If you’ve ever studied film or advertising, you’ll know that colors are not just randomly
chosen.
There’s a good reason why many personal care products come in white packaging, and
that’s because white symbolizes purity and cleanliness.
If we want to denote that something is natural, we might use the colors green or brown.
Things that are mysterious or wicked might be painted black, while sensuality will almost
always come in red.
If we are trying to make a scene look happy, we’ll use bright colors such as yellow or
orange, and if we want something to exude femininity, we might think about using the
color pink.
While different cultures give different meanings to some colors, the meanings also cross cultures
at times.
Today we’ll look at mostly one color, in this episode of the Infographics Show, Why
Is Blue A Boys Color.
When we talk about blue and its symbolism, we must first think about what hue of blue
are we talking about, because there are many.
Crayola, the company we all know that makes crayons, has 19 different blues.
But we’ll keep this simple and talk about two of the blues you all know well.
Those are dark blue and light blue, or sky blue.
Dark blue can signify seriousness, or even sadness (feeling blue), but also intelligence,
integrity and power.
That’s why you might find politicians donning a blue suit, rather than say, a yellow and
pink outfit.
Light blue is a different animal, it symbolizes purity, tranquility, harmony, security.
But what has any of this to do with boys?
Prior to the 19th century we didn’t have a blue for boys and pink for girls binary
rule.
In fact, most kids just wore white or beige or even rags if you came from the wrong side
of the tracks.
Historians tell us it was in the mid-19th century that pastel colors became popular,
but according to the book, “Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America,”
at that time there wasn’t yet a pink and blue rule.
It’s confusing, though.
Listen to what one writer said in the “Ladies' Home Journal,” in 1918, “The generally
accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls.
The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the
boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
Hmm, ok, so what happened?
Well, that little snippet didn’t mean everyone followed that rule.
In fact, one historian tells us that until the 1950s there was a kind of chaos when it
came to colors.
You can actually have a look online at something Time magazine published in 1927.
It is a chart of sex-appropriate colors.
The chart is based on a survey of American clothes stores and what those stores thought
was the right color for boys and girls.
More stores said pink was the most appropriate color for boys, but not all.
According to the writer of that book we mentioned, after World War 2 the pink for girls and blue
for boys’ thing started to become popular, but he also says it didn’t really stick
until the 1980s.
“This happened during a time when mass marketing was appearing,” said one sociologist about
this phenomenon.
“Being 'gender normal' is very important to us, and as a marketing technique, if retailers
can convince you that being gender normal means you need to buy a certain product — cosmetics,
plastic surgery, blue or pink clothing, etc. — it just makes sense from a production
or mass marketing perspective,” he told Live Science.
According to another writer, after the war people were more than ready for some normalcy
in their lives after the utter chaos of global conflict.
When labels such as Christian Dior were telling women to don pink they did so, and they didn’t
mind doing it.
People wanted some stability in their lives, according to that writer at least, and so
color gender norms were met with no amount of contempt…rebellion would come in the
60s, but for a while women mostly embraced pink and men hugged blue.
But why did girls get pink?
Well, not everyone says pink is innately feminine, it just became feminine.
You see, the French, who were often thought to be the leaders of fashion, used pink as
a girls’ color.
Other countries and cultures didn’t, but hey, the French were the avant-garde when
it came to clothes and so some people believe we just followed them.
Another sociologist from Italy looked deeper into this blue and pink thing.
He used technology to scan books on Google that were published in the USA from 1880 to
1980, and you know what, he could find lots of instances where someone wrote that blue
was for boys, but he found no instances of pink being called a boy’s color.
“Pink seems to have been a feminine color at least since the late 19th century,” he
said in an interview, and he went as far to say that this thing about a reversal and pink
once being a boy’s color was probably an urban legend.
So, now it’s confusing.
We must ask if indeed it’s true that blue is a boy’s color and pink is a girl’s
color.
Is there something in our biology that makes it that way?
Do boys just like blue more and girls like pink more?
Scientists say this is just not clear, and there is no way of proving it as we can’t
go back in time.
We are already influenced by societal norms.
Live Science tells us, “The debate about how, exactly, we got to the point where something
as impartial as the color pink seems infused with femininity, will probably rage on in
the pages of academic journals.”
So, what we don’t know is if girls and boys innately prefer one of the colors.
What we do know is that the rule hasn’t always been there, but when the rule became
clear companies that made clothes pounced on it and it has never been reversed.
That’s not to say boys don’t wear pink, they do, but as little children they are more
likely to be dressed in blue then they are pink.
It gets more interesting, though.
Academics tell us that in the 50s and 60s during a strong movement of feminism the colors
became more unisex again.
Many people rebelled against these color norms as they thought that they contained inherent
gender bias.
People didn’t want to follow the dogmas of gender norms and so for a while blue and
pink were again sitting on the fence.
In fact, some clothing labels totally dropped the idea of sex-appropriate colors.
Feminists argued that colors in themselves were not innately feminine or masculine, and
if you bought into that paradigm of blue for boys and pink for girls you were conforming
to a gender norm that just wasn’t true.
Girls didn’t have to be girly and boys didn’t have to be boyish, it was a mixed up, muddled
up, shook up world, and the palette was everyone’s.
We wonder how many of you will get the 60s gender reference in there.
But then in the 80s things changed again, according to one academic.
He said that because prenatal testing was developed, parents could go out and buy all
their baby stuff before the little parcel of flesh was delivered.
Those parents wanted to know what to buy, and manufactures were more than happy to tell
them what to buy.
You see, for those in the business of making or selling clothes, having this color binary
was a good thing.
Why?
Because if you bought blue for little Jack and a year later a little Jill springs to
life, the parents will have to buy another set of clothes.
We are told that the children of the rebels of the 60s were nothing like their parents,
and conformity was back in.
The 80s were garish and bright and perhaps fashion has never been more kitschy.
Little girls in bright pink was something you’d often see.
It was a peculiar decade, perhaps the one decade that people look back on with embarrassment
regarding what they wore.
Of course babies wear all kinds of colors, and gender neutral clothes are in fashion.
We know that for a long time parents have chosen to dress their kids in pastel colors
because these colors have a certain innocence and beauty.
Imagine if you looked at your baby pictures and in all of them you are dressed in black,
grinning at the camera, with your cute bright red bonnet on.
You might wonder if your parents were trying to cultivate a future Satan’s slave.
So, even if you’re against blue for boys and pink for girls because it offends your
sense of fairness, it’s more than likely you’ll still adhere to some of the rules.
The force is strong with color symbolism.
The BBC writes about what it calls the blue and pink gender myth, a myth in that girls
and boys are not inherently suited to one color.
It’s society that manufactures this belief, says the article.
Kids in tests before the age of two when offered a blue or pink object didn’t really have
a color preference, but after the age of two they conformed to the pink and blue norm.
After all, they see that everywhere.
In another test, kids aged three to five were given different colors to wear, and they kind
of formed sides, at the end of a few weeks the kids just liked their own color.
It didn’t matter what it was.
Still this chicken and egg story remains unclear, because scientists still don’t really know
if there has always been something a little more feminine in the color pink and that just
evolved over time.
It might not always be the case, but we must ask how we have ended up with this binary.
Did something natural happen, that was later pushed by society and manufacturers?
Science is still trying to find the answer to the riddle.
Some experts tell us women in their research indeed favored bright colors such as red and
pink, more than men did.
Some of those experts even said that women liked these colors because it was hard-wired
from our hunter-gatherer days, when men did the hard hunting and women did the gathering
of brightly colored berries and such.
Maybe that’s a stretch, but it’s worth considering.
Tests have been performed on men and women to see what colors they prefer, and pink is
not popular in most of these tests although women do like pink more than men.
More men pick blue than women do, but both sexes seem to like the color.
Anyway, we’ll now hand this conundrum over to you and ask you what you think.
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show These Are The Signs
That You Are Going Through Puberty.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.