Pink for girls and blue for boys – a potentially damaging stereotype hitting our supermarket shelves with more force than ever before, suggests lovefood’s Charlotte.
The 'pink plague'
‘Pinkification’: literally, colouring a product pink in an attempt to attract the female market; and metaphorically, the corporation-led imposition of heavily stereotyped values on unwitting girls. It’s mirrored by the ‘blueification’ of products for boys, and is a phenomenon which some say was introduced by American manufacturers in the 1940s.
The pinkification (or ‘genderisation’, if considering both sexes) of products begins at a very early age – try finding a non-pink celebration card for a new-born baby girl. For kids, it can affect the board games they play, the magnets they stick on the fridge, and even the Halloween costumes they might wear. And as a parent I imagine it’s near-impossible to avoid this so-called ‘pink plague’, especially when your little girl becomes ‘hooked’ on the colour before the age of three.
Kids v The World
But this, of course, is a food website, and we’re not here to debate the morality of pink prams. I’ve learnt to try and ignore genderisation until I have children of my own, by which point I will probably rally against it very loudly, like campaigners Emma and Abi are doing at pinkstinks.co.uk. However, when pinkification affects the food I eat, then I have a right to write about it.
A nasty (Kinder) surprise
You can imagine my anger – I was looking forward to unwrapping some kind of plastic safari animal, but was instead faced with making a humiliating decision based on my bodily parts. Not wanting to give money to such a lazy, stale campaign, I walked out of the shop sad and empty-handed.
It’s not just me. Trisha Lowther, founder of inspiring website Let Toys Be Toys which asks retailers to stop promoting boy-only and girl-only toys, told The Independent that she was “baffled” by the move made by manufacturers Ferrero UK, adding: “They’re going to alienate a large part of their potential customer base with this. We were really disappointed to hear they were launching in the UK.”
Have your say
There’s also an online petition to pull the (hopefully) limited edition eggs from stores, and instead return to the gender neutral toys that we all know and love. ‘The company should not be making products that perpetuate outdated stereotypes of girls,’ says Canadian Daria Mancino, who set up the petition. ‘A little girl should be accepted if she likes playing with cars or other toys that are typically for boys, and a boy should be able to dress up as a doll without being ridiculed.'. And to top it all off, there’s this spoof advert to enjoy, too.
In turn, a Ferrero spokesperson insisted that the company “does not advocate or promote our products as gender specific… Research prior to launch indicated that parents welcome this product, with 66 per cent saying it was a good idea.”
The Müller mistake
We’ve written about this issue before on lovefood, and I think it’s getting worse. But enough about me. What about you? Do you think pinkification is a problem? Or do you barely even notice it? Talk to us in the Comments box below.
You might also like
Should food be gender targeted?