Pink
Pink is a pale tint of red or rose, the color of the pink flower. It was first used as a color name in the late 17th century. A combination of pink and white is associated with innocence, whereas a combination of pink and black links to eroticism and seduction.
In the 21st century, pink is seen as a symbol of femininity, though it has not always been seen this way. Prior to the second half of the 20th century, pink frequently reflected masculinity. Scholars have linked the decisive feminization of pink to the emergence of Barbie in 1959.
Etymology and definitions
The color pink is named after the flowers, pinks, flowering plants in the genus Dianthus, and derives from the frilled edge of the flowers. The verb "to pink" dates from the 14th century and means "to decorate with a perforated or punched pattern". It has survived to the current day in pinking shears, hand-held scissors that cut a zig-zagged line to prevent fraying.Optics
In optics, the word "pink" can refer to any of the pale shades of colors between bluish red to red in hue, of medium to high lightness, and of low to moderate saturation. Although pink is generally considered a tint of red, the colors of most tints of pink are slightly bluish, and lie between red and magenta. A few variations of pink, such as salmon color, lean toward orange.History, art, and fashion
The color pink has been described in literature since ancient times. In the Odyssey, written in approximately 800 BCE, Homer wrote "Then, when the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn appeared..." Roman poets also described the color. Roseus is the Latin word meaning "rosy" or "pink." Lucretius used the word to describe the dawn in his epic poem On the Nature of Things.Literature
- In Spanish and Italian, a romantic novel is known as a "pink novel".
- In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 short story, Young Goodman Brown, Faith is wearing a pink ribbon in her hair which represents her innocence.
- Carl Surely's short story "Dinsdale's Pink" is a coming of age tale of a young man growing up in Berlin in the 1930s, dealing with issues of gender, sexuality and politics.
- In Louisa May Alcott's 1868-69 book Little Women, Amy March uses blue and pink ribbons to tell the difference between her sister Meg's newborn twins.
Art and fashion throughout the years
In the high Renaissance painting the Madonna of the Pinks by Raphael, the Christ child is presenting a pink flower to the Virgin Mary. The pink was a symbol of marriage, showing a spiritual marriage between the mother and child.
During the Renaissance, pink was mainly used for the flesh color of white faces and hands. The pigment commonly used for this was called light cinabrese; it was a mixture of the red earth pigment called sinopia, or Venetian red, and a white pigment called Bianco San Genovese, or lime white. In his famous 15th century manual on painting, Il Libro Dell'Arte, Cennino Cennini described it this way: "This pigment is made from the loveliest and lightest sinopia that is found and is mixed and mulled with St. John's white, as it is called in Florence; and this white is made from thoroughly white and thoroughly purified lime. And when these two pigments have been thoroughly mulled together, make little loaves of them like half walnuts and leave them to dry. When you need some, take however much of it seems appropriate. And this pigment does you great credit if you use it for painting faces, hands, and nudes on walls..."
18th century
Pink was particularly championed by Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France, who wore combinations of pale blue and pink, and had a particular tint of pink made for her by the Sevres porcelain factory, created by adding nuances of blue, black and yellow.While pink was quite evidently the color of seduction in the portraits made by George Romney of Emma, Lady Hamilton, the future mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson, in the late 18th century, it had the completely opposite meaning in the portrait of Sarah Barrett Moulton painted by Thomas Lawrence in 1794. In this painting, it symbolized childhood, innocence and tenderness. Sarah Moulton was just eleven years of age when the picture was painted, and died the following year.
19th century
In 19th century England, pink ribbons or decorations were often worn by young boys; boys were simply considered small men, and while men in England wore red uniforms, boys wore pink. The clothing for children in the 19th century was almost always white, since, before the invention of chemical dyes, clothing of any color would quickly fade when washed in boiling water. Queen Victoria was painted in 1850 with her seventh child and third son, Prince Arthur, who wore white and pink. In late nineteenth-century France, Impressionist painters working in a pastel color palette sometimes depicted women wearing the color pink, such as Edgar Degas' image of ballet dancers or Mary Cassatt's images of women and children.20th and 21st centuries
A dress parade, held in 1949, at the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, caused a stir among attendees due to the vibrant pink tones in the dresses and garments. The journalists and critics of the time, seeking to know Mexican designer Ramón Valdiosera's inspiration, asked him about the origin of the color. The artist simply replied that that pink was already part of Mexican culture, which the New York fashion critic Perle Mesta then described as Mexican Pink.The First inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, when Eisenhower's wife Mamie Eisenhower wore a pink dress as her inaugural gown, is thought to have been a key turning point in the association of pink as a color associated with girls. Mamie's strong liking of pink led to the public association with pink being a color that "ladylike women wear." The 1957 American musical Funny Face also played a role in cementing the color's association with women.
In the 20th century, pinks became bolder, brighter, and more assertive, partly because of the invention of chemical dyes that did not fade. The pioneer in the creation of the new wave of pinks was the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who was aligned with the artists of the surrealist movement, including Jean Cocteau. In 1931 she created a new variety of the color, called shocking pink, made by mixing magenta with a small amount of white. She launched a perfume called Shocking, sold in a bottle in the shape of a woman's torso, said to be modelled on that of Mae West. Her fashions, co-designed with artists like Cocteau, featured the new pinks.
In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, inmates of Nazi concentration camps who were accused of homosexuality were forced to wear a pink triangle. Because of this, the pink triangle has become a symbol of the modern gay rights movement.
The transition to pink as a sexually differentiating color for girls occurred gradually, through the selective process of the marketplace, in the 1930s and 40s. In the 1920s, some groups had described pink as a masculine color, an equivalent to red, which was considered for men but lighter for boys. But stores nonetheless found that people were increasingly choosing to buy pink for girls, and blue for boys, until this became an accepted norm in the 1940s.
In nature and culture
Pigments - Pinke
In the 17th century, the word pink or pinke was also used to describe a yellowish pigment, which was mixed with blue colors to yield greenish colors. Thomas Jenner's A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing categorises "Pink & blew bice" amongst the greens, and specifies several admixtures of greenish colors made with pink—e.g. "Grasse-green is made of Pink and Bice, it is shadowed with Indigo and Pink... French-green of Pink and Indico Indico". In William Salmon's Polygraphice, "Pink yellow" is mentioned amongst the chief yellow pigments, and the reader is instructed to mix it with either Saffron or Ceruse for "sad" or "light" shades thereof, respectively.Plants and flowers
Pink is one of the most common colors of flowers; it serves to attract the insects and birds necessary for pollination and perhaps also to deter predators. The color comes from natural pigments called anthocyanins, which also provide the pink in raspberries.Sunrises and sunsets
As a ray of white sunlight travels through the atmosphere, some of the colors are scattered out of the beam by air molecules and airborne particles. This is called Rayleigh scattering. Colors with a shorter wavelength, such as blue and green, scatter more strongly, and are removed from the light that finally reaches the eye. At sunrise and sunset, when the path of the sunlight through the atmosphere to the eye is longest, the blue and green components are removed almost completely, leaving the longer wavelength orange, red and pink light. The remaining pinkish sunlight can also be scattered by cloud droplets and other relatively large particles, which give the sky above the horizon a pink or reddish glow.Geology
Biology
Sound
- Pink noise, also known as 1/f noise, in audio engineering is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density is proportional to the reciprocal of the frequency.
Lighting
- Some grow lights emit a combination of red and blue wavelengths to align with the absorbance spectrum of chlorophyll, appearing pink to the human eye.
- Pink neon signs are generally produced using one of two different methods. One method is to use neon gas and a blue or purple phosphor, which generally produces a warmer or more intense shade of pink. Another method is to use an argon/mercury blend and a red phosphor, which generally produces a cooler or softer shade of pink.
- Pink LEDs can be produced using two methods, either with a blue LED using two phosphors, or by placing a pink dye on top of a white LED. Color shifting was a common issue with early pink LEDs, where the red, orange, or pink phosphors or dyes faded over time, causing the pink color to eventually shift towards white or blue. These issues have been mitigated by the more recent introduction of more fade-resistant phosphors.