When I was little, my favorite color was yellow. Later, it became blue, then even later, purple. That being said, I’ve always loved colors. My first bedroom was full of them, between the flowers painted along the base of the walls to the patchwork duvet cover my mom sewed for me. But of all the colors present, none of them were pink.
Maybe it’s because pink was my sister’s thing. It was often how our parents differentiated between what was mine and what was hers: if an item was yellow, it belonged to me; if it was pink, it belonged to Allison. This is rather backward of the stereotype, since I’m the one who’s into dresses, tea parties, and window shopping, while she’s more into t-shirts, animal science, and wilderness hikes.
But alas, despite my fitting the classic “girly” mold, I was never drawn to the color pink. I was, however, surrounded by it constantly, since our society had essentially identified the color pink as the symbol of traditional femininity. Any attempt to convert me failed—if anything, my indifference became a subconscious aversion, as if I would be giving into something if I joined the “pink” club.
For years, I went along my merry way, casually resisting that particular gender stereotype. Pink things would drift into my life here and there, but not enough for me to give them much thought (for the sake of this article, I’m going that middle-school phase of gaudy shades of neon). Slowly, however, I found myself attracted to certain things that just happened to be pink—pigs, cherry blossoms, a cute old bike I found at a garage sale and named Posy. Well, certain things just have to be pink, I would think to myself. And who can help loving pigs?
Then, when I would go shopping, I started to grab things on a whim that just happened to be a blush pink color. To my surprise, I really liked how the color looked on me. It didn’t wash me out or make my skin look overly flushed, and it was subtle enough that I didn’t feel super pinky.
Then came my prom dresses. All I’ve ever wanted is Belle’s gown from “Beauty and the Beast” or Cinderella’s magical gown in shimmering blue. So you can imagine my surprise when my junior prom dress of choice was a modernized Audrey Hepburn look with—you guessed it—a pale pink bodice. Senior year I did get the princess dress I’d always imagined, but the whole thing was, again, pale pink.
Now, as I sit here writing this article in my fuzzy pink pig slippers, thinking about the other day when I was riding my bubblegum-pink retro bike while wearing a pale pink blouse tied over a flowery pink dress, I can’t help but wonder: What is happening to me?
And more importantly: Why do I care?
Why does my like or dislike of a color matter so much? If the color in question was bright orange or muddy brown, I wouldn’t feel such a weight behind it. But something about pink just gets to me—it feels so absurd that we equate something as multidimensional and individualized as a person’s femininity with a color.
At times, color symbolism makes sense. If something is pink because it supports breast cancer research, I’m all for it. Lord knows I sport Kenyon colors all the time (pun intended *wink wink*). I guess my issue is in feeling like femininity has to be validated by pink, and that it holds some sort of ownership over the color. I have an inherent distaste for living up to a stereotype, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking the color pink, for me the fact that it’s been pushed on girls for ages is an automatic deterrent.
I’ve observed this especially with sports teams and other groups, under the assumption that because everyone is female-identifying, everyone likes pink and should use it as a means of “emphasizing” femininity. Or, as a more commonplace example, companies design products to be “for girls” by coloring them pink, as if it fundamentally changes everything about how that product functions for any other human being. Does the addition of glitter add a layer of superficiality that overlays a perception of weakness or frivolity? Does all this imply that femininity without pink is unfeminine, or that masculinity or neutrality with pink cannot exist?
Nowadays, pink and I have a complicated relationship. I still love pigs, the smell of roses, cherry blossoms when they are in bloom, and my bike. And I’ve realized that, if all colors are created equal, I should feel no qualms about the little bits of pink in my life. That being said, it still makes me uneasy sometimes, and I will still struggle to explain to my mother that while the bedsheets with little elephants are cute, the fact that they are wearing pink blankets on their backs makes me really not want them in my dorm room. I like certain shades and certain contexts better than others, and I don’t plan embracing my inner Sharpay Evans anytime soon, but I’m learning to appreciate pink for what it is—a color, just like any other one.