Pink's now-familiar association with femininity is a comparatively recent, culturally specific development — for much of Western history, pink and blue were not consistently gendered at all, and the modern convention only firmed up in the mid-20th century.
No single HEX value defines this entire colour family — see individual colour profiles below for specific shades.
Historical accounts and trade advice from the early 20th-century United States show pink and blue were not consistently gendered, with some contemporary sources even suggesting pink for boys and blue for girls.
United States · early to mid-20th century
Historical gendering conventions varied and were not universally agreed even within the same period and country.
The now-familiar pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys convention in the US and much of the West is generally understood to have solidified by the mid-20th century, well after pink and blue both existed as colour names.
United States and much of the West · mid-20th century
In eveningwear and fashion, dusty and muted pinks (as opposed to bright pinks) became particularly associated with sophisticated, minimalist branding and interiors in the mid-to-late 2010s.
2010s
Pale reds have always been easy to make, by thinning a red or mixing it with white, so the colour is ancient. The word is not. 'Pink' was first the common name of a garden flower, Dianthus, recorded in the 1570s; 'pink-coloured' follows in the 1680s, the adjective by 1720 and the colour noun by 1733. Before that English used 'incarnation', flesh colour, from the mid-14th century, and its adjective 'incarnate', both of which tended to slide in meaning towards crimson. Old English 'red' simply included pink. The colour was therefore named late and gendered later still, and neither step was inevitable. 1
| Name | Kind | Period | What is known | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Incarnation | Word | from the mid-14th century | The older English name for a flesh or blush colour, from the Latin for flesh. Its meaning drifted towards blood red. | 1 |
| Pink | Word | the flower 1570s; the colour 1680s to 1733 | Of unknown origin. One suggestion links it to the 'pinked', or scalloped, edges of the petals. | 1 |
| Shot-pink taffeta | Cloth | specified in 1635 | The facing of English judges' violet or scarlet summer robes. Grey taffeta was becoming a popular alternative by the mid-18th century. | 2 |
| Madder lake | Pigment | antiquity onward | A translucent plant-based red which, used thinly or with white, gives rose tones in painting. | 3 |
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1530s | England | 'Incarnate' is recorded as an adjective for flesh colour, the nearest thing English then had to a word for pink. | 1 |
| 1635 | England | The Judges' Rules set out robes faced with shot-pink taffeta for summer — pink as part of the dress of male authority. | 2 |
| 1720 | England | The adjective 'pink' is attested, between the compound 'pink-coloured' and the free-standing noun. | 1 |
| 1927 | United States | A magazine survey of ten department stores found them split on whether pink or blue was the colour for a baby boy. | 4 |
| 1950s | United States | Pink for girls became the dominant convention in most of the country, and universal about a generation later, on the historian Jo Paoletti's reading. | 4 |
Claim: Girls naturally prefer pink.
Evidence: Not shown. In a study of children from seven months to five years, the youngest showed no such difference. Girls began choosing pink more than boys at about two and preferred it by two and a half, while boys came to avoid it. That establishes when the difference appears, and that it is not present from birth; it does not by itself establish the cause. 5