Hue: Pink

Millennial
Pink
By Lauren Schwartzberg
Millennial pink, otherwise
known as blush or
delicate pink, is the trend
that simply will not go away. It’s
everywhere from Instagram-ready
restaurants, to couches, clothing
and advertising for all genders.
It’s driving fashion editors up the
wall. And it’s a glorious time for
anybody who reveled in shades of
pink in their childhood and is now
discovering that the adult world
pairs them with bronze bookends
and crystal decanters and deems
Photograph by Ori Baez
them sophisticated. But the story
behind why we’re so obsessed
with millennial pink is deeper than
simply a passing trend. It involves
everything from gender roles
to ideas of beauty, evolution,
and science.
Figuring out the science behind a
color and its response by viewers
is trickier than it seems. Our
judgments about color aren’t just
about personal preference; they’re
also about your associations, your
aesthetic ideas, and your cultural
values. We “read” colors vastly
differently depending on our
cultural standpoint; while white
in Western cultures is the color
of brides, for instance, in Indian
Hinduism it’s the color worn by
widows, and in Judaism and Islam
it’s the color worn on religious
festivals as a symbol of purity.
Millennial pink’s success shows up
in the cultural artifacts of our time:
what we consume, what we watch,
what we observe and demand. So
where has this phenomenon come
from, scientifically speaking?
It can be tempting to look at
human evolution more broadly
for the answer on pink’s appeal.
Association is a powerful thing when
it comes to color. Some pink things
in the natural world, from flowers
to watermelon to dragonfruit, are
either nutritious or unthreatening,
unlike, say, giant orange spiders.
However, we can’t take this
analogy too far, because pink can
also signal natural danger: snakes,
toxic frogs and even scorpions can
be emblazoned with pink shades
from the delicate to the shocking.
Blush pinks can also signal infection
and disease in light-skinned
people (think: fever). It’s not a safe
hypothesis to say we think of pink as
agreeable because we might have
evolved to think of it as a positive
color.preference for pinky-red
tones, so that argument looks
pretty insubstantial.
22 Hue