The rose gold iPhone has been so popular amongst men it's earned the nickname "bros' gold". Photo / Getty
Blue is for boys. Pink is for girls.
Or so we've always been told by toy stores, greeting card companies, and until last week, even technology product manufacturers.
When the new iPhone was released a few days ago, Apple was nice enough to loan me the new model.
As I excitedly opened the package I felt a wave of initial disappointment when I saw what was inside: a rose gold phone.
"It's pink!" I exclaimed to myself, feeling a strange sense of shame creeping in.
"I'm a man with a pink phone!"
As somebody who advocates gender role nonconformity, this was a conflicting feeling. I have no problem with other men wearing pink. I've had many a pink drink in my lifetime. I will jump at the chance to put on a pink ribbon in support of breast cancer sufferers. And of course, the colour pink has also historically been very important to the gay community.
But something about holding up a metallic pink phone to my head in public just irked me.
As it turns out, I have some serious re-evaluation to do concerning my connotations with gender-once-specific colours.
The rose gold iPhone is selling like strawberry-covered hotcakes worldwide, and it has been so popular amongst men it has earned the nickname "bros' gold".
The "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" cliché is a relatively recent idea in the grand scheme of things. It only emerged for the first time in the 1940s; led by commercial manufacturers who wanted to sell gender-specific clothing to parents of the children now known as Baby Boomers.
This post-war consumerist era, however, represented a backflip from conventional gender colours.
An example from 1918 found in Ladies' Home Journal explains pre-war colour traditions:
"The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."
There you have it. Until marketers turned the tables on us, pink represented strength and manliness. It seems, then, that the bros that lined up on Friday to get their hands on a pink phone are not actually progressive. They're traditionalists.
Babies aside, the colour blue shook off its gender-specific connotations long ago. Women have been wearing blue clothes and driving blue cars for decades and nobody has ever thought them "man-ish". Pink, however, has never been given a chance to thrive as a colour for all genders.
This likely comes down to two things. First, there's the internal sexism (from which homophobia also stems) that has plagued society throughout human history. Because woman were purportedly known as the weaker sex, any feminine traits (mannerisms, speech, job roles, modes of dress, etc.) were thought to make a person "lesser".
Secondly - and this is the only defence I can surmise as to my initial aversion to the rose gold iPhone - there's the aesthetic problem of pink. To many of us, it's not a visually pleasing colour to the eye. There's a reason car companies don't manufacture a lot of pink cars, or why pink isn't a popular colour to paint one's house. Pink, especially in abundance, can be hard to look at.
Apple is obviously trying to change that by marketing its rose gold product to the entire world, not just to teenage girls and Legally Blonde lookalikes. It seems to be working, too: the rose gold iPhones were reportedly the first to sell out with pre-orders.
Is this going to be the end of gender-favourable colours? Only time will tell.
There'll always be the argument that parents don't want their girl babies confused as boys, and their boy babies confused as girls, hence the need for a pink bow here and a blue romper suit there.
However, because gender-specific colours started off with marketing by corporates in a bid to make money, it makes sense that - in our age of equality and diversity - this can be undone by corporate marketing, too.
Until this bandwagon is jumped on by the pink-friendly Pepsis, Pradas, and Panasonics of the world, it's up to us men to reclaim pink and herald societal acceptance of it as a gender non-specific colour.
So if you see a guy on the street wearing pink shoes, carrying a pink bag, or tapping away on a pink phone, don't judge him for it. He's just trying to be the man most other guys are too scared to be.
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