• @ShaggySnacks
    link
    English
    31 month ago

    Pink and blue only became gender coded because corporations wanted to sell more merchandise.

    “In America by the 1890s and the early 20th century, manufacturers attempted to sell more children’s and infants’ clothes by color-coding them,” she said. Some manufacturers branded pink for boys and blue for girls, and vice versa.

    Until then, everyone wore blue and pink.

    “If you look back, little boys in the 18th century wore blue and pink, and grown-up men wore blue and pink, and ladies and little girls wore blue and pink,” Steele said.

    The complicated gender history of pink

    Purple is a wicked color because it’s the color of royalty.

    Tyrian Purple was associated with the rank of royalty in the ancient civilisations of Rome, Japan, Persia, Egypt and Constantinople, dating back as far as the 16th century BC. But how did it come to be the stamp of everything imperial? For a start, purple was first sourced in Phoenicia (the name translates as ‘purple land’), an ancient city located in modern-day Lebanon. Producing purple dye was a laborious process – and was subsequently expensive – though the method of extracting it was less glamorous. The dye stemmed from the foul-smelling mucous gland of a marine mollusk. As a result, the term purple owes itself to the Latin word for a purple shellfish, ‘purpura’. A time-consuming process saw these sea snails dried and boiled to make Tyrian dye – many of the creatures were needed to dye even a small segment of fabric, but the benefits meant that the intensity of the colour was long-lasting and not prone to fade.

    Purple: an enchanting pigment reserved for royals and rulers