Shocking Pink …
Svetlana came to see me in my office yesterday. Half way through the conversation, I stopped talking, shocked by what I saw. I’m sorry you don’t like working for me I said.” That stunned her for a second, but as it’s not the first time we’ve had this conversation she quickly realized what I was referring to and smiled.
There, on her jumper, were embroidered the words: “Love Pink”. It was a conservative, black jumper and the words were small and in silver … and I hadn’t noticed at first. When I did notice, I went into my “I hate Pink” routine … “It’s a provocation. … you are doing it deliberately to upset me …”, and so on.
The first time Svetlana ran into my prejudice against the colour pink, we were talking about something and I happened to glance down and spotted that she was wearing pink socks … and I pretended to go into a state of apoplexy. The second time was when she put her mobile phone down on the desk … a pink Nokia.
It’s a sort of running joke in the office. Fortunately, Svetlana has a sense of humour and knew that I was only joking. Ilona, however, was taken by surprise. She didn’t know the background, so we had to explain it to her.
When people are young they tend to prefer bright colours: Reds, Blues, Greens and so on. These are vibrant colours and represent action and passion. As people get older, like me, they tend to prefer softer, less violent displays of colours, such as beige and gold. Now Pink is a softer colour, (it is supposed to be a mix between red and white), so you might expect it to be one of the colours that I prefer … but rather than finding it softer, I find it insipid, weak and ineffectual … neither one thing nor the other.
Think of the Conservative American put down for “left wing” liberals … “Pinko” … someone with communist sympathies, but not not committed sufficiently to be a “red”.
Indeed, whilst red stirs up passion and action, danger and desire, pink is thought to have a calming effect. (Some sports teams actually paint the visitor’s changing rooms pink in order to make them less aggressive and energetic on the field of play.) There are apparently studies, however, which show that large amounts of pink can create physical weakness in people. Perhaps there is a tie-in between this physical reaction and the colour’s association with the so-called “weaker sex”. (Believe me, many of the women I have known give a lie to this designation … there is nothing weak about most of the female sex!)
These days, when it comes to dressing new born babies, boys are usually dressed in blue, whilst girls are dressed in pink. Actually, it seems that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to about the 1940s. Apparently, before that the colour scheme was the other way around. Pink, being a lighter shade of red was deemed a boys colour. In Japan, it still has a masculine association.
In Britain, however, pink is associated with the gay movement – an allusion to the pink triangles worn by homosexuals in Hitler’s concentration camps, (similar to the yellow Star of David that the Jews had to wear), and now used as a symbol of Gay Pride.
Incidentally, that leads to a good trivia question … who wore red triangles, green, black, blue, brown or purple?
There are some other connotations with the colour pink. It is associated with romance and happiness, for example:
- “In the pink” means to be in good health, but it hasn’t always meant that. The scarlet jacket worn in English fox hunting is called the “pink” and the phrase was used to indicate that someone had earned the right to wear such a garment and it later came to mean “in the peak” of something.
- Tickled pink means to be happy
- The pink ribbon is used as a symbol for breast cancer, as a red ribbon symbolizes HIV and AIDS and a yellow ribbon to represent a welcome home for someone who has been away and prevented from returning for some reason, (such as convicts returning from prison, or hostages after their release by their captors).
- The pink pound, the spending power of the gay community
When the 2005 revolution occurred in Kyrgyzstan, it was seen as one of the “colour revolutions” which was sweeping through the countries of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block, and was for a time referred to as the Pink Revolution before the more familiar designation as the Tulip Revolution gained general acceptance.
As it happens, I am not alone in my “dislike”, (although that’s really too strong a word), of the colour pink … according to some researchers, although it’s not one of the favourite colours cited by men in surveys, (Yes there are surveys on this sort of topic), it is not one of their “pet hates”, such as Purple, Lavender and Turquoise.
Actually, I quite like those three!
Bishkek