A warm welcome, fellow Earth Tribers!
I am so excited to have you all here. I am always creating long essay-type posts on Instagram, and so I thought — why not create my own newsletter? A space for me to ramble on, share thoughts, and connect more deeply with all of you beautiful humans.
Last week, I opened up an interesting conversation around colours, clothing, and gender in our society — and whether we have truly shifted our thinking away from these old frameworks.
As a mom of two boys, I’ve found the clothing options for them to be incredibly limiting. Recently, I’ve started looking in the girls’ section for softer colours and cuter, more whimsical pieces. This may feel controversial to some, as though I’m trying to “unmake” them boys, and so I started digging deeper into where these ideas around colour and gender actually came from.
Before the 1900s, many children — regardless of gender — wore white because it was practical and easy to bleach. When colours for children’s clothing became more common in the early 1900s, pink and red were actually associated with masculinity, while blue was seen as feminine.
How interesting is that?
Over time, men went to war wearing blue uniforms, and the colour slowly became tied to masculinity. Retail and fashion industries then pushed pink as a feminine colour to market women’s fashion more effectively. By the 1950s, “pink for girls” and “blue for boys” had become firmly established in retail culture.
At its core, this was a marketing strategy — one designed to encourage families to buy more separate, gender-specific items rather than sharing neutral clothing between children.
Fast forward to today, and we still see this everywhere. Blue is heavily marketed toward boys, while pink is marketed toward girls. It’s still seen as “controversial” for boys to wear pink or anything considered “pretty,” such as flowers, bunnies, rainbows, or butterflies.
But why?
I want to bring awareness to this so we can become more conscious of the society we are creating — and how we, as consumers, continue to reinforce it.
It should not be controversial for boys to wear clothing with flowers, insects, bunnies, or soft colours.
And it should not be controversial for girls to wear dinosaurs, vehicles, camping themes, sharks, or mud-covered adventure outfits.
These are social constructs that we have created as a society.
Children should be allowed to express themselves freely and enjoy being CHILDREN.
The whole world is their oyster, and we should not be placing limitations on them from such a young age. They should be allowed to explore every colour, every texture, every interest, and every form of expression without our limiting beliefs being projected onto them.
This is how we raise a future generation that is open-minded, diverse, accepting, emotionally healthy, and kind.
So yes — you absolutely will see my two beautiful boys in tutu skirts, flowers, bunnies, soft colours, and all the whimsical magic they are drawn to.
I will continue giving them the freedom to try everything and anything.
And I hope that as parents, caregivers, educators, or simply people who interact closely with children, we all begin questioning where our belief systems come from — and how many of them have been shaped by industries whose primary goal is simply to sell us more things.
Thank you for coming to my mini TED Talk.
I truly appreciate every single one of you who chose to read my very first newsletter.
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