Pink vs. Blue.

Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon is famous for his The Pink & Blue Project started in 2005. The main idea of the project concerns the issues of trends and preferences of children and their parents. Yoon takes pictures of children who are obsessed with pink and blue stuff. The project was initiated by Yoon’s daughter who in fact wants to wear pink dresses only. Moreover she is obsessed with pink toys as well. But it turned out that not only Yoon’s daughter had such an obsession. Many children all around the world prefer pink and blue color to others. In fact it doesn’t matter to what community or ethnic group a kid belongs to. This trend is widespread and common for many countries. Why so? Probably it is an influence of advertisements, or pop culture. As the rule children watch the same cartoons and movies, they read the same fairy tales all around the world. Barbies, Hello Kitties, Harry Potter and other cultural artifacts are common and well known to many children regardless their nationalities.

Strangely enough but the situation was completely different at the very beginning of the 20th century. Thus in 1914 The Sunday Sentinel recommended “to use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention”. Pink became associated with girls and blue – with boys after World War II.

JeongMee Yoon is sure that people are forced to buy blue objects for boys and pink for girls. We are simply manipulated by advertisements, cultural and social expectations. It means that girl’s world is connected to fashion, dresses, dolls, make up. As for the boy’s world then it is inseparably associated with robots, cars, technologies, science and other boy’s stuff. Yoon tends to think that “these kind of divided guidelines for the two genders deeply affect children’s gender group identification and social learning”.

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