Vogue Arabia, November 2019. Photo: Elizaveta Porodina
The history of pink: The first pigment
Nature is filled with examples of pink: flamingos, Himalayan salt, and conch shells come to mind. But in 2018, a multinational team of researchers discovered vibrant pink pigments in ancient marine sediments more than a billion years old in Mauritania, West Africa, confirming that ‘bright pink’ is the world’s oldest color. In fact, the first recorded use of the word ‘pink’ was in 1566. The word was used to name the flower Dianthus plumarius. It would be another century before the word would be used to describe the color of the flower.
In France, the word ‘rose’ became renowned for its opulence. Madame de Pompadour’s love of the color in the 18th century is rumored to have set the fashion of the day. As Empirical powers colonized the world, the demand for pink cosmetics grew as well. Upon discovering the potential in Brazil to create pink from the bark and red sap of Brazilwood trees, traders put slaves to work, cutting the trees down at such a rate that they were nearly lost forever. And by the mid-19th century, synthetic dyes were invented, paving the way for pink to become a color for the masses.
In the 1930s, surrealist Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduced the world to ‘Shocking Pink’, which pushed fashion forward in a technicolor post war America. In Hollywood, pink found a way to express the power of social status and beauty. Today, the image of Marilyn Monroe in a hot pink dress being served by a group of men in black tie has become iconic.
In the mid 20th century, pink became the color associated with baby girls and blue with baby boys. This practice gained popularity in the 1960s and was solidified in the 1980s, creating a strong economy for gender-based products. And then we come to 2023, the year of the Barbie movie. So strong was the world’s obsession with the doll’s trademark hue, that in an…
