Let's talk about PINK.
And a little history lesson on cherry blossoms.
Happy spring! Here in D.C., the blooming cherry blossoms are synonymous with the season. The Cherry Blossom Festival would’ve been this weekend, commemorating the anniversary of March 27, 1912, when the mayor of Tokyo gifted the District the trees. If you’re unfamiliar, I recommend reading more about the history of the gift, which includes a decades-long campaign by the first woman to sit on the board of trustees of the National Geographic Society, the Japanese scientist who discovered adrenaline, and the burning of the original trees sent in 1910, which were full of aggressive pests. Yeah, dramatic.
The National Park service has a handy field guide to the different types of cherry trees and their corresponding hues. The color the internet has agreed upon as “cherry blossom pink,” a light red-pink, is the color of the Akebono Cherry, which accounts for only 3% of the trees in the park, and the Kwanzan, which represents about 13%. Approximately 70% of the trees are the Yoshino variety, which have white blossoms. Despite the density disparity, pink has become the representative color of the season.
I learned in The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair that fuchsia and amaranth are two other shades of pink named for blossoms. Fuchsia is a bright blue-based pink and purple flower named for 16th century Bavarian physician Leonhard Fuchs, who created a garden representing as many varieties of plants as he could get his hands on from all over the world. He eventually wrote a book describing over 500 plants, having them illustrated and giving them names along the way. Fuchs never saw the fuchsia flower, which was named by botanist Pere Charles Plumier in his honor in 1703.
Amaranth is a dark raspberry pink named for a flower that can grow anywhere, but was especially meaningful to the late Aztecs. The Catholic Spanish colonizers of Mexico tried to stamp out the flower; they didn’t like that it was used in a dough mixed with blood as part of an Aztec ritual (but the blood of Christ is chill? Ok, guys…) But a single seed head can contain up to half a million seeds, so the flower (and its association with the divine) never died.
Last week I talked about shocking pink, the color coined by Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937. But according to St. Clair, she discovered the color from one of her most infamous clients, Daisy Fellowes, the French-American heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune who wore a bright pink 17.47-carat Cartier diamond to a fitting with Schiaparelli. “The color flashed in front of my eyes,” she wrote of the color in her autobiography. “Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming life giving, like all the lights and the birds and the fish in the world together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West—a shocking color, pure and undiluted.”
Fast-forward a few decades to 1979, when Professor Alexander Schauss announced he had found a way of making people less aggressive. The answer was a pale pink that, in testing, seemed to diminish the aggression and strength of test subjects who stared at the color compared to staring at a dark blue. Two Navel officers intrigued by this discovery, Gene Baker and Ron Miller, tested turning holding cells for prisoners the Pepto-Bismol shade, and sure enough, incidents of violence in the prison dropped. Professor Schauss named the color after the officers as part of his PR campaign to popularize his findings. The color is also known as “drunk-tank pink” for its use in small-town jails across America.
There are so many more pinks of note: Barbie pink, millennial pink, and ballet pink all deserve attention. But we’ll end tonight with fluorescent pink. St. Clair says that neon colors were the hot new thing in the 1970s, especially in the British punk movement. The color was used in lettering for defining albums of the time, including the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album, which was designed by Jamie Reid in 1977. A slightly less saturated version can be found in your pink highlighters.
I hope y’all enjoyed this dive into pink as much as I did! If you want to learn more about color for yourself, I highly recommend The Secret Lives of Color. My friend Susanna Merrick, who uses color as a healing modality in her personal styling practice, suggested the book to me, and I’ve found it to be a fascinating jaunt through history.
Is there a color to which you’d like me to dedicate a newsletter? Reply and let me know!
Until next week,
Elizabeth
This newsletter is just one facet of Zhuzh, my platform dedicated to conscious consumption and making space for delight. I offer secondhand-and-vintage-based wardrobe and interior styling services, art curation, and super chill life coaching. Keep up with me on Instagram and learn more at www.zhuzhlife.com.