What's the deal with pink and blue?

Traditionally, female infants in the US are dressed in pink, and males are dressed in blue -- but why? Tune in and learn more about the pink-and-blue phenomenon in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From housetu works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly. I'm Kristen and Kristen UM. I was

(00:21):
looking through some baby pictures recently, and here's the thing
about me. I had no hair when I was born,
and I didn't have any hair until I was about
four years old. Oh my god. It was actually kind
of worried my parents. Yeah, so I looked like this
little bald child. And Um, as a result, there was
a lot of confusion about if I was a little

(00:42):
boy or a little girl to strangers in like the
grocery store. I thought that was awkward for your mom.
Apparently my mom fielded a lot of things like oh,
what a cute little boy. And so as a result,
I got put in a lot of pink, really a
lot of pink, like pink headbands, pink shirts, pink pants,
so that everyone would know immediately this is this is
a girl. She has no hair yet, we might weird,

(01:03):
but she's a girl, all right. So I mean that
is just one way that I guess that people can
quickly identify a sort of androgenous looking baby. Well, here's
my question. Your mom puts you in a lot of
pink when you were a kid. How did you once
you started dressing yourself. Did you keep wearing a lot
of pink or did you kind of discarded I kind
of discarded pink. Um. I feel like I did not

(01:24):
wear it very much at all, and not even dresses.
I feel like, you know, most kids probably prefer being
in like overalls, except for Sarry Cruise loves to wear
a little dresses around. But because I feel like, as
soon as I could dress myself, it was like jeans,
maybe some purple. I did like purple. I did like
purple too. Yeah, I kind of did the same thing. Yeah,
abandoned pink as soon as I as soon as I could,

(01:45):
because I kind of wanted to be a boy. I
thought it was cooler, not a weird you know. But
why why do you think that? You know, as soon
as we're born, we're like, oh, let's put a girl
in pink. Well, uh, we can trace that back to
the nineteen forties, when in the United States girls started
wearing pink and boys started wearing blue. But I thought

(02:06):
it was kind of strange that um in the twenties,
it was actually reversed. Way back in the day, all
babies just wore white. And then for some reason in
the twenties, boys started being dressed in pink and girls
started being dressed in blue. And then a couple of
decades later it flip flopped and it will stayed the same. Yeah,
it really hasn't. I don't think that I've seen much
evidence as to why the switch happened, but I guess

(02:27):
for a while pink was seen is more of a
masculine color, and blue is more like the dainty, delicate,
colorful all girls. And now it's definitely pink is I
would say that pink, especially in like Western culture, is
definitely the sign of femininity, you know, yeah, from from
girlhood on, I mean even as an adult. There's so
many pink products marketed towards us. Yeah, like you know,

(02:48):
pink blackberries. That's one of the ways they say they
got women interested in blackberries, which we're seen as you know,
the men's ultimate gadget, when they started making them pink. Yeah,
they came out with a BlackBerry, a pink BlackBerry pearl
for on Time's Day two thousand and eight, and um, yeah,
boosted sales pretty well. So it follows you all through
your life. Like it starts with like a pink Barbie
box and then you go pink BlackBerry, buy maybe pink

(03:10):
from Victoria's Secret. You buy pink ribbons to support breast cancer, right,
And originally I was reading the color for that breast
cancer campaign might have been peach, but they thought that
pink was more identifiable with women's issues. And it seems like,
you know, now this starts very young. There's a couple
of researchers at Princeton University that refer to the phase

(03:30):
that little girls go through where they have to have everything,
you know, pink and purple as the pink, frilly dressed phase. Yeah.
And they're saying that this phase occurs regardless of how
you were dressed as an infant, right, like, all of
a sudden, no matter you know, if your parents were
the most egalitarian dressed you in overall sort of parents,
all of a sudden, you're just like, I must have
a pink relly dress. Yeah. So that brings up the

(03:51):
question of, uh, you know, if if kids who were
dressed let's say it was dressed in white or black, whatever,
not dressed in pink, and then all of a sudden
starts the girl starts stressing herself in pink. My question
is is this a social construct or is it something
that women are just biologically like attuned to being attracted
to pink. Well, there are some people who are trying

(04:12):
to figure this out with research. There was a study
that was put out that basically said, you know that
I guess they had about two hundred test subjects um
and overall, everyone I think liked blue the best. But
then when they really had to pick, then it divided down,
you know, the social lines we think of our The
boys picked blue and the girls picked more colors on
the red spectrum. Right, And that original study included mostly

(04:34):
uh like British Caucasians, but the researchers also pulled Chinese
women to see if it the pink preference would cross
cultural lines, and it did. It held. The Chinese women
also ended up preferring colors from the red spectrum as well.
Although something that was left out of that study is
that in China red as a color of luck. So

(04:54):
I mean they tried to pull these Chinese people in
a sort of proof that across culture, across what you've
been tie as a young child, you know we'll always
pick red, but that it might have ignored the fact
that that's sort of a lucky color and child. And
I mean, Molly, I'll be honest with you, I think
I would have skewed results too, because I don't yeah,
I would have picked blue over pink. Although I'm wearing
a red shirt right now, but but I'm I'm I'm

(05:16):
in more of a blue face in my life to say, so,
how do you feel like when you go shopping and
you see a lot of pink things? Um, I keep
walking really quickly. Yeah, see, I'll stop and look. At
one point in my life, I almost bought a pair
of pink glasses. And this is pretty recently, Like it's
not like I was ten and was like, oh, pink glasses,
They're so cute. I mean, I went as an adult

(05:37):
to the to the optometris and had to be like,
I don't know, the saleslayer is really trying to push
these and I can see you in those, So that's
the thing. They looked kind of cute, But did I
feel that way about them? Because I've been trained to
like pink things because I really liked them. Maybe it
is evolution, Molly, Okay, these same researchers that did the

(05:57):
you know, the color preference study, so that their theory
is that we women are evolved to look for um
to be attracted to pink because during hunter gatherer times,
when women would go out foraging for for plants and
other food, red would be the like signifier of right

(06:17):
berries or um also a sign of illness, like a
flushed cheeks when when you get sick. So if you're
taking care of your child, you could see if they
were sick and then give them berries. Yeah, so it
kind of reinforces like the nurturing side. Yeah. I was
reading one article in The Guardian that kind of took
on that that theory, and it said basically that, you know,
the study was just which color women preferred, not which

(06:39):
color they are necessarily better at picking out right, Like,
you know, it's not like they took everyone out in
the forest and saw who could find the most red berries. Yeah,
so maybe they're a little a little more work needs
to be done, but I thought I thought it was
kind of interesting. Um, And because there was also sort
of a study that I thought kind of confirmed this
evolutionary perspective. Uh. It tested male and female monkey toy

(07:03):
preferences to see if sort of the same things applied
as far as female monkeys going for more UM traditionally
like female types of toys, different colors and UM, and
it held up as well. So you know, so I guess,
really what might need to happen. It's just more work
with babies, you know, if they can figure out how

(07:23):
to get you know, a small baby to indicate um,
a color preference. Or in this article, someone posits maybe
we should see if color blind children, if they have
any sort of gender confusion or if you know, they say,
by the time you're what to you can start to
identify which gender you belong to, and you start picking
things that are associated with that gender. Yeah, And that
kind of reminded me of an article that I read

(07:44):
in The Atlantic. Um it's in the November two calls
an eight issue of Atlantic monthly about transgender boys, and
I thought it was interesting that the main subject in
the article it was UM, a boy who basically from birth,
as soon as he could start kind of like self identifying,
really felt like he was trapped in the wrong body

(08:05):
wanted to be a girl, um like, wouldn't do anything
associated with being a boy. And it was around the
age of two and a half that he that his
parents started noticing that he would consistently go for if
given the choice, would consistently go for like pink toys.
He would want to play with barbies like these very
traditionally um female uh, female items. But you kind of wonder,

(08:28):
I wonder about someone in that situation. Um, you know,
you and I both sort of had the luxury of
being girls, knowing we were girls, and so we kind
of had the right to reject that kind of pink thing.
You know, you you clearly rejected pink. I mean, I
got seduced by the pink glasses, but the all fair
reason I rejected them was because I didn't want to
wear them, and people think, oh, she's a girly girl, right,

(08:50):
And so we both had sort of the opportunity to
be kind of, you know, very you know, latantly female
to the world, and so as a result, we had
sort of the chance to reject pink, where someone who
might have been trying to prove that to the world
maybe over overreached it a little bit. Do you think
that's possible. I think that is possible. I think that's
another kind of indicator that this whole pink thing is

(09:11):
sort of a social tool we can use to, uh,
you know, to tell, you know, other people you know
exactly who you are, like identify with your specific gender.
Although at the same time, you don't hear a lot
about boys, you know, clamoring for blue toys. No, And
you know, you think about if you walk through men's department,

(09:31):
not you know, a baby boy department, but by the
time you go the men's department, you see pink dress shirts,
pink ties. Like I feel like pink follows women in
a way that boy that blue does not follow boys. Yeah,
and um, I think that's another reason why now as
an adult female, I'm I sort of shy away from,
like you said, like going directly for the for the

(09:52):
pink items, just because it seems a little I don't know,
a little pandering it does. But you know, I can't
help but think if I were my mother and I
had a little baby that was spald I mean maybe
I would fall back on that. I kind of wonder
if this pink blue thing is less about what the
children need and more about what you know, validation the
parents need for their precious gift. Yeah, well, Molly, I'm

(10:13):
glad you have a beautiful head of hair now it is,
it has grown in now, thank god. Well, Molly, I
think that it's going to take a little more research
to actually answer this whole question of whether or not
color is you know, social or biological nature nurture, nature, nurture,
old debate, who knows? But until then, if you want

(10:34):
to learn more about why girls were pink and boys
wear blue and other fascinating topics, you can go to
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
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(10:57):
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