The Weight of Pink

I used to hate it. I mean, really hate it. When I was a kid, everything “for girls” was pink: clothes, dolls with frilly dresses, little makeup kits. It was like the world had already decided who I was supposed to be before I got a chance to say otherwise. I remember breaking every pink pencil in my case, snapping them so I wouldn’t have to use them again.

Where I grew up, that didn’t stop when you got older. There was a “girl prize” for the hunting season. Pink hard hats. Pink work boots. Pink fishing rods. Pink tool sets. For some reason, women always needed their own version of the real thing, like a neon label that said, “Look, a woman’s doing this.” It’s like a highlighter moving across the job site, saying, “No one thinks I should be here, but here I am.”

"If pain is beauty, I'm a pretty bitch" by Kezleigh

Meanwhile, the men in my family wouldn’t be caught dead wearing pink. Not a shirt, not a hat, not even a stripe. Pink is off-limits, a line they wouldn’t cross. And that’s the thing, it wasn’t about colour. It was about the rules they learned long before they could name them. Rules about what strength looks like, what a “real man” is supposed to be. Toxic masculinity doesn’t just cage women; of course, it cages men, too. Interestingly, my audience is mostly women, and looking at my analytics, my pink work has a sharper decline in male viewership compared to the rest of my work. 

It’s wild how a colour can carry so much pressure. 

"Policing my joy" by Kezleigh

And then there was pink in pop culture: Paris Hilton’s pink, the sparkly, glossy, frivolous “that’s hot” kind. For years, I wanted nothing to do with that world. I saw it as everything I wasn’t: polished, superficial, weak? But now, looking back, I see how brilliant it was. Paris turned a colour that people used to dismiss into a global brand of power, identity, and control. She built an empire out of the very thing women are often mocked for. I respect that deeply.

"To hold too tightly to what's in your hands or in your chest" by Kezleigh (Please inquire)

For a long time, I thought rejecting pink meant rejecting all that came with it. I wanted to belong to something with more to say. But maybe even then, I knew pink had a kind of power. It’s not weak, it’s loud, emotional, contradictory. It evoked a response, even if that response was discomfort.

Kezleigh with "Stones". One of her very first printed pieces. (sold)

Years later, when I began working professionally, pink returned on its own. Its recurrence made me recognize something fundamental: artists tend to work with what they want to understand more. Pink became less a preference and more a site of inquiry, a way of examining the cultural narratives associated with it.

Culturally, pink has been everything at once, dismissed as frivolous, reclaimed as radical, mocked, adored, politicized. When I use pink now, I’m tapping into that lineage. I’m using a colour that carries history and tension, as well as softness and force. It’s no longer something done to me; it’s something I command. And maybe, by working with it this way, I’m shifting what people expect pink to mean.