pink didn’t “lose its meaning” and then get it back; people just stopped attaching a certain meaning to it. The fact that so many people had to distance themselves from it first before coming back to it says a lot about how femininity has been treated, not just how it’s expressed.
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