Why My Son’s Room Will Be Red: An Expert Weighs In on Colors for Baby

Jude Stewart is a journalist and an author, specializing in design, color and visual culture. Her first book, ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color, will be released September 17, 2013. She lives in Chicago.

Every expectant parent fields the question, Are you having a boy or a girl? But if you're expecting your first book about color to hit bookstores at the same time as your son will enter the world — well, let’s just say it ups the ante on the follow-up question considerably: What color will your son’s room be?

My answer in brief: red, offset with grays and black. Of course, more than the actual shade, people want to know the reasons we chose that color. I’m happy to say our choice was guided not merely by cheapness (why reinvent our former guest bedroom, now baby’s room?) but also by historical research.


The ironclad pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys dictum is of remarkably recent vintage, a “rule” of decorating our grandparents wouldn’t have recognized as gospel.

In a previous ideabook, I explored how the colors adorning our walls infiltrate our brains, moods, even physical prowess. This one serves to bust some surprisingly durable myths about color’s link to gender.

People may start out as XX and XY, but we shouldn’t let that duality overshadow the extraordinary rainbow of color options nestled between pink and blue.


Jo B. Paoletti, professor, dress historian and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, first clued me in to the gendered history of pink and blue. In the 18th and 19th centuries, babies were dressed in pale colors of any shade, ideal to withstand scalding-hot washes. More finicky parents might choose clothing colors to match their babies’ complexions; for example, blue outfits for blue-eyed babies.

Other rules of thumb considered religion: In Catholic pockets of Germany, girls wore blue to honor the Virgin Mary, while little boys wore pink, a diluted shade of traditionally masculine red.

In 1927 department stores Wanamaker’s, Maison Blanche and Marshall Field all pushed pink as the It color for girls. Meanwhile, competing shopping emporiums — Macy’s, Franklin Simon and Bullock’s — hawked pink for boys.


World War II’s end brought two sea changes in color trends. First, bored with drab wartime hues, consumers hungered for brighter colors. Second, women reentering the home after wartime work outside it never fully reembraced the homespun methods of yesteryear.

Children’s clothing was increasingly store bought, more brightly hued and colorfast enough to survive repeated cycles in the family’s new washer-dryer units. Pink got tinged with feminine overtones via icons like the 1955 Dodge La Femme (tagline: “By appointment to Her Majesty: the American woman”) and the “Think Pink!” ditty in Audrey Hepburn’s 1957 film Funny Face.

Ironically, Paoletti says it was 1970s feminists' railing against pink — signifying the blinkered conception of midcentury womanhood — that finally cemented the color’s association with the female. Pink colors similar backlash movements even today. During the 2009 Christmas season, the Pink Stinks campaign took aim at a pink-colored globe, rightly asking, Why must we swaddle even a neutral subject like geography in pink for girls?


The lore of color in kids’ rooms takes even more twists. I recently met one of the color consultants at Hello My Name Is Color in San Francisco, who informed me of a much-ballyhooed prohibition in interior design against painting baby’s rooms yellow, on the grounds that it’s too stimulating to encourage sleep. Having grown up in a sunflower-colored bedroom, I wondered, Did I plague my parents with incessant, unexplained yowling? Or does this color myth simply not hold water?


Back to our son Lev’s room. We chose red for reasons of frugality and historicity, but more than color we focused on creating a graphic stripiness. As in many other baby’s rooms, we’re packing lots of necessary furniture into a tiny space, so we wanted to gird the room’s miscellany with a clear visual through line. That’s supplied by a horizontal black chalkboard-paint stripe — a place, coincidentally, where we'll scrawl welcoming poems to our little man (with two writer parents, it’s a frequent urge).


With every erasure, the chalk paint's black softens to a milky gray, a soothing color picked up in pillows on our “fainting couch,” where exhausted parents and helpful grandmas will sleep. The big poster is an enlargement of a matchbook cover from the former East Germany; it reads in translation, “She’s got the ticket — sports are important!”


This poster above the changing table spells the band name “Hella” in mirror image if you view it sideways; I interviewed its creator, graphic designer Dirk Fowler, years ago.


We picked up this trapezoidal red mirror on Bergsstrasse, antiquing haven of Berlin, on one of many occasions we lived there.


Over the baby’s crib we hung this marvelously graphic poster purchased at Haymaker in Andersonville, Chicago. I can just imagine how that cherry-red "a" will one day swim into startlingly clear focus for Lev.

This arrangement will be supplemented by a delightful Flensted Viking-ship mobile — because we’d love to raise a kid who alternates between bookishness and occasional marauding-Viking awesomeness.

So when the stork darkens your horizon with his bundle, think pink or blue, but also every conceivable color! Babies make manifest all the marvelous quirks of human nature; it’s only fair that they should be celebrated with color palettes of similar variety.

More: 9 Unexpected Color Schemes for Boys' Rooms

Tell us: What color did you paint your baby's nursery?

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