Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your
my My My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
Valentine's a day fast approaching, so of course we have
decided here to devote a few different episodes too, you
(00:25):
could say Valentine's Day content or maybe anti Valentine's Day content. Yeah,
Usually Valentine's Day comes around and we sort of begrudgingly
do an anti Valentine'sday just to be like, yeah, it's
coming up terrible. But I've noticed this time we have
like five or six topics that we have planned to
really plumb the depths of different aspects of Valentine's Day
(00:47):
and to really attack it from four different fronts and
just take it out. Ye, take it out, take it out.
You know what we're talking about here. We're really going
to get into Valentine's Day. We're going to dust it
and put it away, and we're gonna start by exploring
the color pink. Yes, because pink and red are the
(01:08):
predominant color scheme for Valentine's Day. It's the colors that
just assault you come pretty much the end of January,
maybe even right after Christmas. These days, you start seeing
it popping up everywhere, trying to sell you that candy,
try to sell you those flowers, try to sell you
god knows what else, all in the name of this
big commercial holiday. Yeah, I call it the pink menace.
(01:31):
And I call it that for a couple of different reasons.
Some you know, the associations with Valentine's Day, which is
the sort of treacle that we we cling to, these
notions of idealized love and so on and so forth.
But also because I just don't enjoy the color pink,
and I never have. So you don't like looking at it,
you don't like wearing it. It makes me feel unsettled. Okay,
(01:54):
And this is something I'm going to point out. I
think some of our female listeners will understand what I'm
talking about here. There is a certain hue of pink
that you will find in a gynecologist office, and it's
usually this kind of mauve pink hue that you find
in literature about the reproductive system, or you even see
in the models of the reproductive system. Okay, I know
(02:16):
what you're talking about. That that that shade of pink.
You also see on the translucent pages that go over
anatomical illustrations. You see it like nice and shiny there. Yeah,
but you particularly will see it in a gynecologiest office.
And I call it vegonna pink. And it's just it's
just that kind of shade of pink. That's just it
doesn't have a lot of verve to it. It's a
(02:37):
bit of a depressing pink. And also I feel like
I'm in the ganna coologist office. I don't necessarily need
to be um, you know, walloped over the head with
this color. I know what I'm there for, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean in our culture, pink
has become this huge gender thing. It's become the color
for females, right, It's become fetishized, I think. I mean,
(02:59):
think about out pink diamonds, pink firearms, pink legos, which
we'll talk about a little bit. Pink salt Does that count? Uh?
I feel like that is the natural colored salt, right,
hillily and salt, And it's very tasty. So I will
put that to the side. Beautiful cracked over a freshly
baked pizza. Okay, So in this episode we're going to
(03:22):
We're going to discuss pink. We're gonna talk about pink
from a cultural and historic standpoint. We're gonna break down
some of the science of pink and uh, you know,
and at the end of it, we're gonna reach out
to the rest of you and get your input on
pink as a color, as a color that appears in
her surroundings, is the color that we we take on
(03:43):
on for ourselves. How do we feel about it and
how does it make others feel? Yeah, I'd like to
read this quote from Elizabeth Camp. She's writing for a
on magazine, and she says, pink matters because it is
bound up with ways of being in the world that
are partially aesthetic but also personal and political colors and
code aesthetic norms that run straight through to style, personality, culture,
(04:07):
and class. You know. Growing up, I feel that pink
was never like a huge deal. Like I wasn't one
of those kids that was raised with this idea like
just beaten into you do not wear pink because pink
is a girl's color. But on the other hand, I
don't remember having a lot of paint clothes, except perhaps
around Easter, you know, where you would have to have
(04:29):
dressed and sort of pastor pastel colors and go everybody
goes to church, and you get this horrible picture made
and it's you know, and your your your kid, it's
it's kind of sunny out. You just all you want
to do is get out of those church clothes, and
then instead you have to stand around and stay in
them and and wait for everybody to get together. Yeah. So,
so I have kind of those connotations with with pink
(04:51):
and some of its pastel colors, not so much that
it's I guess a little bit that it would that
it is feminine as well, because you end up going
to you know, two junior high and then it's it's
the issue of gender is huge, to the point where
I remember being made fun of because my legs weren't
hairy enough and therefore it was a sign of femininity
and man was there, and I remember feeling bad about it, like, oh,
(05:13):
I guess like I have to wear long pants all
the time. So I was gonna talk to you about that. Um,
but let me ask you this, does the color pink
ever evoke associations with calmness or peacefulness? Well, I will
say when it comes to pepto bismol. There is the
there is the promise of possible peace with the color.
(05:35):
But with that I also have a strong memory of
it was either me or one of my sisters taking
pepto bismol for an unsettled stomach as a kid, and
then vomiting it up against the wall and onto the floor.
And the floor was white carpet, so he had a
nice pink stain there from where someone had had vomited. Okay,
well that ties in lovely to a color called drunk
(05:58):
tank pink. And why does a tie in so well, Well,
it is a color that was used and actually I
believe it's still used in some holding cells in jails.
It's a bubblegum pink color. And think about a sort
of maybe an unruly intoxicated person they're locked up, the
cell they're put in, is that's drunk pink pink. What
(06:21):
are the effects? Well, the idea here is that the
pink is going to have a calming effect, a soothing effect,
because you have not a you know, necessarily a delightful
TV drunk like otis on the Andy Griffith's Show, but
rather somebody who might be a little a little violent,
a little a little out of it and a little perturbed.
They've been apprehended and placed inside of a cell. So
(06:41):
if there is a promise of potential calming from this color,
in fact, if you have some studies that back this
up as well, all the more reason to just throw
a bunch of pink paint at the problem. And I
hope that it's kind of a magic bullet, right, Yeah. Yeah,
And this was discovered in n by psychologists who figure
it out that this hue of pink could really calm
people down, and they used it on buses, school buses.
(07:05):
They painted the seats pink, and they discovered that vandalism
rates declined. Uh. Door to do door to door charity
workers wore pink shirts in their donations rose threefold and
um some some very clever football coaches even introduced the
color into locker rooms. Yeah, in particular, the visitors locker
(07:27):
room at the University of Iowa was painted pink back
in seventy nine, and it was it was heavily criticized
for for being you know this this means of demoralizing
and also trying to to to use colors to manipulate
the effectiveness of your opponents. Um. One of the key
individuals that pops up in these studies is Alexander Schauss,
(07:47):
and that's why you sometimes see the pink. This particular
mode of pink referred to as shause pink, also known
as Baker Miller pink, also known as passive pink, also
known as p s which I like that because it
sounds even more nefarious, like you're gonna use p six
one eighteen against your enemies. Well, and that has sort
of incarcerated sound to it as well. Right bring up
(08:08):
the shouts is quoted as saying, even if a person
tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink,
he can't. The heart muscles can't race fast enough. It's
a tranquilizing color that SAPs your energy. Even the color
bind are tranquilized by pink rooms. UM very much playing
(08:29):
into this idea that it's it's it's like a vampire
of colors. It's just SAPs your soul out of you. Um.
He He conducted a couple of different studies. The most
notable one was posted in the final issue of Ortho
Molecular Psychiatry in nineteen this when he took a hundred
and fifty three healthy men exposed them to cardboard squares
one of them blew one of them pink, And after
(08:52):
a full minute of staring at these, they were asked
to hold their arms out in front of their bodies,
you know, like a like a like a horror movie
zombie or mummy or something, and you know, and see
how long they could hold them out. And then their
arms were put down. They were given a few seconds
to recover, and then they did a second test, same thing,
and he found all but two men were dramatically weaker
(09:12):
after staring at the pink, while blue left the strength
in the test intact in both the first and the
second strength test. He ended up following this up in
another study thirty eight men squeezing a measuring device, and
again found found that they were weaker after exposure to
the pink. Now, the amount of time that you're exposed
(09:32):
to the pink is really key here, because Adam Altar,
who wrote the book Drunk Tank Pink, has said that
there's pretty good evidence that over a nine month period,
the very aggressive prisoners at a naval prison in Seattle
were much better behaved when they emerged fifteen minutes after
being put in the pink drunk tank. After that fifteen
(09:54):
minute exposure, if you go up to thirty minutes, you
have the reverse effects of that calming suit and color.
All of a sudden, that color becomes distracting, it becomes angering. Yeah,
there's also the o this idea that you're you're tamping
everything down, You're you're kind of repressing stuff, and it's
going to eventually explode, Like paint cannot constrain the beastly
(10:18):
heart for too long, it cannot. The mary Kay of
it all will just fall apart, and the beast within
all of us, even mary Kay, will emerge. So we
were talking about this after we we looked at some
of these studies, instantly thinking about the use of pink
in sport and in physical combat, Like you would think
you would see more usage of pink on the playing
(10:42):
field um and and even on the battlefield UM in
lieu with some of these colors, that it wouldn't just
be a matter of all, let's paint the visitor locker
room pink and hopes that will will mess with their head,
Like why not? Why not just full on pink uniforms
and let your opponents try and play against that. You
get a thirty minute advantage, right, and then they're gonna
(11:02):
start to become aggressive. But maybe they'll be a little
over aggressive. I don't know much about sports, but maybe
it's like a judo thing where you know they're they're
they're only ramping it up. Then you can adjust accordingly
and use their aggression against it. Well, we were also
talking about Dennis Rodman, who were saying seems to have
co opted a lot of the more uh, the more
feminine aspects of of his dress and his portrayal of himself.
(11:30):
I mean, just think about this guy. He's a big guy.
He is um. You know, if I were to be
a basketball player and met him on the court, I
might be like, wow, okay, this guy is formidable. But
now think of Dennis Rodman wearing lipstick, or his hair
is a very feminine color, or he's wearing makeup, and
(11:50):
all of a sudden, it's like you're playing against a
ground queen. And this becomes an entirely different proposition because
now Dennis Rodman is playing with coda, with gender and
with hetero norms. And we know, and we'll talk about
this more, that nothing could be more unsettling in a
society that really ascribes to gender norms than someone crossing
(12:12):
those boundaries and playing with it, and it becomes a
bit of a threat. You're turning our established symbols and
motifs on their head, and it's essentially playing mind games
with me. Like, suddenly I have to do a whole
lot of extra computing to make sense of you on
the basketball court, whereas before you were just just a
big dude. And there I'm surrounded by big dudes. I'm
(12:33):
a basketball player out there, I'm probably a big dude myself.
But then this, this just throws everything in its head. Yeah.
So what we're saying is make sports more interesting. Put
the drag element in there. Yeah, RuPaul coaches, this is
this is going to really amp up the psychological aspect
of it. I would I mean, I say this a
lot that I would be pretty much into any sport
(12:55):
if it could itself be more like pro wrestling. So
in pro wrestling you see lots of craze, the outfits
and face paint. If if you saw more crazy outfits
and face paint and say professional basketball, I would be
more tempted to watch. I would be there with you
I gotta tell you now, one of the things that
we talked about these archetypes, uh, that that you could
(13:15):
turn your head, is this idea that women like pink.
It's completely ingrained, it's hardwired. And this, of course is
an erroneous idea out there that women are inherently gravitating
towards pink. And we start touched on this a bit,
albeit indirectly, and when we did our episode on the
color blue, because it turns out that most people prefer
(13:38):
blue overall than any other color. That's right. I remember
in that episode I mentioned that, UM that my son, uh,
my wife and I we UM. We didn't say, all right,
here's blue, this is the boy's color, this is the
one you should like, stay away from pink. But he
ends up gravitating towards blue. Yeah. And I believe that study.
I know it was a paint company that funded it, UM,
(14:02):
but I want to say it was the thirty countries
that they surveyed, and it was blue first, and then
I believe it was green, and then yellow was maybe
the last color that that people preferred or didn't prefer
very much. Pink didn't even make it onto that list,
is my point. Um, So if you delve into this
a little bit more, you'll see that there's a two
(14:23):
thousand eleven study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology,
and they had one year old girls and boys that
were shown pairs of identical objects like bracelets, pill boxes,
and picture frames, but with one of those objects being
pink and the other being a second color. Now, they
were no more likely to choose pink than any other color.
(14:45):
But after the age of two, the girls started to
like pink and buy four boys were determined in their
rejection of pink. And the point of this is that
it is not hardwired. It is a cultural script that
kids began to sworb via all of the media around them,
via the ways in which their parents may address them
(15:06):
or direct them toward things. Plus, you're growing up in
an age of TV abundance. You're just constantly marketed to
with products the pink for the girls, the blue or
some of the color for the boys, and it's just
just beaten down into your head. Um. That being said,
it's weird to look back in my own childhood and
having been raised very much in this age of just
(15:27):
all the television you can stand uh and and then
all the messages that are that they're on those airwaves.
I distinctly remember Kinkishi muscle figures. I don't know if
you remember these at all. Um, they're like little a
Japanese product. I remember correctly. Uh, And it was Knkisi
in Japan and in the US it was muscle men um.
And they were all these kind of wild, sort of
(15:49):
pro wrestler characters, but they had like, you know, crazy
animal heads or extra limbs. They were just elaborate comic
book type characters. But they were all this They are
all made out of this pink binda bowl material and
there was nothing, you know, you just completely accepted that
they're pink. I guess they're kind of fleshy. I don't know.
They were called muscle men. Yeah, the muscles and muscles
(16:10):
are pink. We weren't called squishy non musli women. I
guess maybe maybe that's the thing. Maybe there was a
discussion where someone said, all right, uh, these these Knkichi
guys are pretty cool, but if we're going to market
him in the US, we need to name him something
really mask go in to make up for the pink color.
I don't know, Yeah, that's some gender performance terms. They're
like musclemen. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick break,
(16:33):
and when we get back, we're going to talk about
the color pink and how it actually hung with the
guys for a long time. All Right, we're back. We're
talking about pink. We've already talked about some of the
psychology of pink in the Science of pink. Uh. Now
(16:55):
we're talking about ginger and pink and then specifically how
it's become coded into our culture, especially here in the West. Yeah,
because we think about pink is just being squarely for
girls and women, but in fact, um up until the
nineteen hundreds, it was just as equally worn among men
and women. In the seventeen hundreds too, you can you
(17:17):
look back at old plates and you will see that
men were just as likely to wear shades of lilac
and pink as a woman. So what's interesting is you
get to the nineteen hundreds and you get to children, right,
and this is where the coding begins. And largely in
(17:37):
the early nineteen hundreds, you have white clothing for children,
and the reason for that is because when they're very young,
what do they do? They spill things all over themselves,
the urinate on themselves. There's a lot of washing of clothes,
and so you don't want dyes in there. But as
the chemical process gets um a little bit easier for
(17:58):
for clothes to retain die than you begin to see
more colors bring up in children's clothing. Okay, so we
go from basically not having colors for the children and
now we have them. So yeah, suddenly colors are in
play for the the young children. And uh, it's left
to the fashion authorities to tell you what colors you
should dress. Here are your children in? And uh, interestingly enough,
(18:19):
since there's not an established culture of pink for girls
blue for boys, and in fact, pink is historically had
been used by men and it had been a masculine color.
In many instances you saw advice such as the following
from a June article in the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants
department said, the generally accepted rule is pink for boys
(18:41):
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. The complete reversal of of
what ends up becoming the gender color standard, right, because
pink is associated with red, and red is a more virile,
(19:02):
sanguine color, like the color of blood. It's robust. Indeed,
I mean you're familiar with the Game of Thrones, Yes
I am. You know House Bolton, of course, yes, vicious,
vicious House. Their their sickle is the flayed man. And
the colors of that signal red and pink. That's the
colors of taking a person's skin off. I was just
about to say that's what you would find, right, little pink,
(19:24):
little red. Now it didn't. The color of pink didn't
become co opted for women until after World War Two.
Now think about this, this is important. During World War Two,
you have Rosie the Riveter. You have a pretty stark
reversal of gender roles, right because you have now women
(19:47):
that are in factories and they are working and they
are making income because the men are having to go
overseas and fight in the war exactly. So what happens
after that is men return, and then there's this really
intense movement for heteronormatizing the gender roles, for essentially putting
women back in their place and You see that in
the fashion the day, right, because you see post World
(20:09):
War two, Um, no longer is Rosie wearing her dungarees, right,
her blue dungarees. You see women in ads with nipped
in waiste and they're wearing a lot of pink and
a lot of product plays coming in. You see a
lot of shades of pink and the products that are
being offered, and the message is that the woman's house
(20:29):
is her demain. So it's no longer like Rosie the riveter.
It's more like tend to your roses. Yea. And instead
of and instead of working on the machinery, suddenly you
have the benefit all of all this new futuristic machinery
that's coming into your kitchen and into your household for
you to utilize in your traditional feminine role in the house. Yeah,
(20:51):
and hey, why not get some of that stuff in
the shade of pink, especially new beauty products too. Right,
you've got a pink brush to come on your hair
on times a day. Um. Now, in the seventies, you
do see pink taking a backseat, and some of that
is because of the more feminist oriented ideas that colors
should be unisex um. But then the big eighties return,
(21:15):
and with the eighties neon colors fuchia, and you see
pink kind of trickling in again as a hyper gender
performing color. Yeah, because on one hand, you get the
idea that you know what, well, you know, women can
be scientists. Of course, women can have all these different
roles in society. But not only are they strong enough
to do that, they're strong enough to wear pink if
(21:35):
they want to. Yeah. Yes, But I think I feel
like some of this was really just a marketing juggernaut.
And we've seen those you know of late and say legos,
because no longer is that just you know, here's these
primary colored legos. Now you have more girly hues of
legos and pink and purple and other pastels that are
(21:57):
being marketed. It's pretty brilliant, is now. If you have
a two child family, two different genders, you don't have
just one set of legos, you have to Yeah, and
the same thing with like an easy bake oven type devices.
I've seen those where you have the existing one, which
is generally some sort of a pink kind of color scheme,
and you just change it to black or blue or
(22:18):
something or black and green and get a boy to
cook a little gross things in it, right, and then
it's uh, it's marketed to to those those gender stereotypes.
Side note, my daughter got an easy bake oven for
Christmas purple and pink, I gotta tell you, although they
come in different colors, and uh, the pizza is disgusting,
(22:42):
I've not like. I didn't think I'd ever met a
pizza I didn't like, and I really I had to
spit it out into the trash can. I don't know
what they're using in that mix. Also worth noting in
this whole uh nineteen eighties reconfusion of pink is that
you also see paint being lives as a as in
fashions for men, but it's oftentimes kind of wrapped in
(23:04):
this this way of thinking, like he is so masculine,
he's wearing pink. He doesn't even care. That's how masculine
he is. I feel like that's what happened with purple.
Remember the purple tie craze and purple shirt craze happening
in the minnow sphere. Yeah, that was like the I
don't I want to say, like, for some reason, why
is this in my head? We just felled and like
(23:25):
ussered this and anyway, like over the past five years,
it was like, yes, we're in purple. We're doing it
with style and masculinity, which is totally fine with me.
I just think it's interesting to see colors genderized like that.
But then I feel like a lot of that kind
of gets back to this whole idea of again what
the color represents, and this idea of children and pink
(23:48):
and little girls or sugar and spice and everything nice,
you know, and and boys or was it puppy tails,
dogtails and yes, snail tails gross thinks slimy things. Yeah,
and then pink it becomes this sort of confectionery color, right,
and girls are like cupcakes. And not to take this
(24:10):
too far afield, but what happens when you transform a
girl into everything nice and she's all delicious spice, and
she's a cupcake. It's a lot easier to walk that
kid into objectification. The older she gets. She's something to
be consumed or to be you know, looked at. Yeah,
she's something unnatural, something manufactured for consumption. And it's really
(24:35):
weird place to wind up as a culture. Uh. If
I can return to pro wrestling for just one second,
of course, it can always For the last time in
this episode, I do want to point out Breadth the hitman. Heart,
one of the the icons of pro wrestling, always wore
pink like. Sometimes it was very pink like, predominantly pink
his outfit. Other times it would be like a pink
(24:57):
and black type of setting. And a lot of times
he was a guy. Sometimes he was a bad guy.
But it never played into any kind like. He never
did any kind of effeminine character like. It was never
playing into feminine pink. It was just his last name
is Heart and Valentine's days pink, So he just wore
pink so well. And if we've learned anything from David Eagelman,
we know that the unconscious is really at or care right,
(25:19):
So if you're named Heart, maybe you would say, ah, yes,
hearts are pink and red. And I assume that role
for myself. Yeah, I don't know. Um, I'm gonna go
back to camp Um. In her article and and On
real quick and UM, I'm gonna read this quote, she
says the exclusion of boys from a wide range of
perfectly viable, even important forms of dress and play because
(25:42):
of their association with femininity is bad enough, but in
a patriarchal society, the confinement of girls to a limited
set of permissible ways of being is considerably worse. In particular,
there is empirical evidence, such as the research from the
University of Michigan, to suggest that highly gendered clothing can
(26:02):
serve as a trigger for something called stereotype threat, meaning
that girls and women end up performing worse than they
could on test of stereotypically male abilities such as mathematics
and engineering. Now, um, I know that stuff Mom never
told you has talked about stereotype threat quite a bit
in particularly in the fields of stem science, technology, engineering,
(26:25):
and math. But this is all part and parcel, this
idea that you're performing gender, you're doing via color, via
the things that you wear. And if girls are bad
at math, as Barbie once said, when you pulled a
chord on her um, then they're primed to be bad
at math. And that's why all of this matters, All
(26:45):
this sort of symbolism. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it really
gets down to symbolism. And I'll make sure to link
to our previous episode on the power of symbols on
the landing page for this episode at Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot Com because a lot of the same
energy as at work. We establish all these meanings for
these symbols and then also just the colors of themselves,
and then our brain is interacting with those symbols at
(27:06):
at a subconscious level. I mean, they're really controlling, especially
when you look at Victoria's Secret Okay, which we're going
to talk about in the next episode too. Um, if
you look at something called Pink Nation, which is a
range of underwear for tweens, and it's like this crazy
(27:29):
you know, Futia Pink Feller thing, and it's like these
thongs and stuff like that, you know, it's like it's
it's unsettling because you do see that you see all
of this stuff being uh codified and put out there
and consumed by the general public. And so you know,
again going back to David Eagleman, so much of this
is working on an unconscious level. You know. There's an
(27:51):
article in The Atlantic definitely worth checking out titled will
a major sports team everwhere pink? That I found pretty interesting.
It does point that in the nineteenth century, uh, you
did see uh pin State uh deciding on pink and
black for the schools and therefore the football team's colors,
and they later changed it to blue and white. But
for the most part, you do not see pink in
any kind of major usage with a with a major
(28:14):
sports team, except during October or Pink Cober as it's
become branded. Where pink, of course, is the color that
has been taken on by the breast cancer awareness groups,
and to help promote that cause, you'll see sports teams
adding some pink to their to their outfits, wearing pink bands. Uh.
In wrestling, sorry, I came back to one more time,
(28:36):
they'll add like a pink rope, you know, and then
wrestlers will have like pink have have pink outfits that
normally they wouldn't have the pink color scheme, and all
that actually just serves to cement the idea that pink
is a feminine color and if a male is to
wear it, then he's just doing it out of a
show of strength and bravery, uh, you know, for his
(28:57):
his female counterparts, although breast cancer does effect men too,
albeit none at the same rates. Um. Yeah, it's interesting
that that it is then used so effectively in that
campaign because it's not a color that's uh, that's sort
of a boring color. It's really captures your attention, and
so it is put to good use in that campaign,
(29:18):
and as you say, it's some further cements the idea
that it's genderized. And then there's this additional idea that
maybe there's a pink pride going on, you know, via
the pink lego set, Like maybe it's a hey, well,
girls can be engineers too, and they you know, we'll
just put some pink on it and encourage them to
do it. But in my mind, I don't know why
(29:40):
you would have to associate pride with it. Uh, Why
wouldn't you just encourage the child to play with whatever
the engineering building block set in the first place in
a very non gendered way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean unless
it's you know, the point where they're already completely control
(30:00):
by the symbols in place. Yeah, and then you know,
my daughter certainly went through a brief pink phase, and
I would say that she's pretty well balanced in whatever.
You would say that the colors of that symbolize being
a girl and a boy. And she was j from
Ninjago for Halloween. She she was so excited to be
(30:20):
the blue ninja. UM, So I have hopes there because
you know, we've tried to tell her that this is
these sorts of things are available to you no matter
what your gender is. Is there a pink ninjago. There
is not a pink ninjaga. There is uh Nia who
is um. She's not a ninja, she's a samurai. Um.
(30:43):
And so she's a bit apart from the rest of
the ninja. But you know she's a character on there.
But that my daughter is not interested in her. She's
interested in Jay. No. She was red the question that
we have about pink, and we're not trying to um
blow your mind. No, I was gonna say, we're not
trying to whittle pink down to nothing. But the question
that comes up is does pink even exist? Which is
(31:06):
kind of not a fair question, but we'll go ahead
and ask you right it. I mean it definitely made
the rounds. Uh, this particular headline because at surface level
it's just nice and mind blowing and makes you really
love science. Uh. If you're the type of person who
loves science without reading beyond the headline, um, then then yeah,
you just think, whoa pink doesn't exist? I see it,
(31:28):
but it doesn't exist. That's blowing my mind. That's like,
you know, but but when you actually get into it,
it's a bit more complex than that. And but it's
also a bit more mind blowing than that when you
start talking about how we perceive colors and ultimately how
we perceive the details of what we take to be reality. Yeah,
I mean, here's the simplest way to say this is that, um,
(31:50):
there is no single wavelength of visible light that appears pink.
So think of Roy jeep it right, your red, your orange, yellow, green, blue,
and to go and buy it. That is all the
visible spectrum of light. There is no pink within it. Yeah,
we don't see pink wavelengths of light. Something looks pink
(32:11):
because certain wavelengths of light are reflected and others are
absorbed by the pigments. Pink is a reflective color, not
a transmissive color. You perceive it because your brain translates
light bouncing off of the pink object. And moreover, it's
a bit of color mixing by your brain. So consider this.
At the back of your eyeball, specifically on your retina,
(32:34):
you have a bunch of rod and cones. Now, rods
are just all interested in the amount of light that's
coming in, right, they're light sensitive, and colins, on the
other hand, are all interested in color. But the cones
come in only three types, red, green, and blue sensitive.
So what's a pink to do? Well? There has to
(32:54):
be some color mixing by those cones. So if you
think about it, you have blue cones working with green
cones to produce scion, and then they work with red
cones to produce the color magenta. Now, if you want
a true pink, then you have to have, um, those
cones firing just partially, those um, those blue and green
(33:16):
ones firing partially, but the red ones fully firing. And
that's when you get a bit of you know, messaging
to your brain. Hey, we've mixed this together, and that's
pink that you're looking at right now, which is kind
of mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean to throw a
little more context to um. When you see white, that
means all the cones are activated. Black, none of the
(33:37):
cones are activated. And if you want to see gray,
that's all three cones activated, but only partially. So similar
in a way to pink. So you think of gray
and pink in similar terms. Yeah, I mean same if
you look at a yellow banana, right, Um, your eyelax
yellow sensitive cones. So then the yellow of that banana
activates your red and green cones and they fire together
(33:58):
and then they send a message to your brain. So
it really is like having a little artist in your
brain there, But ultimately it's it's all kind of like
having a little artist in your brain in a sense.
Something I don't want to feed into the idea that
we're just brains, uh in a body or a ride
around a horse. We've talked about the mind body connection
plenty of times, but essentially blind brain depending on these uh,
(34:20):
these feeble side organs to relay information to it and
convince it what the outside world consists of. Yeah and uh.
In a Scientific American blog entitled stop this absurd Warm Pink,
the author explains that photons and neurons interplanning with cones
in the eye and the perception of the brain area
is pretty much a magic trick. That any color is
(34:42):
on her head. And this is from the article. It says,
pink is real or it is not, but it's just
as real or not real as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
and violet. So, in other words, probably shouldn't, you know,
quibble about whether or not pink exists. But a lot
of people were really quick to dismiss it and uh
(35:03):
and gast it aside and use this against pink. They are,
And you know, I'm tempted to I'm not a fan
of pink, but hey, it's there, it's around, it's it's
peppt alebismal right, it's it's in the color code. Do
you think some people might have leaped to this as
well because they identify pink as a feminine color and
would therefore see this as an attack on on the
(35:26):
female gender. And I mean, I suppose you could choose
a subtext like that out of it and say it's
so weak it doesn't even exist pink. Yeah, or maybe
they have, maybe they have some sort of agenda against
other um groups out there, or maybe against just Bret
Hart in general. I don't know. I think it is
the Bret Hart conspiracy. Yeah, all right, So there you go.
(35:46):
There's our exploration of pink, and hopefully this episode itself
was what was in the pink was pink in the
sense that just exactly the way we we meant to
h do it. That's right, because the at them all
and you have in the pink. Originally in that like
the top of something like you know, it's in the
pink at the top of its class, but then later
(36:08):
on it began to take on associations with good health. Yeah,
I was reading that it's possible that it had. It
also ties into fox hunting jackets as well, which were
more red. Right, but again the associations between red and pink.
There's Bolton territory where it's the colors of tearing something apart,
so it would be you know, in keeping with Wow.
(36:31):
That was nice that that brought it full circle. Hey,
in the meantime, if you want to catch up on
other episodes we've recorded, if you want to check out
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(36:51):
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And if you have pink hued thoughts that you would
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