A neat stack of folded baby clothes in white, soft pink and pale blue on a wooden shelf
AI-generated image, not a photograph of a real person or place.
doodlepretty

A SHORT HISTORY OF PINK

Pink wasn't
always for girls.

PINK & BLUE a 20th-century rule

  • White first, for practical reasons
  • Mixed advice for decades
  • Toddlers pick it up around two
  • How a colour got a gender

Babies used to wear white.

Pink and blue became popular baby colours in the 19th century, but for decades the advice on who should wear which was mixed. Historians, museum curators and psychologists have pieced together when the modern rule took hold, and when children themselves start to care.

Updated

Pick an era

THE SHORT ANSWER

A newer rule
than it looks.

The pink-for-girls habit grew through the 20th century.
Children start to show it at about two and a half.

BEFORE 1900

White, and dresses for all

Victorian boys wore dresses until about age 6 or 7. White cotton was practical because it could be bleached, a historian told Smithsonian.

Pick an era

1918 TO 1930s

Mixed signals

A 1918 trade paper said pink for the boy, blue for the girl. Other sources tied colours to hair or eye colour instead.

See the numbers

TODDLERS

Pink appears at two

In a study of 192 children, girls only began to favour pink objects at around two to two and a half, as they became aware of gender.

Read the study

PICK AN ERA

How firm was
the pink rule?

Choose a period. The bar shows how strongly baby and children's clothes were coded pink for girls and blue for boys at the time, going by the historians and curators quoted here.

Era check

Choose a period
Victorian eraWhite for all

Boys wore dresses until about 6 or 7, when they were 'breeched' into trousers. Pastels including pink and blue became popular for babies in the mid-19th century.

1918 to 1927Mixed advice

A 1918 trade publication said pink suited boys and blue girls. A 1927 magazine chart of leading US department stores showed their advice split both ways.

1950sRule takes off

The Museum at FIT says pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys coding took off in the 1950s, although pink shirts were still sold to men.

1970sUnisex look

Gender-neutral children's clothes were popular. For two years in the 1970s, one major US catalogue pictured no pink toddler clothing.

From the mid-1980sPink and blue everything

Gender-neutral styles faded around 1985. Prenatal testing let parents shop for a girl or a boy before birth, and pink spread to cots, buggies and toys.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, drawing on dress historian Jo Paoletti and psychologist Marco Del Giudice; The Museum at FIT exhibition Pink (2018-19).

Mostly from US and UK sources; colour customs vary widely between cultures.

TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING

How mixed,
and how early?

One count from old newspapers,
one finding from a study of young children.

34 vs 28

Standard vs reversed pink-blue coding found

Psychologist Marco Del Giudice found inconsistency, though not a full reversal, in US newspapers and magazines. Books from 1880 to 1980 showed the standard coding far more consistently.

NEWSPAPERS 1881-1930 · DEL GIUDICE

2½ years

Age when girls clearly favoured pink objects

By age four girls chose pink just under 80% of the time. Boys picked it less and less, reaching about 20% at age five.

CHILDREN · LOBUE AND DELOACHE 2011

In the study, 192 children aged seven months to five years reached for one of two identical objects, one always pink and the other green, blue, yellow or orange.

FOUR THINGS TO KNOW

Colour customs
are made, not fixed.

Two identical small wooden toys, one pink and one green, side by side on a pale play mat
AI-generated image, not a photograph of a real person or place.

None of this tells you what to dress a baby in. It shows how recent, and how changeable, the pink and blue habit is.

  1. White was the default

    Practical white cotton, which could be bleached, was the usual choice for babies before the colour rules set in.

  2. Old 'pink for boys' quotes were not the whole story

    Del Giudice's search of millions of books found the standard coding far more often than the reverse.

  3. The rule hardened in the mid-20th century

    Curators place the take-off of pink-for-girls in the US in the 1950s.

  4. Children notice around two

    Under two, children in the study showed no pink preference; differences appeared as they became aware of gender.

PRETTY IN PINK

What the toddler
study found.

A long white cotton baby gown with lace trim hanging on a wooden hanger against a plain wall
AI-generated image, not a photograph of a real person or place.

Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache's 2011 paper, titled Pretty in Pink, offered children pairs of identical small objects such as coasters and plastic clips that differed only in colour. Under the age of two, girls and boys chose pink about as often as each other.

A second experiment with 64 children aged two to three found both sexes chose pink around half the time before two and a half, with a pro-pink bias in girls and an anti-pink bias in boys after that. The authors argued this undermines the idea of an innate preference.

Questions

Questions people ask

Was pink ever a boys' colour?

Some early 20th-century sources said so: a 1918 trade publication called pink stronger and more suitable for boys. But a large search of US books found the standard pink-for-girls coding far more common, so those quotes were not the general rule.

Why did babies wear white?

White cotton was practical because it could be bleached, dress historian Jo Paoletti told Smithsonian. Victorian boys and girls alike wore dresses when young.

When did pink for girls become the norm?

The Museum at FIT says the stereotype only really gained traction in the US in the mid-20th century, taking off in the 1950s.

At what age do children start preferring pink?

In LoBue and DeLoache's study, girls began choosing pink objects more often than boys at about two, with a clear preference by two and a half.

Is the pink preference the same everywhere?

No. The Museum at FIT exhibition showed that the symbolism of pink has varied greatly across world history and between cultures.

Sources

Where the facts come from

  1. Smithsonian Magazine: Unraveling the colorful history of why girls wear pink and boys wear blue
  2. The Museum at FIT: Pink, the history of a punk, pretty, powerful color (exhibition, 2018-19)
  3. British Psychological Society Research Digest: At what age do girls prefer pink? (LoBue and DeLoache 2011)
  4. Universität Mannheim, Forschung erleben: Rosa ist für Mädchen? (2012, in German)

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