From the acclaimed author of Blue and other color histories the beautifully illustrated story
of pink from the first ancient pigments to Barbie Pink has such powerful associations today
that it’s hard to imagine the color could ever have meant anything different. But it’s only
since the introduction of the Barbie doll in 1959 that pink has become decisively feminized.
Indeed in the eighteenth century pink was frequently masculine and the color has signified
many things beyond gender over the course of its long history—from the prim to the vulgar and
from the romantic to the eccentric. In this richly illustrated book Michel Pastoureau a
celebrated authority on the history of colors presents a fascinating visual social and
cultural history of pink in the West from antiquity to today. Pink pigments first appear in
ancient Macedonian paintings but it was not until the eighteenth century that vivid saturated
pinks were developed for dyeing and painting. At the same time a popular new flower—the pink
rose—finally gave the color a standard name and pink assuming a place in everyday life began
to acquire its own symbolism distinct from that of red yellow or white. Bringing the story
up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Pink describes how the color both adored and
detested became associated with many other things from softness and pleasure to nudity and
sex. Illustrated throughout with a wealth of captivating images Pink is an entertaining and
enlightening account of the evolving role and significance of the color in art fashion
literature religion science and everyday life across the millennia.
