Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a pink bubble. I am surrounded by a sea of pink stuff: pink scooter, pink bicycle, pink doll’s house, pink clothes, pink princess tiara, pink accessories, even pink books. And for good measure, my four-year old daughter is wearing a pink fairy costume and fluttering a pink wand, as I type.
What on earth has happened to the rest of the colours? “Ah,” friends say, “girls’ stuff was always pink”. No, it wasn’t. I look at photos of my sister and me when we were young and well, we wore green T-shirts and white shorts and brown dungarees, red skirts and blue tops, but there’s no sign of pink, anywhere.
In a way we look strangely androgynous: there is no real difference in the photo taken on a patch of grass at Ħal Far between myself and my cousin Mark. We are both wearing normal clothes in normal colours.
Sure, I loved my dollies but I can’t remember I ever wanted to be a princess or a fairy (I wanted to be a hairdresser and practised the trade profusely on Barbies). And my doll’s house was cream with a realistic brownish-thatched-like roof.
My cousins and I played complicated games of pirates and robbers and mummies and daddies, but never of princes and princesses. Oh, and books were books: there were no pink, glittery, exclusively female volumes.
This is unthinkable today: the tsunami of pink has drowned out everything. Ask any little girl between the age of two to seven and you can be sure that she’ll tell you her favourite colour is pink.
Some claim that this choice of colour is an innate biologicaltendency. What a load of poppycock. The ‘pinkification’ of little girls – their clothes, their bedrooms, their toys – is a very recent phenomenon.
Back in the 1800s, most children were dressed alike. Gender differences weren’t really apparent until they could walk, or later; boys and girls both wore dresses or skirts until they were six or so (check out photos of your grandparents). By the end of the century, boys’ and girls’ clothing styles began to diverge.
According to research by the University of Maryland, pink emerged as an appropriate colour for boys because it was ‘a close relative of red, seen as a fiery, manly colour’. Blue was considered better suited for girls because of its associations, in art, with the Virgin Mary.
It wasn’t until after World War II that the colour code was reversed. In 1948, “royal watchers reported that Princess Elizabeth was obviously expecting a boy, because a temporary nursery in Buckingham Palace was gaily decked out with blue satin bows”. And that was where it all started.
Often I find myself at a loss on how to deal with this pinkification. I had a very gender-neutral upbringing and I kind of assumed that things would be the same for my daughter.
Wrong: she won’t, for example, wear a pair of fleecy trousers just because they are camouflage-coloured. “That’s boys’!” she cries (followed by major tantrum). “Jeez! Pip, look even I have just one like it.” Please believe me, I am not a softy sort of mummy, but on this point there’s just no budging.
I tried blaming it on the influence of television but actually, I’m very anal when it comes to screen time and she only watches DVDs which have my seal of approval (that is, no girls in pink) or channels which don’t run adverts. In the end I think it’s a cultural phenomenon of consumer marketing.
The other day, we went to a stationer to buy a sharpener. The sales assistant looked at Pippa and told me: “I’m sorry I’ve only got boys’ sharpeners left.” They had cars on them, that’s why.
Another time, I bought her a small Thomas the Tank Engine model, and the male friend shopping with me was aghast: “Are you trying to raise a Virginia Wolf?”
It doesn’t help that our toy shops and clothes shops are becoming more gender-segregated than ever. When I am looking to buy pyjamas for my daughter, there is nothing untouched by pink fairy dust. Boys’ on the other hand have prints of dinosaurs and buses. Don’t girls love dinosaurs and buses too? Why this gender difference?
Lately I chanced upon the book Toxic Childhood by Sue Palmer and it really hits the nail. “Pink is just the marketer’s way of getting at girls’ psyches,” she says. “It’s grooming them for a lifetime of consumption.”
How sad is that? I just fervently hope that a pink and sparkly childhood won’t lead to acute disappointment in the future, when girls discover that life is not all pink.
Meanwhile, I’ll have to keep on living in a world of pink.