When my older daughter was close to 4, in a ritual repeated by thousands of approximately 40-inch-high females across the country each day, she declared that her favorite color was pink. From that day forth, she only wanted to wear pink clothing and shoes. Her favorite book was Pinkalicious. She also wanted a pink bed and a pink room. So when it came time to create a proper bedroom for her and her younger sister—before that, they’d been sleeping in separate rooms, one of which had no windows and the other of which co-functioned as my husband’s office—it seemed obvious that I should have the walls painted pink.
The only question was finding the right shade. My first mistake was to show my daughter the two dozen color strips that I’d brought home from the hardware store. Of course, she picked out the shade that best resembled bubblegum. Counting on her short memory—and prepared to claim that the paint came out lighter on the wall than it looked in the picture—I instead bought 2 gallons of a pale shade from Benjamin Moore called Pink Bliss. I even ordered matching pink-and-white polka-dot curtains. I thought my daughters would be as pleased by the results as I was—and they were, at first. But they hadn’t been sleeping in the room for three months when the older one, about to enter kindergarten, announced that her favorite color was now bright blue—and that she didn’t like pink anymore.
Frustrated, I recounted this turn of events to a friend with a daughter older than mine. “I didn’t want to say anything at the time, because you seemed so excited about doing a pink bedroom,” she said, with a sympathetic-yet-knowing smile. “But you would have been better off going with pale yellow.” How was I to know? I hadn’t yet realized that the color preferences of young children were an ever-evolving argument.
As it happened, however, my younger daughter had just turned 3½—and simultaneously announced, as if on cue, that her favorite color was now pink. So at least I had her in my camp. And I still do—though, as she celebrates her fourth birthday next month, her tastes seem to be in flux, too. Just last week, she told me that she only liked dark pink, not light pink anymore. She’s also gotten interested in red and light blue — “because it’s Mommy’s favorite color,” she always says. (After seeing how important favorite colors were to my daughters, I intuited that I needed to choose one of my own—even though, in truth I don’t actually have a favorite color and, like most adults, hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff.) Meanwhile, my older daughter’s appetite for all things azure has been redirected to green, purple, and black. The only constant seems to be a continued fascination with colors themselves.
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