A playful app that defies the notion of pink for girls and blue for boys
Designer Migle Nevieraite has created a playful app intended to highlight the extent to which colours gender children.

With Pink Tints Of Blue, a physical interface lets people dress up an otherwise epicene child in typically gendered clothes, give it gender-biased toys, decorate its room with girly or boyish wallpaper and then alter the colour gradients.

By, for instance, changing pink to blue or a more neutral tone, the idea is that the objects' gendered properties will be destabilised and decontextualised, and ultimately the arbitrariness of assigning gender via colour will be exposed.

Anything that challenges gender norms is, of course, commendable and vitally important - especially when heavyweight children’s brands such as Lego and Kinder Egg have recently done the opposite.

In this respect, Pink Tints Of Blue is encouraging; but the idea of ‘creating your own gender’ by essentially swapping one gendered characteristic for another overlooks the complexity of identity formation and still upholds the male/female binary.