Pink is the new pink

Do you have a favorite color?

Mine has always been pink. Pink is a cheerfully happy, effervescent color. It is the signature shade of rosy-cheeked little girls in pigtails who ride Barbie bicycles with streamers at the handles. Pink is the sweet side of red - softer, delicate, and decidedly feminine. Pink is the color of cotton candy, tropical sunsets and frosting on a cupcake. When the weather has been stuck in a forecast of gray, gloomy, overcast days (such as it's been here in Dallas all week) wearing pink instantly cheers me up. 

Studies have shown the following physical and mental effects of the color pink:

• Has a calming effect on the nerves and creates physical weakness in people.
• Alleviates feelings of anger, aggression, resentment, abandonment and neglect.
• Is a sign of hope in color psychology. It inspires warm and comforting feelings, and a sense that everything will be okay.
• Is so tranquilizing that sports teams sometimes paint the locker rooms used by opposing teams bright pink so their opponents will lose energy.

According to Wikipedia, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920's or earlier. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because, being related to red, it was a more masculine and aggressive color. Blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was related to the Virgin Mary and thus thought as the more dainty, delicate color. In the 1940s, the societal norm was inverted; pink became considered appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century.

My love affair with pink extends well beyond my wardrobe. I have multiple tattoos in shades of pink, from the flowers on my neck to a cupcake on my left arm. Pink lipsticks are stuffed into my cosmetics bag. During pedicures, pink is my number one requested polish color (OPI's Shopping Frenzy is amaze-balls.) My journal is pink; I write in pink gel-pen; and I fantasize about adding hot pink streaks to my hair.  

When I saw this blazer at a thrift store, I knew I had to have it.  It would be my armor against rainy-day gloom. I'd don the blazer, glide on some pink lip gloss, and charge towards victory.

Thrifted Kenneth Cole blazer; Gap long-sleeved white tee; Citizens if Humanity bootcut jeans (eBay); J Crew pink ballet flats (eBay), Marc Jacobs bag; Forever 21 necklace

ZOMG, shoes.

This year, a Daily Express study reported that the average woman will spend $25,000 on 469 pairs of shoes in her lifetime. I'm not sure what to make of this, as I don't consider myself much of a shoe fanatic. And that I blame completely on my terror over anything with a heel higher than an inch.

I have always been slightly fascinated and completely fearful of heels. Those perfectly groomed women who saunter along in their four-inch pumps or slingbacks or stilletos or WHATEVER make me feel inadequate and mannish and decidedly unfeminine. I wonder how these creatures manage to stay so balanced, so collected, so elegant tottering along in them. When I wear heels, I have the tendency to walk like a somewhat demented chicken with a head injury. I wobble. I collapse. I collide into furniture. And God forbid I have to climb stairs.

My mother was extremely fond of heels. Every morning I'd watch her finish off her outfit (power shoulder-padded business suit, red lipstick, gigantic gold clip earrings) with a polished pair of pumps. He feet were calloused and slightly crippled from years of heels, and yet she confessed that wearing them was more comfortable for her than flats. She is not the only woman I have heard make this assessment. Personally, I find this...perplexing. In heels, my feet are contorted and arched and bent into remarkable proportions. The balls of my feet bear my weight, which seems to increase by a hundred pounds with every step. My calf muscles are stretch to a limit familiar to gymnasts and ballerinas. I have never been either.

Thankfully, I do not have the professional job or glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle that makes wearing heels necessary. And so I avoid them like the plague. But I do dream about being the kind of confidant, gravity-defying woman who buys them,  the kind of woman who attends gallery openings and lives in an all-white apartment decorated with Swedish furniture and nineteenth-century antiques and a lifetime subscription to W Magazine. To this woman, shoes are trophy-like and collectible. She walks into a shoe store and gets those fluttery goosebumps similar to a love-at-first-sight reaction. (Whereas I look in the window of a shoe store and think: "hmm those look like they'd hurt. and those. and those? forget it." And then I move along, to stare open-mouthed at the shiny baubles in the jewelry shop window.) Our glamazon shoe fiend is willing, indeed giddy, to sacrifice her comfort and perhaps her life for heels.

And so, for today, I came a tinier bit closer to being that woman.

Thrifted Old Navy cardigan; thrifted  Coldwater Creek buttondown; Gap stretch tee; Gap Outlet cargos; Jessica Simpson booties; Forever 21 bracelets