[5] According to surveys in Europe and the United States, pink is the color most often associated with charm, politeness, sensitivity, tenderness, sweetness, childhood, femininity, and romance.

The verb "to pink" dates from the 14th century and means "to decorate with a perforated or punched pattern" (possibly from German picken, "to peck").

[9] It has survived to the current day in pinking shears, hand-held scissors that cut a zig-zagged line to prevent fraying.

In the Odyssey, written in approximately 800 BCE, Homer wrote "Then, when the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn appeared..."[10] Roman poets also described the color.

And when these two pigments have been thoroughly mulled together (that is, two parts cinabrese and the third white), make little loaves of them like half walnuts and leave them to dry.

The journalists and critics of the time, seeking to know Mexican designer Ramón Valdiosera's inspiration, asked him about the origin of the color.

The pioneer in the creation of the new wave of pinks was the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), who was aligned with the artists of the surrealist movement, including Jean Cocteau.

[15] In 1931 she created a new variety of the color, called shocking pink, made by mixing magenta with a small amount of white.

She launched a perfume called Shocking, sold in a bottle in the shape of a woman's torso, said to be modelled on that of Mae West.

But stores nonetheless found that people were increasingly choosing to buy pink for girls, and blue for boys, until this became an accepted norm in the 1940s.

[26][27][28][29] As a ray of white sunlight travels through the atmosphere, some of the colors are scattered out of the beam by air molecules and airborne particles.

Colors with a shorter wavelength, such as blue and green, scatter more strongly, and are removed from the light that finally reaches the eye.

[30] At sunrise and sunset, when the path of the sunlight through the atmosphere to the eye is longest, the blue and green components are removed almost completely, leaving the longer wavelength orange, red and pink light.

The remaining pinkish sunlight can also be scattered by cloud droplets and other relatively large particles, which give the sky above the horizon a pink or reddish glow.

[31] Raw beef is red, because the muscles of vertebrate animals, such as cows and pigs, contain a protein called myoglobin, which binds oxygen and iron atoms.

When beef is cooked, the myoglobin proteins undergo oxidation, and gradually turn from red to pink to brown; that is, from rare to medium to well-done.

Traditional hams, such as prosciutto, are made by taking the hind leg or thigh of a pig, covering it with sea salt, which removes the moisture content, and then letting it dry or cure for as long as two years.

Thomas Jenner's A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing (1652) categorises "Pink & blew bice" amongst the greens (p.  38),[33] and specifies several admixtures of greenish colors made with pink—e.g.

According to public opinion surveys in Europe and the United States, pink is the color most associated with charm, politeness, sensitivity, tenderness, sweetness, softness, childhood, the feminine, and the romantic.

In many languages, the word for the color pink is based on the name of the rose flower; like rose in French; roze in Dutch; rosa in German, Latin, Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian (Nynorsk and Bokmål); rozovyy/розовый in Russian; różowy in Polish; ורוד (varód) in Hebrew; গোলাপি (golapi) in Bangla; and गुलाबी (gulābee) in Hindi.

Early pink buildings were usually built of brick or sandstone, which takes its pale red color from hematite, or iron ore.

Some products use a natural red or pink food coloring, Cochineal, also called carmine, made with crushed insects of the family Dactylopius coccus.

An article in the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department in June 1918 said: The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls.

[55] Another factor was the popularity of blue and white sailor suits for young boys, a fashion that started in the late 19th century.

[47]: 92 [56][57] One study by two neuroscientists in Current Biology examined color preferences across British and Chinese cultures and found significant differences between male and female responses.

The misreading has been often repeated in market research, reinforcing American culture's association of pink with girls on the basis of imagined innate characteristics.

A key tactic of these charities is encouraging women and men to wear pink[60] to show their support for breast cancer awareness and research.

Pink is often used as a symbolic color by groups involved in issues important to women, as well as to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.