In The Pink Blue Project, Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon takes a close look at how artificial the gender/color division is. How plastic it looks. And how false. After she noticed her young daughter choosing pink constantly, she starting to question the reasons behind that choice, so she photographed children among their pink and blue possessions. The result speaks for itself.
In fact, there is no conclusive research showing anything relevant about this color divide. In the end, it might all be just marketing and stereotyping. ‘Women might be hardwired to prefer pink‘ says the title of an article in New Scientist. But the title is venturesome and in fact an inaccurate deduction from a research that shows women identify shades of red more easily than men. But that’s it. Instead, there is evidence that the pink for girls and blue for boys division is actually recent culture. An interesting article in The Guardian points at how almost 100 years ago, pink was for boys and blue for girls and mothers were advice and explained why that is.
I find this color divide a complete lack of creativity. A certain way of putting kids in a gender box. And I don’t think there is any inevitability in our gender roles. But there is something inevitable in being assigned blue/pink as a defining color, if you’re small and your parents don’t care to question this artificial divide and what it means. Children are born ‘color blind’. It’s what they learn and their experiences what makes the difference.