Personal Essay | Pink, and You’ll Miss It
If you had asked me, at any point between 1989 and 2008, I would have told you that I hated pink. Hated. Being AFAB (assigned female at birth), I had pink thrust upon me from every which direction and from no corner stronger than my paternal grandmother. All her other faults (given her being an abuser, there were so, so many) aside, she wanted me to be almost comically feminine: she gave me an absurd number of kids’ make-up sets and those little puffy sticker earrings; she’d buy me pink clothes (with one notable exception: a black and white striped dress with neon green trim); she’d pick up flyers about child beauty contests and pamphlets from modeling agencies—everything but the kitchen pink. And most of all? Barbies. So many Barbies. And Skippers! But mostly, it was all Barbies, all the time.
An artist’s rendering of me as a child. And an adult. Like, right now.
My younger sister was the one who was into the Barbies. Missy would come up with elaborate, The Young & the Restless-style dramas, complete with Skipper waking up from a coma, Ken cheating on Barbie …with another Barbie, and one Barbie “accidentally” nudging another Barbie from a balcony. She was into it. I mostly just sat there like, “I guess I’ll braid her hair‽” The Christmas that Missy was in the bone marrow transplant unit, she, our baby sister, and I each received one of the three parts a Barbie Dream House. (I will admit that it was pretty cool when she came home and we were able to put them all together.)Anyway, the point being that I was surrounded with an overabundance of pink. And I was expected to like it because I was supposed to be a feminine, little girl. Welp. I spent most of my childhood and all of my teens just loathing pink, and most of my 20s learning to hate it a little less. Baby steps to the elevator. And then I found a wallet. It wasn’t anything special, just a hinged wallet with enough room for all the crap I carried around. It was pink. It was bright-ass pink and I loved it. And, thus, my love affair with pink began.
Well, some pinks, anyway. As I write this, I’m sitting in neon pink shorts, my hair is coral and tipped with pink, I have a Pinkie Pie tattoo (a pink π with Pinkie Pie’s balloons tied to it), my MacBook is in a pink case with a pink keyboard skin. All them are different shades of pink and I love them. But there are some things about pink that still raise my hackles—I still have nightmares about wearing a dusty mauve, taffeta dress, in August, for my aunt’s wedding. And I really can’t stand the annual October pinkwashing which is increasingly used to boost sales rather than donate to any breast cancer-related research (but you can do that here!) or outreach or education... such is the cynical nature of late-stage capitalism. Awareness doesn’t automatically translate into accurate and up-to-date knowledge on the topic. My outrage at corporations and organizations just slapping some pink on something mostly for brownie points and a bump in profit aside—while it started as something closer to Pantone 1895c (Evelyn Lauder, of Estée Lauder fame, decided that the cosmetics company’s own “150 Pink”—which I cannot seem to find a reference for—would be the color of the ribbons), the pink associated with breast cancer awareness is …all pinks. All of them. That is some serious chromatic creep![embed]https://i.gifer.com/DRAt.mp4[/embed]Though, maybe there is no chromatic creep to be had: some people argue that pink… uhh, doesn’t exist. And, of course, there are plenty of detractors to that theory. The, now decade-long, argument over the reality of pink began (on the internet, at least) after this 2011 video by Minute Physics and its being cited by Robert Krulwich on Radiolab in 2012. A week after the question of pink’s existence being discussed on Radiolab, Michael Moyer lamented in Scientific American’s Observations section that Krulwich “Pluto’d pink.” The Minute Physics video claims that pink doesn’t exist because it is a mix of red and purple and those are colors that do not intersect on the color spectrum; to illustrate the point, the visible electromagnetic spectrum is rolled into a circle to show that the space between red and purple is filled with all sorts of other wavelengths that we can’t see. Pink, the video concludes, is an illusion that our brain uses to fill in the gap between red and purple. But—and I’m no spectroscopist but hear me out—the electromagnetic spectrum, visible or not, doesn’t work like that—wavelengths can extend from zero to infinity, at no point does the spectrum circle back around.Ultimately, it’s a moot question: no colors exist and all colors exist. All the colors that we can perceive are illusions conjured up by our brains to make sense of the wavelengths hitting our eyeballs. In fact, some people’s perceptions of color can be hijacked so that they can see forbidden colors (that is absolutely, 100% my new band name). So, if our brains can be made to see colors that can’t exist, why are we arguing about whether or not pink can?
Pink is a loaded color with a long history and a lot of baggage—baggage that starts accumulating while we’re still in utero. (Also, do not do this. OMG, don’t. That’s not okay.) As a nonbinary, trans-inclusive radical feminist, I have a complicated relationship with the idea of pink. And maybe, my hatred of the color in my youth can be boiled down to just that, only I didn’t have the capacity to separate the color from all of the everything attached to it.
This!—this is the thing.
Pink—aside from being an optical illusion, a cynical branding maneuver, a visual reinforcement of gender expectations, and any one of a number of burdening or disenchanting things—is just an awesome color. It’s punk af, it’s bubble gum and pink lemonade, it’s sultry and seductive. It’s transformative, it’s defiant, it’s radical. It’s a good steak, it’s butter mints and it’s Pop Rocks and, yes, it’s a Barbie Dream House assembled as siblings are reunited. And it’s a playlist! Pink is a riot, a celebration—unless it’s that dusty mauve color, ew—and I almost missed it because “I hated pink.” I know it will be a slow process but I hope we can unearth pink out from under all those layers of bullshit—I want everyone to be able to un-self-consciously join in the party. Because life is short; pink, and you’ll miss it.Ah, punny dad jokes—I got ‘em!
