18 Things You Did Not Know About The Color Pink 😁

 Pinks - the flower (Dianthus)

Ok, maybe I should have said 18 things I did not know about the color pink. Last week I went for a nature walk through my neighborhood and, although this is something I have done several times before, I had not noticed the large variety of pink floral blooms before. I immediately became curious about the color pink :)

1. Pink gets its name from the flowers called pinks. They are flowering plants that are members of the genus Dianthus.
2. Pink is a pale red color - I know, you knew that:)
3. Pink is positively associated with love, beauty, charm, politeness, sensitivity, tenderness, sweetness, childhood, femininity, and the romantic.
4. Pink paired with white symbolizes youth, tenderness, and innocence.
5. When Pink is combined with violet or black, it is associated with eroticism and seduction.
6. Pink is often associated with the exotic.
7. Pink is sometimes associated with extravagance and a wish to be noticed.
8. Pink was first used as a color name in the late 17th century.
9. In most European languages, pink is called rose or rosa, after the rose flower.
10. The Japanese language has different words for the pink of cherry blossoms (sakura-iro), and peach blossoms (momo-iro). Recently the word pinku has also become popular.
11. The golden age of the color pink was the Rococo Period (1720–1777). This is a period where pastel colors became very fashionable in all the courts of Europe.
12. Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV of France, made pink and blue the leading fashion colors in the Court of Versailles.
13. In 19th century England, pink ribbons or pink decorations were often worn by young boys.
14. The 20th century ushered in the invention of chemical dyes which did not fade. As a result, pinks became bolder and brighter.
15. Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli  created a new variety of the color, called Shocking pink in 1931. She made it by mixing magenta with a small amount of white.
16. 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.
17. Sunsets and sunrises are sometimes pink because of an optical effect called Rayleigh scattering.
18. Pink was first established as a female gender signifier in the 1940s.