What's wrong with being Pink?

Written by Hira Sheikh

I have no problem in claiming that I am a person acutely against and irritated by stereotypes, it goes starkly against my moody individualistic norms and values. The color Pink is one of the objects that manifested these defined thoughts of Individualism from the beginning. How? I shall explain in due time.
Everyone’s special, they have their own contributions to make and no two existences are the same. I am so inclined towards breaking away from the norm that if someone asks me about a certain thing and I get the hint that I am being analyzed in a way to support a certain stereotype, I would go out of my way to make my answer confusing and unique. For example:
Q : What’s your favourite color?
A : Which sense do you mean it in? In dressing? In interiors? Natural existence?
Because, I like red and turquoise in dressing, orange in interiors, and I like raspberry pink in natural existence, you know that colour that you get when you squish a raspberry on a tissue paper, but then again I am a rather olfactory person so maybe I like the color only accompanied with the smell of a squished raspberry.
Confused? Hard to put in a stereotype isn’t it? Indecipherable?
So when I was asked to write for PINK, I knew what I had to do, I had to break the stereotype, I had to make sure that everyone takes this pink we have to offer.
I have loved the color pink since I was a little girl, it was the color of my first bicycle that I had to leave behind when we moved to Pakistan from Bahrain, naturally an unforgettable and unmatched object in my life at that point, and why was it so special, because it was PINK. That was before I developed the mindset that pink is a girly color (like everyone tends to thinks) and that it represents everything I don’t want to be. Since boys I played with back in Bahrain would not touch my Pink bike as if it was something contagious, I had to get along, I was lesser like girls, because I wanted to run like crazy all the time and had no patience for toy tea parties or doll-houses, I was not exactly like boys because “HELLO! You have a pink Bicycle, You can’t ride with us!”
I had to let go of PINK. As little it seems now, back then for me it wasn’t a small thing. It represented the earliest signs of trying to cope with stereotypes. Making a hard choice between having to bear tea parties (I naturally lacked the finesse), overcome my dolls phobia and giving up pink as a color for a bicycle and go for the shiny red one. Because of this stereotype that Pink represented and put me in the same line as to people I could not get along with due to another stereotype (girls).
I started to hate the color for a few years, until I realized that it was not the color I loathed but things associated with it and how people were inclined to think about a certain thing in a certain manner.
The point of my whole argument is, Pink color is not and should not be labeled as a stereotype. Pink is about individuality in all its aspects. No skin changes into a same shade of pink when blushing or feeling flattered. No lips are the same shade of pink when closed up together in amusement. Pink is a natural color, and thus Spontaneous. Synonymous with all sort of wrong things sadly, everyone fails to realize what a special color Pink is, it’s the color of celebration, happiness, Love, romance, delicacy, health, innocence, individuality and sensuality. Although majorly known as the feminine color, pink and its variations have been used in a lot of home fashion lately, which I personally think is a break in a mould. So on this platform let’s celebrate pink and all its positive aspects, away from its stereotypical representation. Let’s make it a color synonymous with flattery and health. Because everyone likes to be flattered and Loved. Everyone likes to be Pink!