In Defense of Pink

It was Easter Sunday and one of the dinner guests had brought along a bowl of camellias from her yard.

Pink ones.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of those camellias. So rich in color, yet so delicate. So full of life. So pink.

Pink Gets A Bad Rap

I like pink. But pink tends to get a bad rap from urban sophisticates. Wear pink to a cocktail party? Bad idea. A job interview? Even worse. Paint your house pink? You gotta be kidding.

You could take pink tulips to your mother on Mother’s Day, but in general, it’s best to avoid pink. It’s too sweet. Too delicate. Too innocent. Too romantic. Too naïve. Too darned optimistic.

My very worldly East Coast boss back in my secretarial days in New York City, dressed me down one summer day for wearing a pink flowered shirtdress to our office on Madison Avenue. Too unsophisticated, she said. Too Midwestern.

I ditched the dress and ever since then I think twice before wearing pink.

Another sophisticated woman, one who entered my life after I had switched coasts and was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, repeated the lesson, this time from her West Coast point of view. My daughter — her granddaughter — had just been born and our family was paying my in-laws a visit in Southern California.

“I hope you won’t dress her in pink,” my mother-in-law said. “Pink is a dreadful color on little girls.”

In Defense of Pink

Part of me, the feminist part of me, totally agreed with my mother-in-law. Going out of my way to dress my daughter in pink would be buying into the stereotype that girls, but not boys, are soft, sweet, tender — and compliant.

The pink-is-for-girls stereotype hasn’t changed in the 40 years since that conversation with my mother-in-law. Visit the children’s clothing section of a department store today and on the girls side of the aisle you’ll be embraced in a poof of soft, sweet, tender pinks — along with equally demure pastels and yellows.

If you’re a girl, these days, there will be pink in your life, like it or not.

Step over to the the boys side of the aisle and you enter a vale of dark — navy blue, forest green, brown.

I feel sorry for little boys born today, destined as they are to be buttoned and snapped into those sober-sided blues and browns. No sweetness for them. No tender yellow. No huggable pink.

Stereotypes aside, I like pink. Pink is a legitimate color. It deserves respect. It’s not teal. It’s not periwinkle. It’s not alizarin. It is pink, and it has a lot to give

For me, what they say about pink is true: it is a tender, sweet color. It is soft. It is unapologetically beautiful. Most of all, it is optimistic. It’s a color that says to me, in this precarious, often meanspirited world, it is OK to be beautiful, soft and kind.

Pink Everywhere

In the days following Easter dinner and that bowl of camellias, I saw pink everywhere on my afternoon walks. I found myself passing up the splashy orange tulips and the turgid purple hyacinths and going straight for the primroses and the pink-headed knotweed.

Later, over at Berkeley Horticulture looking for columbine for the front yard, I ignored the yellow and the orange and I took home the pink.

Same thing at Orchard Nursery in Lafayette. High on a shelf, an azalea was bursting with pink — fearlessly, as if this world were indeed a safe place for sweetness and joy.

I reached up for it. I took it home.

That’s because, when I open my eyes in the morning, when I fold back the shutters on the bedroom window and I look down on my garden, I want to see that azalea. I want to see pink. I want to see pink and everything pink has to say to me about the world that we — pink and I — live in.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come to the defense of pink. I had this to say back in 2015, “Pink. Pink. Pink. I’m Taking a Stand.”  And this in 1988, “Feminine, Feminist Pink.”  Pink seems to be a theme with me.