was pink ever a boys’ colour?

Yes, but only partly, and only for a while. In 1918 an American trade magazine told shops that pink was the stronger colour and better for boys. In 1927 several big department stores agreed. But just as many sources said the opposite, and for most of history babies of both sexes simply wore white.

We shared a short version of this story on Instagram: “Pink was for boys”. Here is the long version, with the evidence on every side, including the historians who think the famous “pink for boys” story is overstated.

before pink and blue, there was white

Look at a family photo from the 1800s and you may not be able to tell the boys from the girls. Babies and toddlers of both sexes wore long white dresses. White cotton could be boiled and bleached, which mattered in a time before washing machines. Dresses also made changing a nappy much easier.

Boys moved into trousers in a small ceremony called breeching. The age varied by family and period, but most sources put it somewhere between four and seven. Until then, a boy in a frilly white dress was completely normal. A well-known photograph shows the future US president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1884, aged about two and a half, in a white skirt with long curls.

pastels arrive, with no rules attached

Pink, blue and other soft pastels became popular nursery colours in the middle of the 1800s. At first they were simply pretty colours for babies. Historian Jo B. Paoletti of the University of Maryland, who spent two decades studying American children’s clothes, found that pink and blue were not promoted as boy and girl colours until shortly before the First World War.

Even then, the advice was all over the place. Some writers said blue suited blond babies and pink suited brunettes. Others matched the colour to the baby’s eyes.

And the modern code was already around too. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Amy ties a blue ribbon on the baby boy and a pink one on the girl, “French fashion”, so people can tell the twins apart.

the 1918 magazine that said pink for boys

The line that made this story famous comes from a June 1918 issue of Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department, a trade magazine for people who sold baby clothes, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department, June 1918

The reasoning sounds backwards today, but it made sense at the time. Pink was seen as a light shade of red, a bold and fiery colour. Blue was seen as calm and gentle.

1927: the stores couldn’t agree

Nine years later, Time magazine printed a chart of what America’s leading department stores told parents. The result was a split vote:

• Pink for boys: six stores, including Filene’s in Boston, Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Best’s in New York and Halle’s in Cleveland.
• Blue for boys: four stores, including Macy’s and Wanamaker’s.

So if you shopped for a baby boy in 1927, the colour you were sold depended on which city, and which shop, you walked into.

so was there a “great colour swap”?

Here is where it gets interesting. Many articles say pink and blue simply swapped sides in the 1940s. Not every researcher agrees.

In 2012 the psychologist Marco Del Giudice reviewed the evidence in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. He found it very hard to document a real reversal, and called the idea a possible “scientific urban legend”. Pink-for-girls appears in sources from many countries in the 1800s, from the Netherlands in 1823 to England in 1862 and the United States in 1856.

Paoletti herself never claimed a clean swap. Her finding is that the code was known by the late 1860s but not dominant in most of the United States until the 1950s, and that before then usage was mixed. As she put it to Smithsonian Magazine, “It could have gone the other way.”

The fairest summary: a few influential voices really did say pink for boys, there was no single rule for decades, and the pink-for-girls habit slowly won.

how the rule finally stuck

1. 1940sManufacturers and shops settle on pink for girls and blue for boys, following what they think customers want.
2. 1953New First Lady Mamie Eisenhower loves pink so much that the White House gets a pink makeover, and pink becomes the fashionable feminine colour of the decade.
3. late 1960s–1970sThe women’s movement makes unisex clothes popular. Many toddlers wear the same overalls and primary colours.
4. mid-1980sPrenatal testing lets parents find out the baby’s sex before birth, and shop for it. Pink and blue return in force, from sleepsuits to cots, prams and car seats.

Paoletti points out that the money mattered. “The more you individualize clothing, the more you can sell,” she told Smithsonian. A pink pram can’t easily be handed down to a baby brother, so the family buys another.

do girls naturally prefer pink?

Probably not from birth. In 2011, psychologists Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache tested 192 children, aged seven months to five years, by letting them choose between small objects that were identical except for colour. Babies under about two and a half picked pink objects only about half the time, whatever their sex.

Then things changed. From around age two, girls chose pink more and more, and by about two and a half the preference was clear. Over the same years, boys started to avoid pink. That is also the age when children learn what gender is, which suggests they are picking up the code from the world around them.

Studies of adults vary too. Research among the Hadza people of Tanzania, published in 2019, found no difference between men’s and women’s colour preferences, which is hard to explain if pink-for-girls were built into our biology.

what it all means

Pink and blue never had a fixed meaning. People gave them one, argued about it for a century, and then shops turned the winning answer into a habit we now call “normal”. It is a small reminder that plenty of rules feel timeless only because we grew up with them. We wrote about the same idea in Fashion rules aren’t timeless, and about the bride who made white the wedding colour in White wasn’t always the wedding colour.

quick answers

Was pink really for boys?

Sometimes. A 1918 trade magazine and six big department stores in 1927 recommended pink for boys, but other sources said the opposite. Before that, babies mostly wore white, and there was no single rule until the 1940s and 1950s.

When did pink become a girls’ colour?

The link appears from the mid-1800s, became dominant in the United States in the 1950s, and grew much stronger in the mid-1980s, once parents could learn the baby’s sex before birth.

Why did babies wear white dresses?

White cotton could be bleached clean, and dresses made nappy changes easy. Boys wore them too, until they were breeched into trousers at around four to seven.

Do girls naturally prefer pink?

Babies show no preference. Girls start choosing pink from about age two, the same age children learn about gender, which points to learning rather than biology.

sources

1. Jeanne Maglaty, “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011.
2. Jo B. Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, Indiana University Press, 2012; see also University of Maryland, Department of History.
3. Marco Del Giudice, “The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend?”, Archives of Sexual Behavior 41 (2012), and “Pink, Blue, and Gender: An Update” (2017).
4. “Gendered associations of pink and blue”, Wikipedia (1927 Time chart, early examples by country, Mamie Eisenhower, Hadza and Disney Store studies).
5. V. LoBue and J. S. DeLoache, “Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences”, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 29 (2011); summary by the British Psychological Society.
6. Boy’s jacket and vest, 1870–1874, FIDM Museum (white dresses and breeching).
7. The Museum at FIT (the Little Women ribbons).
8. “Colour stories: Blue”, The National Gallery, London, and “Ultramarine”, Wikipedia.

Written by the wishyou.today team from the sources above. Spotted a mistake? Tell us on Instagram @wishyoutoday.