PINK: Evolving Symbolism Across Different Cultures and Eras - Evgeni Minchev - World IA Cafe
Evgeni Minchev explores the evolving symbolism of the color pink across cultures and time periods, highlighting how intention shapes interpretation and meaning in design.
PINK: Evolving Symbolism Across Different Cultures and Eras
Resource information
Presenter: Evgeni Minchev
Event: World IA Café
Date published: 2025 Jul 25
Duration: 49 minutes 46 seconds
Format: Talk
Language: English
Original audio: English
Subtitles: English (auto-generated)
Transcript: Available
Transcript languages: English
Tags: cultural symbolism, ontology, product design
Summary
This talk explores the evolving symbolism of the colour pink across different cultures and time periods, using historical and contemporary examples to trace its shifting meanings. From masculinity to femininity, rebellion to conformity, pink has worn many faces—each shaped by cultural intent. At its core, the discussion delves into how intention influences interpretation, reminding us that meaning is rarely fixed, but intended.
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Transcript
Languages Available: English
Transcript was edited using AI assistance and may not capture all nuances of the original presentation.
Transcript (English)
This is a cleaned-up transcript of the talk, "PINK: Evolving Symbolism Across Different Cultures and Eras Evgeni Minchev."
Opening Remarks (Rupa Misra)
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the World IA Cafe Speaker Series. Thank you for joining in today; like the previous webinars, I'm sure this would be excellent as well. My name is Rupa Misra, I'm an Associate Teaching Professor in the MBS program at Rutgers University. I manage and teach in the user experience design, as well as in the product design concentrations in the MBS program. I'm also an active member of World Eye Association.
The topic for today's webinar is pink: Evolving symbolism across different cultures and eras. Sounds fascinating, and I can't wait to hear what the speaker has to say. The speaker for this interactive event is Evgeni Minchev. Welcome, Evgeni. We have been planning this for quite some time, and I'm glad it's happening.
He's an information architect and design leader with over 10 years of experience. He explores the intersection of color, culture, and intent. He has spoken at various events. Currently, he is focused on AI in EdTech, which is one of my interests as well. He seeks to enhance learning through design. Outside of work, he's an avid fly dresser, Angler. Maybe next time our topic will be on artificial flies, and you'll be able to show us what you have been working on. That'd be interesting.
I think Nehar has shared his LinkedIn profile link, which is great. In this talk, Evgeny is going to explore the evolving symbolism of the color pink across different cultures and time periods, using historical and contemporary examples to trace its shifting meanings. This is something which I had mentioned before: all the recordings of all our speakers would be shared. The recordings are shared on our website, which is the World IA Cafe series; it's actually on Vimeo.
World IA Organization, or Association, is a great organization to network and meet people from all over the world. If you are interested, please join the organization. Every year, we host the World IA Day, and this has been going on since 2012. We have Nehar here from World IA Association, we have Grace, we have the other president, co-president as well; we have quite a few people from the IA association. If you have any questions, they would be very happy to answer your questions.
The format of the Cafe Speaker Series is this: about 45 to 50 minutes is the talk, followed by 10-15 minutes of Q&A. Please don't hesitate to ask as many questions as you like. This is an excellent opportunity to network with one another. If you would like to share your LinkedIn profile link, please do share it in the chat. I think Nihar has put mine. Thank you. I'll also share my department's website link. Enjoy the webinar today. Now over to you, Evgeni.
The Talk Begins (Evgeni Minchev)
Hi. That was pretty elaborate on who I am and what I do and why I do it. The only thing I'm going to say, and would repeat for some of you because I already mentioned that on this meeting, is that I literally free fall into rabbit holes in all sorts of domains and interests. It usually happens to me that I find something interesting, and I start to dig and look around, and then it ends. Nobody knows where and how and when. This particular talk is a really good illustration of this, and how a lot of things in my life happen.
Hopefully, that's going to be interesting to you. It's a little chaotic and untypical, so bear with me. It's going to take some time to get to the point, but hopefully when I get there, it would make some sense, and most of all, it would provoke a good discussion. I'm happy for anyone to oppose any of what I'm saying, although it's mostly factual. I'm happy to hear your perspective, questions, comments, anything that's on your mind.
I also see that there's an encouragement from Nehar to share what got me interested in ontology. I think that was my professor in the university, Andrea Resmini. We grew very close to each other, and he literally ignited the spark in me to be curious about everything surrounding me and the whole world in general. He literally told me that you can be whatever you want, so just do it.
Let's go back to the topic. To those of you who are close to the academic world, I ask for an apology for framing my references for being inconsistent. I know that's important to all of you, but for this particular purpose, I was not very careful or meticulous. Please don't judge me for that. To pink. Let's start.
Disclaimer and Origin Story
This talk might include some bad words, not that many, actually. Some inappropriate or ugly illustrations. Most of them would be low quality because technical people have learned how to protect imagery quite well. You would also need to go through my lame jokes and puns that might be here and there.
We're starting. This is my kid. I'm not going to say what gender it is, and I would really try hard not to. It all started with them. The reason was that when we were going outside as a family, a lot of bystanders and people on the street would stop and make a compliment, and that would really make my partner frustrated because it was the wrong gender identification.
My mother-in-law is an architect who owns a business that designs kids clothes, ages 1 to 6. Her inheriting that aesthetic from the architecture world, using colors that are not that bright and the typical blue, pink, green—all the very, very stereotypical kid colors—made this even a harder task for everyone to be able to guess the right gender of my kid.
Etymology and Perception of Color
Being an information architect, to me, the easiest thing to do is to go down the rabbit hole by just looking at the meaning behind words. If you type "color" in an etymology dictionary, you're going to see that the earliest usage of the word "color" was for the purpose of describing skin color in the early 13th century. Looking into Old French and then Latin reinforces the same concept, mostly because people needed to differentiate and also have class differences and be able to segment races.
One caveat: this talk is going to describe the journey that I went through when I wanted to learn more about the color pink, and why I ended up thinking about pink. For some time, it's not going to make much sense, but it's going to tie down later, just like a Tarantino movie.
Old English words for color were "he hue" and "in blue". "Hue" is a good one to know because we use it as designers when concerned with visual design and choice of color. "Color" seems to be a very boring word in the dictionary.
I started thinking, "How do we perceive color?". This led to reading the Bacharian Lecture on the theory of light and colors from the 1800s. The lecturer, Mr. Young, hypothesized that we perceive light because there's a sense of vibration that goes through our brains when we look at items that are reflecting light. This was not far from the truth. The exact quote is that perception of color derives from the stimulation of photoreceptor cells, in particular, cone cells in the human eye and other vertebrate eyes.
To put it simply, light is reflected through an object, and then perceived by the human eye. The pupil and retina control the light, which hits tissue containing rods and cones that are light-sensitive to different frequencies. The nerve interprets the cone input as color. The fact that the quote mentions "all the vertebrate eyes" implies that some creatures don't see color like us. This means that other creatures who live among us perceive the world differently, essentially living in a different color. For those interested in phenomenology, this means that we live in the same environment but have a different experience; the sense of being is completely different.
Visual Spectrum and Illumination
The visual spectrum, as defined in physics, is super condensed, but there is so much more outside, meaning things might be reflecting in a part of the spectrum which is basically invisible for us.
I was excited to learn about the International Commission on Illumination, which studied the effect of illumination on the color appearance of an object. This means that the objects we perceive through our eyes depend on what the light emitter is. This led to my obsession with flashlights.
This study is known as CRI, or Color Rendering Index, a way to measure how close the light source is to the standard light source, which is the sun. The difference in light wavelengths affects how an object, like a banana, is portrayed. This is important: if a flashlight poorly renders the color of a mushroom you pick at night 2,000 years ago, you might only eat that mushroom once.
Going further down the rabbit hole, the peacock Mantis shrimp is one of the most fascinating creatures when it comes to vision and color vision. Its range of perception of color is spectacular and has nothing close to what humans perceive.
Color Spaces and Symbolism
Since humans use colors for communication, we organize them. Color spaces are much more mathematics than everything else. I was fascinated by how many people spent their lives organizing and creating those spaces. I was devastated when preparing my slides because I realized I could have used ChatGPT to create an extensive list of color spaces in one minute.
The first problem I collided with is color symbolism. When talking to people in design, they often have a strong opinion on specific colors, like needing to use blue because "blue is the color of corporate". Color symbolism is a super objective meaning humans attach to various colors. Just like the fruit/vegetable debate about the tomato, those subjective meanings should not be disregarded because that meaning is basically the essence of language.
In resource materials for intermediate designers, I found an article, Color Theory for Designers Part 1: The meaning of color, which states that colors like blue communicate calm, responsible, and sadness. It also claimed that black is mystery, elegance, and evil. This initial bother led me to start looking into pink.
Shades of Pink
When you say pink, there is WebPink, which should be the first shade visual people think about due to standardization in world wide web standards. Other standardized shades of pink include:
Pantone Pink
Millennial Pink (pale)
China Pink
New York pink
Mountbatten Pink (or Plymouth Pink), which is actually a military color used in camouflage, suggesting pink is not only feminine.
Mexican Pink
French pink
Persian Pink
Shocking Pink by designer Elsa, used to reinforce the aromas of a perfume packaging.
Pink glaze (subjective, based on lingerie color)
Cherry blossom pink (from Sakura trees in Japan)
Spanish Pink
Since creating shades of pink is a mathematical problem (color spaces), millions of pinks could exist, but this list is not extensive.
Historical and Contemporary Usage of Pink
Pink is a super popular color for many things nowadays. We'll start from now and go back in time:
Pink Ribbon (Modern Healthcare): Pink is used for things that need to scream a lot, like the pink ribbon, which is literally a cry for help to show solidarity in healthcare-related causes like breast cancer awareness. Bracelets for similar causes often feature pink beads and are not gender-related; they convey a different message.
Hot Pink / Pink Triangle (LGBTQIA+): Hot Pink has so much history. The pink triangle has been a symbol for various LGBTQIA plus identities for a long time.
Hillary Clinton Pink (Political Statement): This pink shows intent. Hillary Clinton said that for a woman to wield power in what was historically a men's world, she had to dress like a man, "but brighter". Pink became an instrument for her to send a message: "I'm here, and I'm brighter than you".
Barbie Pink / Barbiecore: Barbie Pink is bright. Barbie has always represented the fact that a woman has choices, introducing the idea to girls that they can be a doctor or a lawyer. This conveys the sensitive political message that a woman’s place in the world is equal, and pink is targeted exclusively to girls. Barbiecore spun off from this culture and involves excessively dressing in pink.
Marilyn Monroe (Art/Personality): Andy Warhol (1967) used pink to portray Marilyn Monroe, saying "Pink is Marilyn Monroe," attaching a lot of pink to the personality of a woman.
Punk Pink: The punk culture utilizes pink a lot. The earliest manifestation found was the pink flag album of the band called Wire, which cemented pink in punk rock culture.
Baker-Miller Pink / Schaus Pink (Psychology/Military): This color came from a study by Alexander Schaus, who hypothesized that painting a room in pink would have a calming effect on the inhabitants. To test this, he painted cells in prisons pink. According to the statistical information, he was successful, and a huge portion of inmates saw a decrease in aggression and negative behaviors in the "tranquilizing pink" cells. This concept was later applied by an American football coach in Iowa, who painted the guest locker room and restrooms in the same shade of Schaus Pink. He claimed this demoralized the guest players, helping him win many seasons of guest games. This usage is a significant detachment from pink being "for girls". However, studies related to Baker-Miller Pink suggest that in rare cases, exposure to excessive pink can amplify aggression and discomfort.
"Think Pink" (1950s Fashion): Moving back in time, we find a famous quote from a song performed by Kay Thompson in a movie called Think Pink. She sings, "Banish the Black and Burn the Blue," telling girls to "think pink". This reinforces the prevailing idea that pink is a girlish and feminine color and was literally sold as such to people.
Gender as a Social Construct (1970s/1980s): A book I consulted had a quote summarizing the women's movement perspective from the 1970s and 1980s: "Notions of femininity and masculinity, the gender divisions... the idea of gender itself, all are social constructs". The quote continues that parents dress infant girls in pink and boys in blue, expecting them to act differently. "In short, if boys and girls are different, they're not born, but made that way".
First Lady Pink (1950s): This refers to the First Lady of Eisenhower, who loved the shade and recreated the White House in it, setting off this trend in the 1950s. She didn't have the burden that pink was exclusively for girls. Because she moved 28 times, she carried samples of pink fabrics and paints to make new homes comfortable. She famously said, "Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops".
The Pink Triangle (Nazi Germany): The pink triangle used by the LGBTQI+ community today originated from a color coding system during the Nazi Germany times. The pink one was used to label all the homosexual prisoners in the camps. The modern community uses the same triangle to reclaim the symbol and put a more positive note on it.
Baby Pink (Pre-1920s): Around 1927, girls equally wore both blue and pink. During the Victorian era, boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, when they transitioned to trousers in a tradition called breaching. However, by the early 1920s, most Western children started dressing along gender lines. Before 1936, a suit design with a pink trim was typically a boy thing. Around this time, the association between boys and blue, and girls and pink, gained traction in the US and the United Kingdom. The earliest evidence that girls were not wearing pink was 1918. One article from that time states that girls should always wear blue because it is delicate and gentle color. Pink did not exist before 1918 the same way it does now.
Conclusion: Intent
After listing all the shades and usages, the central question remains: Why was my kid (who is a girl) mistaken so much in her gender? She chose her pink items—the bike, skirt, jacket, and helmet—on her own, "definitely rocking that Barbiecore thing".
The point is intent. Color is meaningless without intent. Intent shapes the meaning of that color. No list or article can describe a color and attach subjective meanings that are universally true. Historically, people like the Nazi German designers and those behind the Charles Pink literally reshaped meaning. Color does not have meaning on its own; it's the intent that brings meaning, and that we channel through what we do with color.
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This resource is maintained by Grace Lau and Nehar Sultana.
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