Pink: The History of a Color

Pink feels inevitable now. Its associations with femininity, softness, and a certain kind of girlhood seem like they must have always existed. Pastoureau's opening move is to dismantle that assumption completely: it was only with the introduction of the Barbie doll in 1959 that pink became decisively feminised. Before that — as recently as the eighteenth century — pink was frequently a masculine colour.

The colour itself has a late start. Pink pigments appear in ancient Macedonian paintings, but vivid, saturated pinks for dyeing and painting were not developed until the eighteenth century. At the same time, a popular new flower — the pink rose — gave the colour its standard name in European languages. Before that, what we now call pink was generally described as a pale or light red, without its own identity.

Once named, pink accumulated its own symbolism quickly and contradictorily: the prim and the vulgar, the romantic and the eccentric, softness and nudity, pleasure and excess. It has been adored and detested in almost equal measure, often at the same time.

This is the most recent and shortest volume in the series — 192 pages against the usual 240 — but it covers the most compressed history, since pink as a distinct colour is essentially a modern invention. Which makes it a useful counterpoint to the older colours: a reminder that not all colours have ancient histories, and that the ones we take for granted as eternal are often the youngest.

Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Black, and White.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2025.