Pink is for girls and blue is for boys.

Did you know this hasn't always been true?

Long ago young children of both sexes often wore the same clothes: loose white dresses.


But around the turn of the century, colors started being advertised as being for certain genders. Pink was seen as a boy's color, as it was the lighter relative of a strong fierce red. Blue was associated with the Virgin Mary, thus a more feminine color.

I'm not completely convinced there was a strong color designation given to each gender in North America, as this 1927 Time article indicates that it depended on which store you went into. However, the article does say that when the Crown Prince of Belgium was born, "The cradle...had been optimistically outfitted in pink, the color for boys, that for a girl being blue."

Today's color associations for became apparent around the time of WWII. Many attribute this to the Nazi's use of pink triangles to designate homosexuals, but others also associate it with the dark colored uniforms that the soldiers (mostly male) wore. It is obvious that at this time pink was no longer seen as a manly color.

Book by Lynn Peril

As women were being urged to be beautiful perfect housewives in the 1950s, pink became a definitively feminine color. The slogan "Think Pink" was used to convince women to embrace their femininity.

It's obvious that the colors' designations have been almost wholeheartedly accepted as nowadays you can't walk into a North American store's baby department without being overwhelmed with baby blue (the name now causes a hmmm...) and pink. But think, less than 100 years ago you may have walked into a baby department and those colors would have been for the opposite gender!