Pink - The History of a Color

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