How Did Pink Become A Color For Girls?

Have you ever really thought about how it came to be that we associate blue with boys and pink with girls? It’s actually a much more recent association than you probably thought. In fact, there was a pretty long time period where pink was the masculine color and blue was feminine.

Up until the mid-19th century, children wore gender-neutral whites and grays, and then pastels came into fashion for young children. Until just before World War I, none of the colors for clothing signified gender. Once people did start to associate gender and color, it was around 1920, and pink was actually the accepted masculine color, as it was perceived to be stronger, and blue was seen as dainty and assigned to girls. This remained the accepted social convention until the 1940s, when manufacturers began switching pink to girls and blue to boys to match the changing public preferences, but it really could have gone either way.