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Millennial Pink is the Undeserved Heroine of 2017

Millennial pink isn’t a new color — it’s been in those beautiful, beautiful rosé bottles for years — but its recently found clout is something to pay attention to.

By Brandon PhenixPublished 6 years ago 2 min read
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Pink is, as we learned in third grade, a mixture of white and red. Two colors, beautiful in their own right, combined into something arguably even prettier. Millennial pink as a concept follows that rule of mixture: archaic gender roles, but given a forward-thinking twist.

Pink has traditionally been a color of femininity, and tangentially, weakness, demureness, and submission. Pink is regarded as a “girl’s color,” something boys shouldn’t go near, for fear they’ll catch cooties, or whatever it is misogynists think women have nowadays. Millennial pink is society’s answer to this — a color no longer forced onto women and girls, but rather a color chosen and embraced by them of their own volition.

Feminism has become an ideological octopus, wrapping its wonderfully slimy tentacles of equality around everything we know and love. To deny feminism’s relationship to millennial pink would be like denying how great Chick-fil-A tastes — you totally could, and you’d probably feel cool about it, but you’d be a dirty liar.

Millennial pink is a successful reclamation of what was formerly a tool of oppression (albeit it a minute and colorful one). This isn’t the color our mothers forced us to wear or our fathers urged us to stay away from. This is a color that everyone wears on their own terms, unafraid of its implications — it’s not that pink no longer connotes femininity, it’s that people are less and less afraid of femininity.

Millennials are constantly moving farther away from the rigid gender binary previous generations had more strictly enforced. I’m not saying that millennials are the only socially conscious or forward thinking ones, but there is a reason we aren’t seeing a rise in baby boomer orange.

Women, men, and people of every other available variety are incorporating millennial pink into their wardrobes. It’s not just a color, it’s a statement; both fashion-wise and socially.

When more people wear pink, less people will associate it with negative things. As millennial pink becomes increasingly popular, its hard connotations soften, and we are collectively offered an alternative to the old-fashioned gender roles that have so long been projected onto colors.

Millennial pink at first glance really does seem insignificant, like just another fashion trend, but seriously — millennial pink did not come to play, it came to slay, and it’s here to stay.

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