apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

my 3 year old has always gravitated towards pink. it's the first crayon he colors with, and when we go to a toy store, the pink packaging on princess toys catches his eye. i think girl things are definitely more glittery and glitzy, and that may be why as well. he still loves his trucks and hot wheels, but i've never discouraged his affinity for pink (my husband might have though :) )

I remember reading somewhere (although I forget exactly where) that associating pink with girls and blue with boys is fairly recent -- around the Victorian time.

The article stated that kings wore red, army uniforms were red (must have been a British article!), and the colour was associated with strength, valour, power (and fighting probably). Young boys were dressed in pink, a watered-down red (red-in-training as it were).

Girls were associated with the colour blue -- it was cooler, calmer, quieter. I remember the association of "Alice Blue Gown", for example, which references Teddy Roosevelt's daughter's favourite shade of blue.

-- not Victorian, 1920s actually
--blue was also considered virginal, and was associated with the Virgin Mary.

-- interesting link:

http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEPMagazine/Article/28832

color has no gender

In Belgium, there is a tradition for the newborn boy to wear pink and newborn girl to wear blue!

I could see it in a 1980's pink and black checkerboard Vans kinda way. http://www.instepshoestore.com/browser/S004__6a/S004__6c/product/R004__IGQdFabaH6554d6c9a4db1bc/items.html


Or a rugy team uniform kind of way.
http://www.rcthepinkpanthers.nl/

When my nephew was young, my sister told me that she always had to be careful when choosing blue clothing for him. According to her husband, a lot of blues weren't "masculine" enough. *sigh*

My son wears lots of fun colors, including pink and lavender, just like his dad!

The tradition of boys in pink and girls in blue actually held on into the 1950s.

The majority of the early Disney heroines wore blue (Wendy, Alice, Cinderella - even Sleeping Beauty's color-changing gown was blue for more of the film than it was pink).

The novel A Separate Peace, set at a boys' boarding school during WWII, even mentions a main character wearing a pink shirt. Pink was considered a light version of red and therefore still counted as masculine.

For the record, when I was a little girl I had a blue bedroom.

i would do a light-red instead of the commercial, purpley pinks you see everywhere. that with red accents would make a nice tone-on-tone design.
that being said, i still wouldnt do it if i were to have a child

My son's favourite colour is red; his best friends' however, is pink. He has pink crocs, pink pajamas, pink tshirts....all pink. Luckily his parents are open to this. We have a neighbour whose husband wont' let his son play dress up, as that might make him homosexual. shudder.

Ma Vie en Rose -- a movie I order on accident through Netflix (I was going for La Vie en Rose) is all about a little boy who loves pink.

Nevertheless, my son

whoops -- hit return there -- my son at 14 months loves pink and purple scarves at the music class we attend. He obviously has not been overly "genderfied" yet... And, as a kid I (a female) leaned towards blue and greens, and didn't start to like pinks until a few years ago (I am still not fond of purple), so I am not sure what that says about biology. I think the study is bogus...because they tested adults (from what I could tell) and this day and age even the Chinese have surely been influenced by "boy blue" and "girl pink" standards. I'd like to see a study testing babies, toddlers, preschoolers and up, before I'd call it biological.

Ahem - BS. The study found that Anglo women, Chinese men, and Chinese women are more attracted to shades on the reddish end of the spectrum than are Anglo men. The authors speculate that women are more attracted to the reddish shades due to genetics, and Chinese men are more attracted to reddish shades due to cultural conditioning. Er, right on, cuz there's NO cultural conditioning to associate women and pink.

My 2 1/2 year old son's absolute favorite color is yellow! :) He gravitates toward that color, even uses it, though it doesn't really show on yellow paper... ;)
It literally makes him smile with glee.
He doesn't seem to have any special affinity to any other color, blue, green or red (my favorite color!), nor does he have any aversion to pink.

Actually I came here looking for ideas on how to decorate a pink bedroom for a boy! My 3.5 yr old has been asking for his room to be painted pink for months, and I'm about to do it, but was hoping to find inspiration somewhere.

This post go me thinking. When I was a little girl, I loved pink. Then I became a teenager and gravitated towards black (don't we all?). Now, as a mother, I'm into white, and my 4 year old son keeps telling me his favourite colour is light blue... so I guess I won't be painting his bedroom pink. I hate to say it, but I think his father would have a fit if I did. My hubby's old fashioned like that.

Our son's room is purple. It never occurred to me that purple has any gender-identification (but apparently it's "feminine"). We painted it purple when he was a baby; now it's his favorite color.

Considering my daughter loves blue and her best friend (a little boy) loves purple, I will stick with my idea that it is purely commercial to do it that way

I'm female. When I was little, I HATED pink and red. I wouldn't wear anything with either color on it. It was kind of weird. I remember leaving red and orange out of the rainbow. I LOVED purple and blue, and yellow and green, in those combinations.

In my early 20s I got really into red. I still love it. I am also crazy about pink and orange.

My 2.5 year old daughter loves yellow (which is also her dad's favorite color) but also likes pink. However, she only likes HOT pink.

And now, so do I! I think its not about biology or gender or anything! It's all about style.