When parents bring their newborns into our baby photography studio, they are dressed in a wide variety of outfits. Many of these are novel and certainly don’t fit stereotypes, but others may go for traditional colours, such as blue for boys and pink for girls.

If you have a baby daughter, you may be entirely happy with pink, but there are some who hold a very contrarian position on this.

As Yahoo Life reports, the gendered stereotype when it comes to colours is not something everyone goes for, and perhaps with good reason. It quoted an observation by children’s fashion designer Beya Made that old pictures from 1919 of her grandparents showed boys and girls dressed the same way, all in white.  

“Pink for girls and blue for boys is a relatively new marketing scheme, pushed by manufacturers who wanted to double their revenue, “she remarked, suggesting this has only applied for around 50 years.

This raises the age-old nature v nurture question: Is the liking for pink among girls a matter of nurture (driven by cultural and economic factors) or nature (a natural liking for things at the pink-red end of the spectrum)?

Advocates of the ‘nature’ argument rely on arguments that among our distant ancestors, women gathered berries while men hunted, although how that would apply to blueberries is not clear. Nonetheless, there have been some studies that appear to show women tend to lean more towards pinks and reds than men.

Whichever of these explanations you believe, it is still entirely up to you what colours you dress your children in, either in everyday settings or when you have them photographed. 

After all, what would you do if you wanted your son photographing in the colours of your favourite football team and their home colours are pink? That doesn’t apply to any English teams now, but it used to – for instance, Grimsby Town’s pink third kit pays homage to the colours they wore in the 1900s, while in Italy, Palermo still play in pink now. 

So, if you want your baby son photographed in pink or your daughter in blue, you should feel entirely free to do so.