In case you were ever wondering where these colour stigmas came from, read what I found online below. It provides a nice explanation of how and why and where these colour traditions came from. Personally, I love purple. Even if we had had a boy, I would have been tempted to dress him in purple... I wonder what that means.
The whole idea of "pink for girls and blue for boys" was not common practice in the North America until the 20th century. In the 1800s, all babies were dressed in white dresses, which extended below their legs (that hardly seems like a practical garment, but apparently crawling was not encouraged back then). In the early 1900s, color became popular and people who chose to dress their children in conventional colors were advised to dress girls in blue and boys in pink. Blue was considered delicate and exquisite and pink strong and masculine. In one of their issues from 1927, Time Magazine wrote ""In Belgium, Princess Astrid gave birth a fortnight ago to a 7-lb. daughter. The cradle . . . had been optimistically outfitted in pink, the color for boys, that for a girl being blue." It was not until the 1950's we started doing the reverse, and these days, few people would decorate their little boy's room in pink. It does help to identify the sex of a baby; I can never tell if (dressed) babies are boys or girls, but if the child in question is wearing a pink dress, you can be pretty sure it's not a boy.
Regardless of how children were dressed, it seems like girls all over the world have always liked the color pink. Why is that? Research done on the gender preference of colors, suggest that it's in our genes. Two neuroscientists at Newcastle University in England, Dr. Anya Hulbert and Dr. Yazhu Ling, asked 208 volunteers (mostly British but they also included 37 Chinese men and women to determine if there was a cultural difference) to choose the color they preferred from a variety of colors on a computer screen. The colors were divided in two: red-green and blue-yellow. Presented with the basic colors, all volunteers selected the color blue (long known to be the favorite color of most people), but when they were tested on mixed colors, women from both groups (British and Chinese) showed a strong preference for colors on the red side of the spectrum (i.e. pinks and purples). The results were so consistent that the researchers concluded that one can usually identify a person's gender from their color preferences.
Based on this study, there does seem to be a genetic reason why women like pink. One line of thought is that this evolved way back when we still lived in caves and women were the gatherers of berries and fruits and had to be able to recognize what was ripe. Another suggestion is that women needed to know if a family member was sick, and a red (or dark pink) face would suggest that the person was running a fever.
Related Articles:













