Colour in society
Pink for girls and blue for boys
A custom of the twentieth century, not an ancient one. A hundred years ago babies wore white and advice on colours was inconsistent.
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The rule that pink is for girls and blue is for boys feels old. It is not. In Europe and North America, babies of both sexes wore white dresses well into the twentieth century. When pastel colours came in, shops and magazines disagreed about which suited whom. The present convention settled around the 1940s and hardened in the 1980s. It is a product of marketing.
Before the rule
For centuries small children were dressed alike. White cotton could be boiled clean, and boys wore dresses until they were about six. Pink and blue arrived as baby colours in the nineteenth century without fixed meanings. A much-quoted American trade article of 1918 advised pink for boys, as the stronger and more decided colour, and blue for girls. In 1927 Time magazine printed a table showing that large department stores in different American cities gave opposite advice. The historian Jo Paoletti has documented this period in detail.
How it settled
By the 1940s American makers and shops had converged on pink for girls and blue for boys, and the generation born after the war grew up with it. The 1970s brought a turn towards unisex children's clothes. Then, in the 1980s, tests that showed a baby's sex before birth let parents shop in advance, and makers found that sharply separate products for boys and girls sold more, since they could not be handed down. Pink toys, bicycles and aisles followed. The convention has since spread to much of the world.
What is disputed
Some writers describe a complete reversal, with pink once the standard boys' colour. That overstates it. A study of books from the period by the psychologist Marco Del Giudice found little sign that pink for boys was ever the majority view. The safer reading is that there was no settled rule, and then there was one. Nor is there good evidence that the preference is inborn: studies of infants find that girls' liking for pink appears at about two to three years of age, when children learn which things are meant for them.
Colours on this page
Sources and further reading
- Gendered associations of pink and blue on Wikipedia
- BBC Future: The 'pink vs blue' gender myth
- NPR: Girls Are Taught To 'Think Pink,' But That Wasn't Always So
- Del Giudice, Pink, Blue, and Gender: An Update, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2017)
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.