Pink, Advertising and

The color pink has been used in advertising and popular culture since the 1940s. Drawing upon and reinforcing gender stereotypes, the subtlety and consistency of pink symbolism has adapted to different generations and contexts to shape popular understandings of what it means to be a woman in America.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, advertising created a feminine ideal packaged in pink. The color became an iconic symbol to convey a set of duplicitous traits, in which the feminine could be a source of assurance or alarm.

Pink girlhood was represented as soft, pure, impressionable, and pretty, but it was accompanied with trickery, mysteriousness, and volatility. In turn, pink womanhood was characterized in terms [Page 1105]of morality, emotionality, and nurturance, as well as seduction, manipulation, and secrecy. Physical attractiveness and beauty habits were crucial for both girls and women, and it was never too early to surround girls in pink accouterments (ribbons, ruffles, dresses, and jewelry). Pink also became popular from its connection with the iconic Barbie doll. Clothing and accessories for Barbie from the 1970s on were predominately pink, and a bright pink color came to be associated with the doll.

The color pink gained new momentum in the form of the pink breast cancer ribbon, established in 1992 as the symbol for breast cancer awareness. The pink ribbon easily conjured feminine imagery and discourse that was already prevalent in popular culture. Focusing on goodness, morality, and woman's domain in the private sphere, pink was used to evoke innocence, thereby rendering breast cancer a virtuous illness and a good cause.

Although women's health advocates successfully used the ribbon to promote awareness, October's National Breast Cancer Awareness Month became so closely identified with a feminized version of the cause that it is now commonly referred to as “Pinktober.” Pinktober is an array of awareness and advertising campaigns that encourage people to buy pink products, while it uses the color pink to reinforce idealized versions of survivorship that are steeped in feminine stereotypes.

The pinking of breast cancer has turned the illness into one of the most popular, and most advertised, causes in contemporary culture. As with other common advertising techniques, pink marketing capitilizes on the sexualization, objectification, and infantalization of women. From “Boobie-Thons” to T-shirts with statements such as, “Stop the War in My Rack”, these representations reduce women to their usefulness as sexual objects.

Pink ribbon ads for teddy bears, rubber duckies, M&Ms, and Barbie dolls suggest that femininity and adulthood are incompatible. And, many pink ribbon ads depict women in their proper domestic roles—cooking, cleaning, and satisfying the needs of others with pink kitchen aids, pink vacuum cleaners, pink cosmetics, and other feminine accessories. Pink advertising is part of an ongoing cultural project that draws upon and strengthens gender stereotypes for the purpose of selling products and ideas.