As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was pondering the fact that female designers have a little bit of a leg up on male designers: they can use pink and purple. Woah, wait a sec…I can’t use pink or purple in my color palette? Who says? The fact that I so mindlessly and casually attributed pink and purple almost exclusively to female designers makes for an interesting point: what stops most male designers from considering these colors?
In American culture, pink represents female and blue represents male. The notion of color coding male and female is embedded from the get-go. Toys and clothes, for example, almost always follow the pink and blue dichotomy. Since males are inherently concerned about their masculinity, we learn to avoid the color, both consciously and unconsciously. Amongst peers at an early age, I remember there was a social stigma attached to the color pink. Even in my 5th grade class, I remember the other kids already associating pink with homosexuality. Purple was treated similarly, mostly because it creeps away from blue, towards pink, in the color spectrum.
It’s embedded into the male psyche. When I’m checking out shirts at the store, I make sure to avoid pink and purple. When I consider possible color palettes, I avoid pink and purple, except for maybe one occasion. Really, this is ridiculous. I’m a designer, and yet I have a bias towards certain colors, because let’s face it: I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to avoid them, as an unconscious measure to avoid being considered homosexual, or at least not manly. It’s laughable when put into words.
To put it into complete perspective, pink and purple are like any other color; they are our brain’s representations of certain wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Photo taken by jennybubbletime on Flickr.
