Why Pink

I counted them once. Not because I'd set out to count them, but because I was standing at the back of a hotel function room in Reading, holding a coffee that was too hot to drink and too sad to throw away, and I had to do something with my eyes.

Forty-eight men. White. Middle-aged. Blue shirt, or black shirt, or the shirt that is trying to be blue but has given up halfway and become grey. A few navy jumpers. One very brave beige. That was it. That was the room.

And then there was me, in a pink shirt.

People ask me, with genuine sincerity, why I wear pink. They ask it at conferences. They ask it in meetings. A woman called Janet once asked me in the queue at a Pret. I tend to mumble something and change the subject, because the real answer is long, and it involves cyanobacteria, and nobody wants cyanobacteria before lunch.

But I've been asked enough times now that I think I owe the world a proper reply. So here it is. The canonical one. Please link to it, and leave me be.

Reason one. I would like to be remembered.

I am a white middle-aged bearded man in technology. There are, at a conservative estimate, four hundred million of us, most of us are called Chris, and most of us have the same beard. If I stand in a room with forty-seven other blokes in blue shirts, I am, statistically speaking, interchangeable. The blue shirt is not a choice. It is a uniform. Tech has decided, quite without asking anyone, that more than half the top-100 tech brands should be medium-to-dark blue or black, and a lot of the men in the room have taken the hint and dressed to match the logos.

I looked up the proper term for what the shirt is doing. It turns out there isn't one that quite fits. Economists would call it a Schelling point, which is a nice phrase for a coordination signal. A thing that is cheap on day one and valuable because of a decade of consistency. You're not the pink one because pink is expensive. You're the pink one because you were the pink one last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and now when two people in a foyer are trying to find each other they say "look for Chris, he'll be the pink one" and it saves everybody a phone call.

I should mention, while we're here, that it isn't just the shirt. I have bright pink trousers as well. I have been known to pair the two. On a bold day, in full daylight, I have gone full pink from collar to ankle, which is a look that commits. If the shirt says "you'll remember me", the trousers say "you'll remember me, and you'll tell your spouse about it when you get home."

The socks are also pink, and this is the bit I am most proud of, because the socks are pink for a logistical reason rather than an aesthetic one. If every sock you own is the same colour, you never have to pair them. You just grab two. And when one of them develops a hole, you throw out one sock, not two. I worked this out some years ago and have not been pairing socks since. I consider it one of the great small victories of my adult life.

The complication, and there is always a complication, is that I wear a size thirteen. Pink socks in size thirteen, in a cut that does not cut off the circulation, do not exist at scale. So I bought several dozen pairs of good-quality white ones and dyed them myself. The same applied, later, to the jeans. There is, it turns out, not a mass market for pink jeans in a gentleman's fit, and so the gentleman has to take a pair of white Levi's and a bucket of dye and work it out on a Saturday afternoon. I will not pretend this was planned. I will pretend, to my wife, that it was.

If you meet me once, in a pink shirt, you will remember me. If you meet me twice, in a pink shirt, you will think, right, that's the pink one. And that, in a career built largely on people remembering to email me back, is worth the price of a slightly startled conversation with a woman called Janet in a Pret.

I should say, while I'm here, that this only works because the room is mostly blue. If the room ever goes pink I'll go beige, and I'll be sorry to see it.

Reason two. Pink is the oldest colour anyone has dug out of a rock.

This is the one nobody believes, which is why I enjoy it.

In 2018, a team led by Dr Nur Gueneli at the Australian National University extracted 1.1-billion-year-old pigment molecules from marine black shales in the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania. A billion, with a B. These molecules are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll, produced by tiny cyanobacteria that dominated the base of the food chain before animals had even been invented. Concentrated, they run blood-red to purple. Diluted, they fluoresce a bright, joyful pink.

I find this quite moving, to be fair.

Half a billion years before there were animals, half a billion years before there was anything that could be said to look at anything, there was pink. Pink was doing its work in the oceans while the rest of the colour wheel was still a rumour. If pink is good enough to predate animals, it's good enough for a conference lanyard in Reading.

Reason three. Pink isn't actually there.

I'll explain what I mean. The rainbow goes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. You've seen one. You know the order. What you may not have clocked, because nobody sits you down and tells you, is that there is no wavelength of light that produces magenta or pink. There's a gap. Red is at one end. Violet is at the other. They don't meet. Nothing lives in the space between them.

But your brain doesn't like the gap. So when your long-wavelength cones (the red ones) and your short-wavelength cones (the blue/violet ones) fire at the same time, with nothing coming from the green ones in the middle, your visual system just invents a colour. It says, right, I'll bridge those two ends by hallucinating something that isn't in the spectrum. And the something it invents is pink.

Pink is a colour the brain paints into a gap in the rainbow because the rainbow is embarrassing.

I walk around wearing a hue that doesn't technically exist. It is a hallucination everyone agrees to have at the same time. I find that rather lovely. And I find it even lovelier that nobody at the conference knows. They're just thinking, there's Chris in that shirt again.

Reason four. I have been lying to my wife for many years.

This is the bit I've been putting off.

The truth is, when we first met, she was the one who liked pink. I was the one going round in navy, like everyone else. At some point, and I cannot tell you exactly when, I started wearing a pink shirt. Then another one. Then, gradually, over about a decade, I somehow convinced her, with the quiet complicity of several friends and at least two members of her own family, that I had always been the pink one. That pink was, in fact, my thing. That she'd got into it because of me.

I would like to clear up, right now, in writing, that this is not true.

I want to be careful here. Real gaslighting is a pattern of behaviour, a form of domestic abuse, and I am not for a single second making light of what it does to people. What I am describing is a long-running affectionate family joke, conducted in full daylight, about a shirt. I would not want anyone to confuse the two.

Anyway. She knows. She's always known. She's letting me have it because she's a kind person and because, at this stage, the mythology has become load-bearing. If I ever admitted it out loud, a load of dinner parties would collapse.

So: I am confessing in print. She liked pink first. I am a fraud. The pink is hers. I am merely wearing it, badly, in her honour.

I am also, if I am being completely honest, relying quite heavily on the fact that she doesn't read my blog. If you know her, please don't send her a link. If you are her, hello, I was going to tell you over dinner, probably, at some point, once I'd worked out the running order.

Reason five. Pink was for boys first.

This is the one that gets people in the pub.

Up until about the 1950s, pink was considered the proper colour for a boy. It was a strong colour, a little version of red, suitable for a small lad. Blue was for girls. Something to do with the Virgin Mary, apparently. Professor Jo Paoletti, who wrote the book on this, puts it very plainly: pink-blue gender coding was known in the late 1860s but didn't become dominant until the 1950s, and wasn't universal until a generation after that. In June 1918, the Ladies' Home Journal told American mothers, in print, 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." That is the actual sentence. Someone wrote it. Someone agreed with it. Someone's granny cut it out and kept it.

Which means the idea that pink is girly is about seventy years old. It is younger than my mother. It is younger than the Queen Mother was when she opened most of the bridges in the north-east. It is, in the grand sweep of human history, a bit of a rumour that got out of hand.

So when a man wears pink, he isn't being subversive. He's being restorative. He's putting the shirt back where it belongs.

Most things people treat as permanent are about seventy years old and made up.

One last thing, before you go. Please do not all start wearing pink. I am saying this with love. Pink is my thing. I have put the hours in. I have a decade of photographic evidence and a drawer full of trousers that match nothing else in the house. If all of you turn up at the next conference in pink, the whole system breaks, and we are back to forty-nine interchangeable men, just pinker. Get your own colour. Teal is available. Mustard is having a moment. Someone needs to be brave about green.

Right. That's the answer. Please stop asking. I've got a conference in Reading next week and I need to iron the shirt. And the trousers.

(Views in this article are my own.)