The Pink Gender

Yesterday while I was with the 2 and half years old little girl (I'm also a nanny, sometimes) she proudly showed me her new pair of pink pants. She was wearing, as per usual, pink from head to toe. I always thought little girls look cute in pink but when a little one tells you she wants pink hair too "cause pink is beautiful and I am beautiful" the whole thing become kind of freaky...

I never wore too much pink when I was a child (but I probably would to and this should justify the fact now I have a pink blog called "the cupcake diary"!!!), but at today this color is everywhere and the girls grows up with the scary classic association pink = feminine more than ever.

Today while web surfing, I stumbled upon the work of JeongMee Yoon , a South Korean artist who in 2005 began a photographic series called The Pink Project. At the beginning, she noticed how much her 5 years old daughter loved the color pink and all her "pink possessions" and how she could choose a toy or a dress only beacause of this color, refusing everything else. Then, asking other parents she met here and there, regardless etnich groups and cultures, she found there were not much differences and her daughter's case was not unusual. The pink trend was epidemic.
She began to take pictures of these little girls and all their beloved pink items.






The photos perfectly show the unconscious social craziness and the compulsion behind the enormous amount of pink stuff each girl owns. It's not only a sign of a globalizated taste or a convention. It's probably the power of advertising, the cultural manipulation wich divide and direct customers not only to a specific product, but to an entire lifestyle, literally starting from basements.

As JeongMee Yoon noticed:

"As girls grow older, their taste for pink changes. Until about 2nd grade, they are very obsessed with the color pink, but around 3rd or 4th grade, they do not obsess with pink as much anymore. Usually, their tastes change to purple. Later, there is another shift. However, the original association with the color-code often remains."

And I like a lot purple, berry and similar shades...