As many colour historians have documented, pink wasn’t always the colour of sugar and spice and all things nice in the West. The colour’s first gender affiliation was with boys.

From as early as the 13^th century, the Christ child was depicted swathed in rosy fabric. By the 19^th century, little boys were decorated with blush ribbons. Seen then as simply smaller versions of grown men, pink was considered a lighter, diminutive incarnation of the warrior-like red worn by English soldiers. And, of course, the blue of the Virgin Mary – created by painters using the most exotic and luxurious pigment of Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli – became the colour associated with girls and women; considered, for a long time, the ‘daintier’ shade. Even Disney princesses, the girliest of girls, are dressed in blue.

When the Edwardian sailor suit came into fashion for boys, the colour preferences for children were inverted, but the gender divides between pink and blue were never set in stone, as they seem to be today.

It was the invention of chemical dyes that really gained pink a reputation as a female colour. And in 1947, surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduced her own shade of pink, a hot, fierce magenta which she called ‘shocking pink’. This, as its name suggests, was a rebellious out-there shade for the confident woman. Nobody wearing shocking pink was going to be ignored.

Millennial pink is the colour of the moment and it’s redefining femininity