My Hot-Pink Nail Polish Is Getting Everywhere — A Love Story!
I have taken to wearing pink – mostly hot pink — in increasingly abrasive, lurid, Miami ways. A neon pink called Cotton Candy (if the cotton candy were radioactive) on my nails, a DayGlo pink purse, soft-pink Reeboks, a pink crop top. Searing hot pink is girls-just-want-to-have-fun, Angelyne in a pink convertible, completely fizzy. I’ve become a bit obsessed.
Just like it’s been said that Dolly Parton is the ultimate, hyper-feminine performance of a woman, pink is the ultimate, hyper-feminine performance of a color. It’s dynamically artificial yet steeped in nature. Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli described hot pink as “life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West.”
Schiaparelli designed the bottle for her most famous 1936 perfume “Shocking!” using the torso dimensions of Mae West and inspiration from Dalí paintings of flower-sellers. The packaging was shocking pink, a signature color of Schiaparelli that was said to have been inspired by Daisy Fellowes’ pink diamond. “Shocking” is a particularly befitting adjective preceding pink, a shade of a color that’s supposed to be soft and feminine — the “shocking” or “hot” before the color makes it sizzle. Soft pink is girlhood and tasteful restraint; hot pink symbolizes something else, a kind of extended girlhood that’s veered off into Barbie hedonism.
Pink is a color at odds with itself, yet very sure of what it is. Wearing hot pink in movies generally denotes a low-brow appeal. There’s Marilyn Monroe’s pink-satin gown as the “gold-digging, ice-wearing showgirl” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Barbie’s very own Pantone 219 C, and, of course, Elle Woods’ pink everything in Legally Blonde. Some boring hater in The Economist described pink as “a peculiarly nauseating hue that lies between a garish fuchsia and a medicinal shade of bubblegum,” and it might as well have been the law students in Woods’ Harvard law school class. Serious people are supposed to loathe pink. And listen, I hate to get political, but reclaiming hot, sweet, fuck-you pink as something meaningful, a color of (serious) fun, seems like some sort of statement.
“Pink and purple are colors that I use a lot in my work,” artist Signe Pierce said in an interview. It’s a way of re-appropriating something that is sold to us from birth. These colors are often demeaned by people saying they’re ‘girly’. And the word girly is often associated with weakness. I like to take these colors and pair them with a strong persona and reclaim some of the things that have been devalued in society.”
Hot pink is my armor. No other color energizes me more. I love neon yellow and construction-worker orange, but I wouldn’t wear it with the same excess. The embracing of hot pink typically is done in small doses; it’s ubiquitous in the cursive neon signs and the nostalgic images we double-tap on Instagram. Yet, it’s a color I don’t exactly see people wear in real life.
In an inspiring article from Merriam-Webster titled “Pink: The Color That Will Change Your Life” the writer cites the first-known written evidence for “hot pink” in an English literary magazine.
Then, never was seen a living woman so gratuitously ill-dressed! One might have believed she had a sworn antipathy to pure colours, or becoming “cuts.” Hot pink, mouldy blue, livid lilac, and diseased green: such were her preferences …
—Bentley’s Miscellany, 1849
Here’s to sworn antipathy to pure colors and to hot pink flattering things moldy, livid and diseased. My Cotton Candy pink nail polish, in its strange texture, has taken to chipping off everywhere lately — the train, beds, people’s food. It seems very fitting!
Feature photo taken by me inside Portia Munson’s all-pink room.
