It's a modern thing. Basically it's all just commercialization. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_and_blue
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
56 points (98.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
42922 readers
951 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
but why pink and blue? Are they cheaper to manufacture and mass produce or something?
If you read the wiki article department stores wanted to collaborate on colors. Most stores were doing all colors for babies, but it's easier to mass produce one color per gender. There was a time where different stores were doing boys pink (because red is masculine, so pink is baby red) and girls in a feminine light blue. Eventually they settled on girl pink and boy blue. It was utterly arbitrary. Yellow was used for gender neutral.
It's only recently with online shopping that we are getting back to being able to buy baby clothes in any color once again.
ah they all collaborated so that it was consistent. That makes sense, but it kind of makes you wonder what other arbitrary things were decided by the circle of department stores
I mean, red and blue are 2 of the 3 primary colors in pigments, so that probably has something to do with it. Why yellow missed out, I have no idea.
Yellow sucks.
It's associated with urine, and a baby in yellow just looks like a baby that's pissed itself.
It's a fairly recent association. In fact, at least in art, red used to be the colour for men, Jesus in particular, and blue the colour of women, Mary in particular.
This is the best text I could find on the topic doing only a quick search.
Blue colour was a crushed gemstone from Afghanistan, so insanely expensive (used rarely and only on the top layer) so used only for rich people, so the church basically.
Lapis lazuli is a metamorphic rock, not a gemstone.
This painting isn't a traditional one but from a crazy painter/genious, or so I recall. It doesn't follow the classic rules, and does lot's of other awesome stuff instead. Can't remember his name though...
Like Mary’s bolt-on fake tits.
interesting
It's basically because gender rules and sexism were being pushed onto children at an ever younger age.
There's noting natural or eternal about it, it reflects prevailing biases in society.
I know someone who did a research on color preferences in very very young kids. Girls loved pink from the very beginning. Boys prefered yellow at first and later moved to the traditional blue or green. I see several ways to interpret the data. Could be that girls tend to like pink naturally and boys start to like blue as they inzernalize the stereotype, or girls internalize it much sooner, or it's something else. It's interesting non the less. Also, obviously, daltonics have completely different color preferences. It's fun.
I once read a study which came to the conclusion that women prefer pastel/light colors overall and men prefer strong vibrant colors, so brightness and saturation seem much more important than hue across different cultures and time periods. The most "gender balanced" color turned out to be orange. Very interesting.
I read that the paintings "pinkie" and "the blue boy" were famous at the time when mass consumer products started being commercialized, thus the association.
interesting