Colors are one of the strangest concepts we have come up with in society. Colors are used for just about anything, to tell you to stop, pay attention, or calm down. Colors are even used to symbolize deferent parts of today's society, and in this current social climate this has become a baffling concept. I am sure that at one time or another someone has said something along the lines of that can't be pink because pink is for girls. This has confused me for years and especially in my later years when I began to learn about the history around the colors in our fabric.
Today pink is the color for girls and blue for boys, a rule that has been drilled into all of us from the time we are born, and our nurseries were painted one of the two colors. This so-called rule has gone undisputed for years and people seem to just give into the notion that this has always been. The truth in the idea of pink and blue being for girls and boys is actually very modern idea, coming about in the last century or so. In fact, it was originally switched with the traditional light blue being for girls because it was considered to compliment the soft look of a girl's features.
The idea of a color representing a gender in itself is not a modern idea, not in the slightest, in fact the one of the first instances of this idea can be found in Ancient Rome. In ancient times colors were treated very differently than they are now, and they held much deeper meanings. Unlike know where we can find shirts in literally any color we can think of, this was not the case in ancient times, dark, vibrate colors were few and far between. It was because of this that lead certain colors to take on symbolic meanings in society. This symbolism brings us back to Ancient Rome and the color purple.
In ancient times it was much harder to dye fabric dark, vivid colors, the hardest color to obtain at the time was purple. It was not the purple we know today, instead it was more of a wine color. It was because of the rarity of this fabric that Ancient Rome made it the color of a citizen of Rome, so if you were a Roman citizen than you were able to wear a toga with a purple boarder. Now if you notice I said that purple represent a gender in Ancient Rome but then said that citizens of Rome all wore purple. Well its very simple in the fact that woman where not considered to be citizens, they were property of their husbands. So, when a boy turned fifteen they were allowed to wear the color purple, signifying that they were a citizen of Rome and could take part in Roman society. Roman women on the other hand had the color yellow to call their own, though yellow was a much easier color to obtain then purple.
It is funny how yellow has become more of a neutral color and purple a more feminine one, but that's the point I am trying to make. Colors, any color, change their meanings at the drop of a hat. Purple which was once a symbol of royalty and only allowed to be worn by a king is now a color anyone can wear. The color red now has become associated with food because of how every other fast food restaurant uses the color red for their logo. White which has always been a symbol of purity was once a symbol of wealth more than anything else. Fun fact was that one of the major reasons modern weeding dresses are white, is because having a white dress was once almost like having a dress spun of gold.
The main reasons for this gender color divide is mainly because of marketing. Yep, marketing, it is the reasons for many things we think people have always done, look it up the only reason we even have a dental industry is because of one men's marketing campaign. Toy companies and such split their marketing by gender and colors followed suit. What I am getting too is that colors don't matter. Colors are there to bring beauty and life and not to be something that allows someone to be brought down. Putting a pink bow on a male dog does not make it less of a male dog, it just makes it a cuter dog. Who knows in a century or so the new colors for girls and boys could be green and orange.
