Abigail Dougherty/Stuff

First parents: Clarke Gayford and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern introduced their daughter Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford to the world on Sunday. There was no pink to be seen.

OPINION: "It's a girl!" Last week some rejoiced, some smiled, and – despite our PM being on the record about her desire to avoid the pink-for-a-girl cliches – one of country's major newspapers decided to mark the occasion with a masthead in shades of rose. 

Pink: it's the "natural" colour for a girl… isn't it? We're so used to seeing it around it feels as normal as the air that we breathe – yet how much gender stereotyping is it safe to ingest? Not much, it turns out, and the acceptable dosage is even lower for a child.

"But pink is for everyone, love," I find myself saying to my son, who is pushing away a selection of crayons. These rejects have names that evoke delicious tastes and smells: salmon, melon, rose.

Burnt sienna, sky blue, goldenrod, forest green – these crayons are fine. Lavender (at a push), "mauvelous", wisteria, and wild strawberry are OK, but: "Pink is for girls."

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He is adamant. He is also 5. When did he start thinking this? He's been at school for all of five minutes and my beautiful, empathetic, expressive, right-on son has learnt – along with how to read, and where the toilets are – that some colours are "girl" colours.

Thankfully, he is yet to learn that "boys don't cry" and how that catchphrase leads young men to suppress their sadness and instead express it as anger and self-destruction. I am immensely grateful that he has no experience of New Zealand – home of "she'll be right" – as a place with the highest level of domestic violence and youth suicide in the developed world.

He is also yet to learn about how viewing women as "other" and "lesser" (yes, folks, I do mean the gender pay gap) is a form of control; how locker room banter and its gaslighting companion "it's only a joke" are the foothills of rape culture.

But in the playground he is learning some troubling lessons about the acceptable limits of masculinity: that having hair "like a girl" is bad, that being called a "girl" is an insult.

He and I have talked before about how there are "girl toys" and "boy toys" just so that marketing people can sell more toys – that topic was relatively easy. The others, not so much, but they will keep for another day. Just now we will put the crayons aside for a moment and address the seemingly immutable truth that pink is only permissible for one gender.

It is time, my boy, for a history lesson.

Once upon a couple of millennia ago, people's clothes were highly colour coded according to wealth and, frequently, occupation. The rich folks could afford fine fabrics, dyed in vibrant hues, and the poor... couldn't. It was a bit like The Handmaid's Tale, but in reverse: red was the colour of the nobility, because it was expensive. Red was a power colour, for people who held power. Red was for men.

Fast forward to the Italian Renaissance when religious painting was reaching new peaks. Wealthy art patrons wanted to show off their piety as well as their pocketbooks, and how better to do that than to commission art in the most expensive pigments? At this time, that shade was ultramarine, a vibrant blue made from lapis lazuli mined only in far-away Afghanistan. It became the convention to honour the Virgin Mary by depicting her in this pigment – her large blue cloak a display of how large a fortune the patron could afford to spend on a painting.

There you had it: red was the aspirational colour for men and blue the equivalent hue for women. And so it continued, with (as fabric technology allowed) paler shades being deemed appropriate for the younger generation. If their clothing was colour coded at all – and let's remember that it usually wasn't – pink was for boys and blue for girls. In 1890, the Ladies Home Journal noted: "Pure white is used for all babies. Blue is for girls and pink is for boys, when a colour is wished."

In 1918 the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department was singing the same tune: "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."

Then along came Princess Astrid of Sweden, who married Crown Prince Leopold of Belgium in 1926. A year later, Astrid was expecting and had decked out the royal crib in pink, hoping to produce an heir – a boy, that is. "The cradle…had been optimistically outfitted in pink, the colour for boys, that for a girl being blue," read news dispatches quoted in Time magazine of November 1927. A 7lb daughter came forth; she kept her colour scheme nonetheless.

Astrid was beloved by her subjects and not for the first time, what the chic young royal princess did set the fashion. By the time the Baby Boomers were in booties, pink for a girl was the new normal.

As I tie up my little story with a (rainbow striped) bow, my lad's little eyes are wide in disbelief. I might as well have told him that, actually, Brussels sprouts are made out of marshmallows. He takes back a rejected crayon. It is called "tickled pink". I think you can guess how I'm feeling.

 - Stuff