Shades of Pink
Shades of Pink are Taylor's colours for love in its first glow, the flush and the rose-tinted view that come before anything has gone wrong. Pink settles on the sky when a love is easy (a light pink sky over a childhood rooftop, the pink skies of a summer romance, the purple-pink that follows a run of blues) and on the face as the blush of being smitten. Lavender joins it through the old phrase for being in love. The glow can also turn: into the blush of someone caught out, or into a high the speaker knows cannot last. Red and crimson belong with Shades of Red, and a sky watched for its ending with Sunset.
Reached for when a feeling is at its most hopeful and least guarded. Where red burns and gold shines, pink glows softly, so it marks the early, dazzled stage of love rather than its heat or its worth. The same softness makes it fragile. A pink cloud is a high that has to end, and a blush can give away more than the speaker meant to show.
Appears in 10 songs
“Met the magenta sunrise Fuchsia forever intertwined”
The song is washed in pink from its first line, a magenta sunrise and fuchsia wound together. Its title takes the pink cloud from the language of recovery, the euphoria that can follow getting clean and can tip into relapse. Here pink is the colour of a high she knows cannot hold, and the man she met under it is the one she leaves up there.
“I just wanna stay in that lavender haze”
Lavender stands in for the whole state of being in love, a soft coloured haze she means to stay inside while the world weighs in. The colour is the glow itself, and the song is about protecting it.
“Gave me the blues and then purple-pink skies”
After a long run of blues, time brings purple-pink skies, the colour of the happiness the long way round was leading to. The pink is the arrival, soft and playful where the blue was heavy.
“I'm wonderstruck, blushin' all the way home”
After one meeting she blushes all the way home, the flush lasting long after she has left the room. The pink face is infatuation made visible.
“Summertime spritz, pink skies”
The pink sky belongs to a summer when she is sure of being loved. It sets the easy, sunlit mood of a love with nothing left to prove.
“Cheeks pink in the twinklin' lights”
Her cheeks go pink under the fairy lights, the flush of someone who has fallen hard and cannot hide it. The blush makes an adult love feel as giddy as a teenage one, which is the joke of the title.
“Flamingo pink, Sunrise Boulevard”
Young love is painted in flamingo pink, a bright holiday colour that turns the affair into a postcard. The pink is the version of the romance she wants to keep, whatever is said about it.
“If I never blushed, then they could've Never whispered about this”
Here the blush is what gave her away. Her own flush of response becomes the evidence, and the colour of first feeling turns into the colour of shame.
“I don't like slow motion, double vision in rose blush”
She sees him through a rose-tinted blur and refuses it. The pink is the daydream of a love everyone wants, and the song names the flush in order to step out of it.
“Light pink sky, up on the roof”
A light pink sky hangs over two friends on a rooftop with no curfew. The pale colour suits a love that has not yet named itself, gentle and unhurried.