The tube, marked “Pinkie,” is bright. Eye-searingly bright. It’s so bright that it blows out my phone camera—the camera app turns the rest of the frame into a light show as it struggles to capture the fluorescent hue of the bottle of acrylic paint at the screen’s center. It is so bright as to be borderline illegal. I mean this literally.
Artist Stuart Semple created his paint shade “Pinkie” as a direct response to “Barbie Pink,” which, as it turns out, is an actual shade—Pantone 219C, “a magenta pink”—that doesn’t just have a choke hold on current color trends, but comes with fear of legal repercussion as well.
The release and subsequent success of this summer’s Barbie—cowritten and directed by Greta Gerwig, and starring Margot Robbie as the perfect doll in the midst of a less-than-perfect existential crisis—ushered in a pink wave. Call it nostalgia, call it grasping at the same carefree joy that had us self-identifying as “girlies” and describing our fashion fantasies as “Barbiecore,” call it what you want, but there was no arguing with the power of the hue in the year 2023.
As Mattel president and CEO Richard Dickson told Reuters in July, “There is not a corner of the globe that hasn’t turned pink.” And that dousing in pink has spelled profit for Mattel in box office proceeds, licensing agreements, and actual toy sales, all boosting the company’s stock by some 33% this year already.
Semple has no problem with the color’s ascendance. He loves pink! Pink has gotten him where he is today. It’s the relatively recent push to treat color as intellectual property that he has a problem with. Semple, through his online store Culture Hustle as well as artworks, sculptures, technology, and in-person events he calls “happenings,” wants to make a statement as much as he wants to make art. He wants to liberate color.
“I love and I’ve always been obsessed with colors,” Semple told Vanity Fair. From the time he was a kid, he said, he would mix his own paints in his mom’s kitchen because he was unable to afford supplies at art stores. “There was always a sense that some people could afford things and some people couldn’t, and that perhaps art materials weren’t for everybody.”
In 2014, “Vantablack,” the so-called blackest black ever created, made headlines. It absorbs 99.995% of light on its surface. In 2016, sculptor Anish Kapoor (he’s the artist behind Chicago’s “Cloud Gate,” better known as “The Bean”) purchased exclusive rights to use the material in artistic settings, rankling Semple and other artists. (Grimes broke the rules when she wore a crown coated in Vantablack to the 2018 Met Gala, and it’s a Vantablack exhibition in the show Fleishman Is in Trouble that leads the main family to a sort of catharsis.)
By 2016, Semple had already formulated a powdered pigment that he called “the pinkest pink,” a shockingly neon powder. As a sort of performance art, he decided he’d make it available to everyone online. Everyone, that is, except Kapoor.
“If you want to use the pinkest pink you can, but you need to confirm you’re not Anish Kapoor and you’re not going to share any of it with Anish Kapoor,” he recalled the messaging surrounding his first online product. “And I thought about five people might buy it because I thought the website would be the artwork, a piece of conceptual art. But actually what happened was thousands and thousands and thousands of people bought the paint. My poor mum and dad and sister helped me make all this paint in a studio for everybody. And we were going down to the post office with the sacks of color and artists all over the world were using it and it went completely crazy, this thing. It went completely bonkers.”
The product page for the “Pinkest Pink” still has a version of that disclaimer today, reading: “Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.”
And, surprisingly, that’s probably legally binding, Susan Scafidi, director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University, told Vanity Fair. “It is a form of contract,” she acknowledged, adding that though Semple can put conditions on the primary sale of his pigments, it’s hard to enforce limitations on resale or where it goes after its initial purchase.
Of course, no companies are going to claim that the pinkest pink in the world is infringing on their own claims and products. But some companies may take issue with some of Semple’s other offerings. First, Semple used Kickstarter to fund the creation of his own take on the blackest black, which is now in its fourth iteration with “Black 4.0.”
“What started to evolve after that was the fact that it’s not just Kapoor, and it’s not just him in the art world. There’s actually quite big corporations that own the rights to colors and control how they’re used,” he said. “I’ve been making it my focus really to try and liberate those colors and give them back to people so they can use them in their work without fear of being sued or shut down or whatever.”
Call them high-irony, high-end designer knockoffs: iconic jeweler Tiffany, say, might take issue with Semple’s “Tiff,” an ultra-matte, pigmented acrylic paint in an awfully familiar shade of aqua blue. Semple also “democratized” (in his words) Klein blue with his “Incredibly Kleinish Blue,” and now there is “Pinkie,” which has a disclaimer warning Mattel to keep its hands off Semple’s paint. (The company did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
Semple may not have an entire leg to stand on when it comes to enforcing who can use his creations, but he can claim at least a few toes. Kapoor did, in fact, get his hands on “Pinkest Pink”—literally: He posted a photo to his Instagram account of his extended middle finger coated in the pigment, with a caption that would be impossible to misconstrue: “Up yours #pink,” he wrote. Using site data, Semple tracked the purchase to an employee at the Lisson Gallery in London where Kapoor shows his work.
Neither Kapoor nor Lisson Gallery responded to requests for comment.
“We wrote to the Lisson Gallery, and I said, ‘Look, I’m happy to not take any action but I do want an apology. I’d like Kapoor to write 100 times I will never use the pinkest pink and post it on his Instagram,’” Semple said. He also wanted the paint back. “But [Kapoor] never did that. He never apologized or anything. But [at a certain point] you just got to get on with your life.” He eventually dropped his quest for a public apology.
To date, Semple has not heard from Mattel. In the past, the company has brought legal actions around its iconic doll. In 2002, the toy maker attempted to sue MCA over the novelty single “Barbie Girl” by the Danish-Norwegian pop group Aqua. It was unsuccessful, as was the label’s countersuit for defamation. In the Ninth Court’s decision, the justices wrote, “The parties are advised to chill.” Mattel doesn’t currently have rights to “Barbie Pink” beyond a registration for “intent to use” with the US Patent and Trademark Office, filed in July of this year. The legal protections are narrow—Mattel asked to protect the use of the words “Barbie Pink” in the fashion sector—and the burden of proof is, again, difficult to meet.
Trademarks of this sort are registered for specific uses. Louboutin doesn’t own red, no, but in the US it does own the use of a red sole when paired with a contrasting color for the upper shoe (anyone can do an entirely red shoe). Coke owns the proprietary shape of its bottle. Tiffany doesn’t own “Tiffany Blue,” but it does have a protected right to use the shade on jewelry boxes and bags. If some product feature becomes so iconically linked to a brand that the brand name is unnecessary for immediate identification—say, that little blue box—it’s more likely to be approved for trademark. And it’s not just for the company’s sake.
“It’s two sides of the coin,” Scafidi said. “One side is to protect the goodwill of the company—the company has invested in getting us to recognize this particular sign, symbol, color—and the other is to protect the consumer against consumer confusion. So that when we reach out to grab that curvy bottle that we think is a Coke, it really is a Coke. When we grab that pair of shoes with red soles, it really is Loubi, and when we get excited about someone kneeling down on one knee and presenting a little blue box, we know it’s Tiffany and not somebody else. So it is a consumer protection argument as well as a brand protection argument.”
For Mattel to go all-in and trademark their pink, they’d have to narrow which uses are protected. “Toys are a crowded category,” Scafidi said, making the issue even more challenging.
“For example, they could say a registration for dollhouses in a particular shade of pink, and they could argue that everybody recognizes the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse,’ even if it’s not labeled as the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse,’ [because] it is this particular shade of pink,” she said of a rhetorical attempt at an argument.
In fact, one of the partnerships around the Barbie movie did call on that possible connection in the cultural consciousness: Direct-to-consumer paint brand Backdrop created a capsule collection of three shades with Mattel: “Barbie Dreamhouse Pink,” “Barbie Dreamhouse Blue,” and “Barbie Dreamhouse Purple.”
Natalie Ebel, the cofounder and creative director of Backdrop, told Vanity Fair that she was excited to partner with Mattel because “at the end of the day, Barbie has the color authority. People love Barbie pink and we wanted to create something that people can bring in real life to their walls. It is an exact replica of the Dreamhouse colors.”
She didn’t pitch the brighter “Barbie Pink,” the one Semple’s “Pinkie” apes, because “I always try to have a level of conviction with paint, not just creating vanity colors, but like what colors are actually livable.” The softer pink, ultimately, “had a stronger point of view,” she said.
“That’s the thing about paint, it doesn’t say Barbie on it, but if you know that it is Barbie paint, that’s great,” she said. “But also if you don’t care that it is Barbie, I think it still works in your space.”
Semple said that he’s never really heard from any of the well-funded bears he’s poked over the last several years while making paints and releasing software like a “Freetone” plug-in that helps digital artists circumvent paying an add-on fee in Photoshop to use Pantone colors, and his upcoming pay-once Adobe Creative Suite knockoff, Abode.
“We’re always expecting some sort of cease and desist, or some sort of legal action or something, but it just hasn’t happened,” he said. “So strange, and I don’t know if it’s that maybe it makes them look so bad and terrible if they did it, that they let it be, but so far, so good.”
“It’s clearly trolling,” Scafidi said. “It’s unlikely to create any kind of [brand] confusion, and companies tend not to actually go after that. One, because they typically wouldn’t win, and two, because it creates such bad press. The entire box of Crayolas is free to everybody except in certain very limited categories. And there are protections in place within trademark law to make sure it stays that way. The fact that I can realize these examples with such specificity is because there are only a handful of examples.”
But even that handful, Semple said, is too many. Just as his efforts fall at the intersection of art and commerce, Semple sees the philosophical and legal discussion over ownership as a type of artwork.
“On one level, yes, they’re really amazing colors,” he said of his offerings. “But on another level, I think they mean something…our whole life is mediated by color. And actually, if we start carving up bits of the rainbow and giving people the rights over it, roll it forward to 300 years and you see where we end up. It could be quite, quite a devastating thing.”
