Pink for Girls, Blue for Boys: The Reversal That Wasn't

You have probably heard the fun fact. Pink used to be a boy's color. Blue belonged to girls. Then, around 1940, the whole thing flipped.

It is a great story. It is also only half right, and the half that is wrong tells you more about how color rules actually form than the tidy version does.

Boys in dresses, and no color code at all

Start with what babies wore. In the Victorian era, small children of both sexes wore white dresses. Boys stayed in dresses until about age six or seven, when they moved to trousers in a ritual called breeching. A portrait of a two-year-old Franklin Roosevelt from 1884 shows him in a white skirt, a fashionable look for young boys at the time (Smithsonian Magazine).

Pink and blue did arrive in the mid-19th century, along with other pastels, but as baby colors, not sex colors. The two were not promoted as gender signals until just before World War I.

1918: the quote everyone repeats

The usual evidence for the "pink was for boys" claim is a line from June 1918. A trade publication, Infants' Department, wrote: "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl" (Smithsonian Magazine).

Notice what that sentence is. It is one trade magazine stating a rule of thumb. It is not a survey of nurseries.

Then comes the better evidence. In 1927, Time printed a chart of the colors leading American department stores recommended for each sex. Filene's in Boston, Best & Company in New York, Halle Brothers in Cleveland and Marshall Field's in Chicago advised pink for boys. Four other stores advised the opposite (Smithsonian Magazine).

Eight major retailers, split down the middle. That is not a reversed rule. It is no rule.

The historian who started it

The reversal story traces back to Jo Paoletti, an American studies researcher who has written on children's clothing since at least 1987. Her 2012 book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, covers the decline of the white dress, the rise of rompers, the gendering of pink and blue, the return of unisex fashion and the origins of today's gender-specific baby clothes (Indiana University Press, via Project MUSE). One chapter is titled "Pink Is for Boys."

Her summary of the story is modest. "It's really a story of what happened to neutral clothing," she told the Smithsonian. And of the color rule itself: "It could have gone the other way" (Smithsonian Magazine).

She never said pink and blue cleanly swapped. She said the convention was inconsistent. The media turned "inconsistent" into "reversed" because reversed makes a better headline.

Two ways to count a century

The psychologist Marco Del Giudice went looking for the reversal and could not find it. He named the popular version the "pink-blue reversal" and argued it had the marks of a scientific urban legend: it was repeated as fact by media and researchers, but its originator had never claimed it (Del Giudice, 2017).

His 2017 follow-up used two different sources and got two different answers.

In English-language books in the Google Books Ngram corpus, the standard pairing of "pink for girls" and "blue for boys" dominated for the whole period from 1880. The few reversed matches were all for the phrase "blue for girls." The pattern looked similar in the U.S. and U.K. corpora.

In newspapers and magazines, though, the picture is messier. A search of the Chronicling America archive, covering pages from 1789 to 1924, returned 62 matches between 1889 and 1922. Of those, 27 were unique, informative quotes: 14 followed the standard coding and 14 reversed it. Adding more quotes from the period 1881 to 1930 brought the total to 34 standard and 28 reversed. The split looks roughly even until about 1920.

Del Giudice's conclusion is careful. There was "a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal)," and the true extent of it is unclear, because books and periodicals paint dramatically different pictures. The small numbers also mean no one should lean hard on either count.

The palette above is roughly what the debate is about: two soft pinks, a near-white and two soft blues. In the 1927 store chart, retailers could not agree which of them belonged on which side of the nursery.

Then neutral clothes took over, and left

Whatever the early rule was, it did not stay put. After the mid-1960s women's liberation movement, unisex styles became popular. Paoletti found that the Sears, Roebuck catalog showed no pink toddler clothing for two years in the 1970s (Smithsonian Magazine).

Gender-neutral children's clothing stayed popular until about 1985. Then it changed fast. In Paoletti's words: "All of a sudden, it wasn't just a blue overall; it was a blue overall with a teddy bear holding a football." Disposable diapers were made in pink and blue.

So the sharply gendered children's clothing aisle is younger than many people assume. Paoletti dates its modern form to the years after 1985. Books of the earlier period already printed "pink for girls" as the standard, so the print record and the shop floor did not move in step. If you want to see how a single color gets claimed, named and abandoned, the story of millennial pink runs on the same machinery, only faster. And the Barbie pink revival of 2023 shows how much work a brand can make one shade do.

What about biology?

At this point someone always says girls just like pink. There is real research here, and it deserves a straight look.

In 2007, Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling of Newcastle University published a study in Current Biology using a fast paired-comparison task. They reported a consistent sex difference in color preference. The sample was 171 young British adults plus a small Chinese group. Blue was the universal favorite. Women's preferences shifted toward the red end of the red-green axis, so pinks and lilacs ranked higher for them (Hurlbert and Ling, Newcastle University; ScienceDaily).

Hurlbert floated an evolutionary idea: women, as gatherers, may have benefited from spotting ripe red fruit, and culture may then have amplified the effect. The team also said the nature-versus-nurture question stayed open, and that they planned infant testing.

A later study went looking for the cultural side. In 2021, Jac Davis and colleagues tested pink and blue preferences in children aged 4 to 11 in three small-scale societies with limited exposure to global media and mass-produced goods: Shipibo villages in Peru, Tanna Island in Vanuatu and BaYaka foragers in the Republic of Congo. They compared those children with kids in Brisbane, Australia.

The result is hard to wave away. Boys and girls in the three small-scale groups showed negligible differences in pink preference. In Brisbane, girls preferred pink more than boys did, and the gap came mainly from boys avoiding pink, not from girls strongly seeking it. The authors argue that linking pink with girls is a cultural phenomenon. They allow that biology may predispose children toward gendered preferences, but say culture shapes how those preferences show up. Their literature review also reports that infants of roughly 3 to 24 months show no sex differences in color preference, and that girls' pink preference emerges around ages 2 to 5 (Davis et al., Child Development, 2021).

Both findings can be true. A small adult difference toward redder hues is not a rule that pink means girl. For more on how meaning shifts from place to place, see color and culture across borders.

What designers should take from this

The practical lessons are short.

• Check the claim before you build on it. "Pink was a boy's color" is a good fact for a slide deck and a weak foundation for a brand argument. The honest version is "the rule was unsettled."
• Treat pink and blue as learned signals. A learned signal can change, and it already has. Don't assume your audience reads it the way you do. The Color Theory reference covers the vocabulary of hue, saturation and value if you want to describe these shades precisely.
• Test the pair you pick. Pastel pink against pastel blue has low contrast. Run it through the contrast checker before putting text on it.
• Look at who you exclude. In Brisbane, the pink gap was mostly boys steering clear. A palette that reads as "for girls" can quietly tell half your audience to leave. For another pink whose claimed powers have been argued over, see drunk tank pink.

The cleanest summary is the unglamorous one. Pink and blue were both baby colors first. For a few decades retailers disagreed about which went where. Unisex clothing then rose, and after about 1985 the gendered aisle came back. Hurlbert and Ling's small adult preference gap is real, but the 2021 data suggest the color rule is mostly something children learn.

Sources

• When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?, Smithsonian Magazine
• Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, Indiana University Press (Project MUSE)
• Del Giudice, "Pink, Blue, and Gender: An Update," Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2017
• Hurlbert and Ling, "Biological components of sex differences in color preference," Current Biology, 2007
• Newcastle University study coverage, ScienceDaily, 2007
• Davis et al., "Cultural Components of Sex Differences in Color Preference," Child Development, 2021