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Pink and Blue: The Right Color for Your Gender!

Photographer Bob Carey defies standard, gendered color norms—and other norms, too. Pink is for girls, blue is for boys.  Most any American you know who’s had a baby has had to wrestle with this question.  Modern parents (including myself) debate whether or not they want to hew to the old gender-designated colors, or if they want to just dress their babies in green or orange or some other color that doesn’t have those old gender-specific associations we’ve always had. But we haven’t always had them.  It used to be that babies were dressed in white.  In the days before leak-proof diapers, this might seem imprudent, but that’s how it was done.  The more poetic among us might figure that white suggests the innocence of the newborn, but it’s probably more that babies grow out of clothes quickly, and since dyes were expensive, it didn’t make sense to do anything to make baby clothes any more expensive than they already were.  By the early 20 th century, advances in chemistry