If, like me, you’re one of those people who ponder too much over why things are the way they are, considering why specific colors and symbols are chosen to reflect concepts and the like, Lynn Peril has revealed a partial answer to why boys are associated with blue and girls are associated with pink. It turns out that these hues weren’t always assigned this way. According to Lynn:

Prior to the mid-19th century, babies usually wore white. Then a trendsetter in France got the bright idea to identify girls with pink and boys with blue. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), artistic Amy March puts blue and pink ribbons on her sister’s newborn twin boy and girl “French fashion, so you can always tell” them apart.

So we can blame the French for all this claptrap. I intend to track down this mysterious trendsetter and determine what other contributions he made to society at large.