In the Pink

coming up terrible. But I've noticed this time we have like five or six topics that we have planned to really plumb the depths of different aspects of Valentine's Day and to really attack it from four different fronts and just take it out. Ye, take it out, take it out. You know what we're talking about here. We're really going to get into Valentine's Day. We're going to dust it and put it away, and we're gonna start by exploring the color pink. Yes, because pink and red are the

predominant color scheme for Valentine's Day. It's the colors that just assault you come pretty much the end of January, maybe even right after Christmas. These days, you start seeing it popping up everywhere, trying to sell you that candy, try to sell you those flowers, try to sell you god knows what else, all in the name of this big commercial holiday. Yeah, I call it the pink menace. And I call it that for a couple of different reasons.

Some you know, the associations with Valentine's Day, which is the sort of treacle that we we cling to, these notions of idealized love and so on and so forth. But also because I just don't enjoy the color pink, and I never have. So you don't like looking at it, you don't like wearing it. It makes me feel unsettled. Okay, And this is something I'm going to point out. I think some of our female listeners will understand what I'm

talking about here. There is a certain hue of pink that you will find in a gynecologist office, and it's usually this kind of mauve pink hue that you find in literature about the reproductive system, or you even see in the models of the reproductive system. Okay, I know what you're talking about. That that that shade of pink. You also see on the translucent pages that go over

anatomical illustrations. You see it like nice and shiny there. Yeah, but you particularly will see it in a gynecologiest office. And I call it vegonna pink. And it's just it's just that kind of shade of pink. That's just it doesn't have a lot of verve to it. It's a bit of a depressing pink. And also I feel like I'm in the ganna coologist office. I don't necessarily need to be um, you know, walloped over the head with this color. I know what I'm there for, you know

what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean in our culture, pink has become this huge gender thing. It's become the color for females, right, It's become fetishized, I think. I mean, think about out pink diamonds, pink firearms, pink legos, which we'll talk about a little bit. Pink salt Does that count? Uh? I feel like that is the natural colored salt, right, hillily and salt, And it's very tasty. So I will put that to the side. Beautiful cracked over a freshly

baked pizza. Okay, So in this episode we're going to We're going to discuss pink. We're gonna talk about pink from a cultural and historic standpoint. We're gonna break down some of the science of pink and uh, you know, and at the end of it, we're gonna reach out to the rest of you and get your input on pink as a color, as a color that appears in her surroundings, is the color that we we take on on for ourselves. How do we feel about it and how does it make others feel? Yeah, I'd like to

read this quote from Elizabeth Camp. She's writing for a on magazine, and she says, pink matters because it is bound up with ways of being in the world that are partially aesthetic but also personal and political colors and code aesthetic norms that run straight through to style, personality, culture, and class. You know. Growing up, I feel that pink was never like a huge deal. Like I wasn't one of those kids that was raised with this idea like just beaten into you do not wear pink because pink

is a girl's color. But on the other hand, I don't remember having a lot of paint clothes, except perhaps around Easter, you know, where you would have to have dressed and sort of pastor pastel colors and go everybody goes to church, and you get this horrible picture made and it's you know, and your your your kid, it's it's kind of sunny out. You just all you want to do is get out of those church clothes, and then instead you have to stand around and stay in

them and and wait for everybody to get together. Yeah. So, so I have kind of those connotations with with pink and some of its pastel colors, not so much that it's I guess a little bit that it would that it is feminine as well, because you end up going to you know, two junior high and then it's it's the issue of gender is huge, to the point where I remember being made fun of because my legs weren't hairy enough and therefore it was a sign of femininity

and man was there, and I remember feeling bad about it, like, oh, I guess like I have to wear long pants all the time. So I was gonna talk to you about that. Um, but let me ask you this, does the color pink ever evoke associations with calmness or peacefulness? Well, I will say when it comes to pepto bismol. There is the there is the promise of possible peace with the color.

But with that I also have a strong memory of it was either me or one of my sisters taking pepto bismol for an unsettled stomach as a kid, and then vomiting it up against the wall and onto the floor. And the floor was white carpet, so he had a nice pink stain there from where someone had had vomited. Okay, well that ties in lovely to a color called drunk

tank pink. And why does a tie in so well, Well, it is a color that was used and actually I believe it's still used in some holding cells in jails. It's a bubblegum pink color. And think about a sort of maybe an unruly intoxicated person they're locked up, the cell they're put in, is that's drunk pink pink. What

are the effects? Well, the idea here is that the pink is going to have a calming effect, a soothing effect, because you have not a you know, necessarily a delightful TV drunk like otis on the Andy Griffith's Show, but rather somebody who might be a little a little violent, a little a little out of it and a little perturbed.

They've been apprehended and placed inside of a cell. So if there is a promise of potential calming from this color, in fact, if you have some studies that back this up as well, all the more reason to just throw a bunch of pink paint at the problem. And I hope that it's kind of a magic bullet, right, Yeah. Yeah, And this was discovered in n by psychologists who figure it out that this hue of pink could really calm people down, and they used it on buses, school buses.

They painted the seats pink, and they discovered that vandalism rates declined. Uh. Door to do door to door charity workers wore pink shirts in their donations rose threefold and um some some very clever football coaches even introduced the

color into locker rooms. Yeah, in particular, the visitors locker room at the University of Iowa was painted pink back in seventy nine, and it was it was heavily criticized for for being you know this this means of demoralizing and also trying to to to use colors to manipulate the effectiveness of your opponents. Um. One of the key individuals that pops up in these studies is Alexander Schauss,

and that's why you sometimes see the pink. This particular mode of pink referred to as shause pink, also known as Baker Miller pink, also known as passive pink, also known as p s which I like that because it sounds even more nefarious, like you're gonna use p six one eighteen against your enemies. Well, and that has sort of incarcerated sound to it as well. Right bring up the shouts is quoted as saying, even if a person tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink,

he can't. The heart muscles can't race fast enough. It's a tranquilizing color that SAPs your energy. Even the color bind are tranquilized by pink rooms. UM very much playing into this idea that it's it's it's like a vampire of colors. It's just SAPs your soul out of you. Um.

He He conducted a couple of different studies. The most notable one was posted in the final issue of Ortho Molecular Psychiatry in nineteen this when he took a hundred and fifty three healthy men exposed them to cardboard squares one of them blew one of them pink, And after a full minute of staring at these, they were asked to hold their arms out in front of their bodies, you know, like a like a like a horror movie zombie or mummy or something, and you know, and see

how long they could hold them out. And then their arms were put down. They were given a few seconds to recover, and then they did a second test, same thing, and he found all but two men were dramatically weaker after staring at the pink, while blue left the strength in the test intact in both the first and the second strength test. He ended up following this up in another study thirty eight men squeezing a measuring device, and again found found that they were weaker after exposure to

the pink. Now, the amount of time that you're exposed to the pink is really key here, because Adam Altar, who wrote the book Drunk Tank Pink, has said that there's pretty good evidence that over a nine month period, the very aggressive prisoners at a naval prison in Seattle were much better behaved when they emerged fifteen minutes after

being put in the pink drunk tank. After that fifteen minute exposure, if you go up to thirty minutes, you have the reverse effects of that calming suit and color. All of a sudden, that color becomes distracting, it becomes angering. Yeah, there's also the o this idea that you're you're tamping everything down, You're you're kind of repressing stuff, and it's going to eventually explode, Like paint cannot constrain the beastly

heart for too long, it cannot. The mary Kay of it all will just fall apart, and the beast within

all of us, even mary Kay, will emerge. So we were talking about this after we we looked at some of these studies, instantly thinking about the use of pink in sport and in physical combat, Like you would think you would see more usage of pink on the playing field um and and even on the battlefield UM in lieu with some of these colors, that it wouldn't just be a matter of all, let's paint the visitor locker room pink and hopes that will will mess with their head,

Like why not? Why not just full on pink uniforms and let your opponents try and play against that. You get a thirty minute advantage, right, and then they're gonna start to become aggressive. But maybe they'll be a little over aggressive. I don't know much about sports, but maybe it's like a judo thing where you know they're they're they're only ramping it up. Then you can adjust accordingly

and use their aggression against it. Well, we were also talking about Dennis Rodman, who were saying seems to have co opted a lot of the more uh, the more feminine aspects of of his dress and his portrayal of himself. I mean, just think about this guy. He's a big guy. He is um. You know, if I were to be a basketball player and met him on the court, I

might be like, wow, okay, this guy is formidable. But now think of Dennis Rodman wearing lipstick, or his hair is a very feminine color, or he's wearing makeup, and all of a sudden, it's like you're playing against a ground queen. And this becomes an entirely different proposition because now Dennis Rodman is playing with coda, with gender and

with hetero norms. And we know, and we'll talk about this more, that nothing could be more unsettling in a society that really ascribes to gender norms than someone crossing those boundaries and playing with it, and it becomes a bit of a threat. You're turning our established symbols and motifs on their head, and it's essentially playing mind games with me. Like, suddenly I have to do a whole lot of extra computing to make sense of you on the basketball court, whereas before you were just just a

big dude. And there I'm surrounded by big dudes. I'm a basketball player out there, I'm probably a big dude myself. But then this, this just throws everything in its head. Yeah. So what we're saying is make sports more interesting. Put the drag element in there. Yeah, RuPaul coaches, this is this is going to really amp up the psychological aspect of it. I would I mean, I say this a lot that I would be pretty much into any sport

if it could itself be more like pro wrestling. So in pro wrestling you see lots of craze, the outfits and face paint. If if you saw more crazy outfits and face paint and say professional basketball, I would be more tempted to watch. I would be there with you I gotta tell you now, one of the things that we talked about these archetypes, uh, that that you could turn your head, is this idea that women like pink.

It's completely ingrained, it's hardwired. And this, of course is an erroneous idea out there that women are inherently gravitating towards pink. And we start touched on this a bit, albeit indirectly, and when we did our episode on the color blue, because it turns out that most people prefer blue overall than any other color. That's right. I remember in that episode I mentioned that, UM that my son, uh,

my wife and I we UM. We didn't say, all right, here's blue, this is the boy's color, this is the one you should like, stay away from pink. But he ends up gravitating towards blue. Yeah. And I believe that study. I know it was a paint company that funded it, UM, but I want to say it was the thirty countries that they surveyed, and it was blue first, and then I believe it was green, and then yellow was maybe the last color that that people preferred or didn't prefer

very much. Pink didn't even make it onto that list, is my point. Um, So if you delve into this a little bit more, you'll see that there's a two thousand eleven study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, and they had one year old girls and boys that were shown pairs of identical objects like bracelets, pill boxes, and picture frames, but with one of those objects being

pink and the other being a second color. Now, they were no more likely to choose pink than any other color. But after the age of two, the girls started to like pink and buy four boys were determined in their rejection of pink. And the point of this is that it is not hardwired. It is a cultural script that kids began to sworb via all of the media around them, via the ways in which their parents may address them or direct them toward things. Plus, you're growing up in

an age of TV abundance. You're just constantly marketed to with products the pink for the girls, the blue or some of the color for the boys, and it's just just beaten down into your head. Um. That being said, it's weird to look back in my own childhood and having been raised very much in this age of just all the television you can stand uh and and then all the messages that are that they're on those airwaves. I distinctly remember Kinkishi muscle figures. I don't know if

you remember these at all. Um, they're like little a Japanese product. I remember correctly. Uh, And it was Knkisi in Japan and in the US it was muscle men um. And they were all these kind of wild, sort of pro wrestler characters, but they had like, you know, crazy animal heads or extra limbs. They were just elaborate comic book type characters. But they were all this They are all made out of this pink binda bowl material and there was nothing, you know, you just completely accepted that

they're pink. I guess they're kind of fleshy. I don't know. They were called muscle men. Yeah, the muscles and muscles are pink. We weren't called squishy non musli women. I guess maybe maybe that's the thing. Maybe there was a discussion where someone said, all right, uh, these these Knkichi guys are pretty cool, but if we're going to market him in the US, we need to name him something really mask go in to make up for the pink color.

I don't know, Yeah, that's some gender performance terms. They're like musclemen. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about the color pink and how it actually hung with the guys for a long time. All Right, we're back. We're talking about pink. We've already talked about some of the psychology of pink in the Science of pink. Uh. Now we're talking about ginger and pink and then specifically how

it's become coded into our culture, especially here in the West. Yeah, because we think about pink is just being squarely for girls and women, but in fact, um up until the nineteen hundreds, it was just as equally worn among men and women. In the seventeen hundreds too, you can you look back at old plates and you will see that men were just as likely to wear shades of lilac and pink as a woman. So what's interesting is you get to the nineteen hundreds and you get to children, right,

and this is where the coding begins. And largely in the early nineteen hundreds, you have white clothing for children, and the reason for that is because when they're very young, what do they do? They spill things all over themselves, the urinate on themselves. There's a lot of washing of clothes, and so you don't want dyes in there. But as the chemical process gets um a little bit easier for for clothes to retain die than you begin to see

more colors bring up in children's clothing. Okay, so we go from basically not having colors for the children and now we have them. So yeah, suddenly colors are in play for the the young children. And uh, it's left to the fashion authorities to tell you what colors you

should dress. Here are your children in? And uh, interestingly enough, since there's not an established culture of pink for girls blue for boys, and in fact, pink is historically had been used by men and it had been a masculine color. In many instances you saw advice such as the following from a June article in the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants department said, the generally accepted rule is pink for boys

and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl. The complete reversal of of what ends up becoming the gender color standard, right, because pink is associated with red, and red is a more virile, sanguine color, like the color of blood. It's robust. Indeed, I mean you're familiar with the Game of Thrones, Yes

I am. You know House Bolton, of course, yes, vicious, vicious House. Their their sickle is the flayed man. And the colors of that signal red and pink. That's the colors of taking a person's skin off. I was just about to say that's what you would find, right, little pink, little red. Now it didn't. The color of pink didn't become co opted for women until after World War Two. Now think about this, this is important. During World War Two,

you have Rosie the Riveter. You have a pretty stark reversal of gender roles, right because you have now women that are in factories and they are working and they are making income because the men are having to go

overseas and fight in the war exactly. So what happens after that is men return, and then there's this really intense movement for heteronormatizing the gender roles, for essentially putting women back in their place and You see that in the fashion the day, right, because you see post World War two, Um, no longer is Rosie wearing her dungarees, right, her blue dungarees. You see women in ads with nipped in waiste and they're wearing a lot of pink and

a lot of product plays coming in. You see a lot of shades of pink and the products that are being offered, and the message is that the woman's house is her demain. So it's no longer like Rosie the riveter. It's more like tend to your roses. Yea. And instead of and instead of working on the machinery, suddenly you have the benefit all of all this new futuristic machinery that's coming into your kitchen and into your household for

you to utilize in your traditional feminine role in the house. Yeah, and hey, why not get some of that stuff in the shade of pink, especially new beauty products too. Right, you've got a pink brush to come on your hair on times a day. Um. Now, in the seventies, you do see pink taking a backseat, and some of that is because of the more feminist oriented ideas that colors

should be unisex um. But then the big eighties return, and with the eighties neon colors fuchia, and you see pink kind of trickling in again as a hyper gender performing color. Yeah, because on one hand, you get the idea that you know what, well, you know, women can be scientists. Of course, women can have all these different roles in society. But not only are they strong enough to do that, they're strong enough to wear pink if

they want to. Yeah. Yes, But I think I feel like some of this was really just a marketing juggernaut. And we've seen those you know of late and say legos, because no longer is that just you know, here's these primary colored legos. Now you have more girly hues of legos and pink and purple and other pastels that are

being marketed. It's pretty brilliant, is now. If you have a two child family, two different genders, you don't have just one set of legos, you have to Yeah, and the same thing with like an easy bake oven type devices.

I've seen those where you have the existing one, which is generally some sort of a pink kind of color scheme, and you just change it to black or blue or something or black and green and get a boy to cook a little gross things in it, right, and then it's uh, it's marketed to to those those gender stereotypes. Side note, my daughter got an easy bake oven for Christmas purple and pink, I gotta tell you, although they come in different colors, and uh, the pizza is disgusting,

I've not like. I didn't think I'd ever met a pizza I didn't like, and I really I had to spit it out into the trash can. I don't know what they're using in that mix. Also worth noting in this whole uh nineteen eighties reconfusion of pink is that you also see paint being lives as a as in fashions for men, but it's oftentimes kind of wrapped in this this way of thinking, like he is so masculine, he's wearing pink. He doesn't even care. That's how masculine

he is. I feel like that's what happened with purple. Remember the purple tie craze and purple shirt craze happening in the minnow sphere. Yeah, that was like the I don't I want to say, like, for some reason, why is this in my head? We just felled and like ussered this and anyway, like over the past five years, it was like, yes, we're in purple. We're doing it with style and masculinity, which is totally fine with me. I just think it's interesting to see colors genderized like that.

But then I feel like a lot of that kind of gets back to this whole idea of again what the color represents, and this idea of children and pink and little girls or sugar and spice and everything nice, you know, and and boys or was it puppy tails, dogtails and yes, snail tails gross thinks slimy things. Yeah, and then pink it becomes this sort of confectionery color, right,

and girls are like cupcakes. And not to take this too far afield, but what happens when you transform a girl into everything nice and she's all delicious spice, and she's a cupcake. It's a lot easier to walk that kid into objectification. The older she gets. She's something to be consumed or to be you know, looked at. Yeah, she's something unnatural, something manufactured for consumption. And it's really

weird place to wind up as a culture. Uh. If I can return to pro wrestling for just one second, of course, it can always For the last time in this episode, I do want to point out Breadth the hitman. Heart, one of the the icons of pro wrestling, always wore pink like. Sometimes it was very pink like, predominantly pink his outfit. Other times it would be like a pink and black type of setting. And a lot of times he was a guy. Sometimes he was a bad guy.

But it never played into any kind like. He never did any kind of effeminine character like. It was never playing into feminine pink. It was just his last name is Heart and Valentine's days pink, So he just wore pink so well. And if we've learned anything from David Eagelman, we know that the unconscious is really at or care right, So if you're named Heart, maybe you would say, ah, yes, hearts are pink and red. And I assume that role for myself. Yeah, I don't know. Um, I'm gonna go

back to camp Um. In her article and and On real quick and UM, I'm gonna read this quote, she says the exclusion of boys from a wide range of perfectly viable, even important forms of dress and play because of their association with femininity is bad enough, but in a patriarchal society, the confinement of girls to a limited

set of permissible ways of being is considerably worse. In particular, there is empirical evidence, such as the research from the University of Michigan, to suggest that highly gendered clothing can serve as a trigger for something called stereotype threat, meaning that girls and women end up performing worse than they could on test of stereotypically male abilities such as mathematics

and engineering. Now, um, I know that stuff Mom never told you has talked about stereotype threat quite a bit in particularly in the fields of stem science, technology, engineering, and math. But this is all part and parcel, this idea that you're performing gender, you're doing via color, via the things that you wear. And if girls are bad at math, as Barbie once said, when you pulled a chord on her um, then they're primed to be bad at math. And that's why all of this matters, All

this sort of symbolism. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it really gets down to symbolism. And I'll make sure to link to our previous episode on the power of symbols on the landing page for this episode at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com because a lot of the same energy as at work. We establish all these meanings for these symbols and then also just the colors of themselves, and then our brain is interacting with those symbols at

at a subconscious level. I mean, they're really controlling, especially when you look at Victoria's Secret Okay, which we're going to talk about in the next episode too. Um, if you look at something called Pink Nation, which is a range of underwear for tweens, and it's like this crazy you know, Futia Pink Feller thing, and it's like these thongs and stuff like that, you know, it's like it's it's unsettling because you do see that you see all of this stuff being uh codified and put out there

and consumed by the general public. And so you know, again going back to David Eagleman, so much of this is working on an unconscious level. You know. There's an article in The Atlantic definitely worth checking out titled will a major sports team everwhere pink? That I found pretty interesting. It does point that in the nineteenth century, uh, you did see uh pin State uh deciding on pink and black for the schools and therefore the football team's colors,

and they later changed it to blue and white. But for the most part, you do not see pink in any kind of major usage with a with a major sports team, except during October or Pink Cober as it's become branded. Where pink, of course, is the color that has been taken on by the breast cancer awareness groups, and to help promote that cause, you'll see sports teams

adding some pink to their to their outfits, wearing pink bands. Uh. In wrestling, sorry, I came back to one more time, they'll add like a pink rope, you know, and then wrestlers will have like pink have have pink outfits that normally they wouldn't have the pink color scheme, and all that actually just serves to cement the idea that pink is a feminine color and if a male is to wear it, then he's just doing it out of a show of strength and bravery, uh, you know, for his

his female counterparts, although breast cancer does effect men too, albeit none at the same rates. Um. Yeah, it's interesting that that it is then used so effectively in that campaign because it's not a color that's uh, that's sort of a boring color. It's really captures your attention, and so it is put to good use in that campaign, and as you say, it's some further cements the idea

that it's genderized. And then there's this additional idea that maybe there's a pink pride going on, you know, via the pink lego set, Like maybe it's a hey, well, girls can be engineers too, and they you know, we'll just put some pink on it and encourage them to do it. But in my mind, I don't know why you would have to associate pride with it. Uh, Why wouldn't you just encourage the child to play with whatever the engineering building block set in the first place in

a very non gendered way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean unless it's you know, the point where they're already completely control by the symbols in place. Yeah, and then you know, my daughter certainly went through a brief pink phase, and I would say that she's pretty well balanced in whatever. You would say that the colors of that symbolize being a girl and a boy. And she was j from Ninjago for Halloween. She she was so excited to be

the blue ninja. UM, So I have hopes there because you know, we've tried to tell her that this is these sorts of things are available to you no matter what your gender is. Is there a pink ninjago. There is not a pink ninjaga. There is uh Nia who is um. She's not a ninja, she's a samurai. Um. And so she's a bit apart from the rest of the ninja. But you know she's a character on there. But that my daughter is not interested in her. She's

interested in Jay. No. She was red the question that we have about pink, and we're not trying to um blow your mind. No, I was gonna say, we're not trying to whittle pink down to nothing. But the question that comes up is does pink even exist? Which is kind of not a fair question, but we'll go ahead and ask you right it. I mean it definitely made the rounds. Uh, this particular headline because at surface level it's just nice and mind blowing and makes you really

love science. Uh. If you're the type of person who loves science without reading beyond the headline, um, then then yeah, you just think, whoa pink doesn't exist? I see it, but it doesn't exist. That's blowing my mind. That's like, you know, but but when you actually get into it, it's a bit more complex than that. And but it's also a bit more mind blowing than that when you start talking about how we perceive colors and ultimately how

we perceive the details of what we take to be reality. Yeah, I mean, here's the simplest way to say this is that, um, there is no single wavelength of visible light that appears pink. So think of Roy jeep it right, your red, your orange, yellow, green, blue, and to go and buy it. That is all the visible spectrum of light. There is no pink within it. Yeah, we don't see pink wavelengths of light. Something looks pink because certain wavelengths of light are reflected and others are

absorbed by the pigments. Pink is a reflective color, not a transmissive color. You perceive it because your brain translates light bouncing off of the pink object. And moreover, it's a bit of color mixing by your brain. So consider this. At the back of your eyeball, specifically on your retina, you have a bunch of rod and cones. Now, rods are just all interested in the amount of light that's coming in, right, they're light sensitive, and colins, on the

other hand, are all interested in color. But the cones come in only three types, red, green, and blue sensitive. So what's a pink to do? Well? There has to be some color mixing by those cones. So if you think about it, you have blue cones working with green cones to produce scion, and then they work with red cones to produce the color magenta. Now, if you want a true pink, then you have to have, um, those cones firing just partially, those um, those blue and green

ones firing partially, but the red ones fully firing. And that's when you get a bit of you know, messaging to your brain. Hey, we've mixed this together, and that's pink that you're looking at right now, which is kind of mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean to throw a little more context to um. When you see white, that means all the cones are activated. Black, none of the cones are activated. And if you want to see gray, that's all three cones activated, but only partially. So similar

in a way to pink. So you think of gray and pink in similar terms. Yeah, I mean same if you look at a yellow banana, right, Um, your eyelax yellow sensitive cones. So then the yellow of that banana activates your red and green cones and they fire together and then they send a message to your brain. So it really is like having a little artist in your brain there, But ultimately it's it's all kind of like having a little artist in your brain in a sense.

Something I don't want to feed into the idea that we're just brains, uh in a body or a ride around a horse. We've talked about the mind body connection plenty of times, but essentially blind brain depending on these uh, these feeble side organs to relay information to it and convince it what the outside world consists of. Yeah and uh.

In a Scientific American blog entitled stop this absurd Warm Pink, the author explains that photons and neurons interplanning with cones in the eye and the perception of the brain area is pretty much a magic trick. That any color is on her head. And this is from the article. It says, pink is real or it is not, but it's just as real or not real as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. So, in other words, probably shouldn't, you know,

quibble about whether or not pink exists. But a lot of people were really quick to dismiss it and uh and gast it aside and use this against pink. They are, And you know, I'm tempted to I'm not a fan of pink, but hey, it's there, it's around, it's it's peppt alebismal right, it's it's in the color code. Do you think some people might have leaped to this as well because they identify pink as a feminine color and would therefore see this as an attack on on the

female gender. And I mean, I suppose you could choose a subtext like that out of it and say it's so weak it doesn't even exist pink. Yeah, or maybe they have, maybe they have some sort of agenda against other um groups out there, or maybe against just Bret Hart in general. I don't know. I think it is the Bret Hart conspiracy. Yeah, all right, So there you go.

There's our exploration of pink, and hopefully this episode itself was what was in the pink was pink in the sense that just exactly the way we we meant to h do it. That's right, because the at them all and you have in the pink. Originally in that like the top of something like you know, it's in the pink at the top of its class, but then later on it began to take on associations with good health. Yeah,

I was reading that it's possible that it had. It also ties into fox hunting jackets as well, which were more red. Right, but again the associations between red and pink. There's Bolton territory where it's the colors of tearing something apart, so it would be you know, in keeping with Wow.

That was nice that that brought it full circle. Hey, in the meantime, if you want to catch up on other episodes we've recorded, if you want to check out the landing page for this episode and check out the links also include some links to some of these outside sources we've been talking about. Go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is our mothership. You'll find all the podcast, all the blog post, all the videos, links oide to our social media accounts, anything you could desire.

And if you have pink hued thoughts that you would like to share with us, we would love to hear them. You can send them to Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on Thiss and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.