Omni Mountainskyrainbow: Pink

There as so many kinds of pink! You get some kind of pink when you add light to red, rose, red-orange, magenta, and even some purples. The amount of light you add to these colors also greatly affects the type of pink you get and the feeling it invokes.

There is little girl toy pink, a bright intense pink with lots of magenta and purple in it.

Not that far away, there is the lurid hot pink one sees plastered all over adult sex product stores.

Perhaps there is a connection. Pink is the first favorite color of most children, who are genetically programmed to seek mommy, and sex stores try to commercialize a primal connection to the universal mommy.

Pastel pink is associated with baby girls, but a century ago it was a little boy color.

Women wear this color to soften their appearance, to appear more “feminine,” even to appear less threatening to men. It is a favorite spring apparel color.

When men wear this color, it is a statement: “I am confident enough in my sexuality that I can wear pink.”

Some people claim that painting walls of a room pink causes men to be less violent, or even that the presence of pink actually reduces the physical strength of men. Whether this is true, or just a stereotype does not really matter, we are talking about our culture.

“Pink gives me love that would even make red blush.” -Anthony T. Hincks

So far all this is about gender and sex! Pink just keeps proliferating, expanding into more and more colors.

While other colors stay who they are when lightened, pink becomes an entity unto itself. There is yellow, for example, and light yellow. Blue becomes light blue, or baby blue. But red with white mixed in is not red. While technically just a category of some other color with light added, pink becomes a color in its own right. That is why it has an indispensable spot in the crayon box.

Pink is approachable and disarming. When I wear bright pink, I not only get noticed, but people I have never met speak to me as if they are friends.