‘Millennial pink’ is the colour of now – but what exactly is it?

Name: Millennial pink.

Age: Timeless, yet very now.

Appearance: Well, that’s the tricky part. It’s sort of a grapefruit shade of apricotty salmon.

That sounds disgusting. Au contraire. The worlds of fashion and design are swooning over it. They’re tipping buckets of millennial pink over everything they can get their hands on.

So it’s a colour? Yes. Although not everybody agrees what colour.

So it’s several colours? Yes. But all of them are pink. It’s quite close to skin colour, if you have that skin colour.

This isn’t helping. Can you give me some examples? Some say it started in 2014, with Wes Anderson’s movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, which embodies a kind of arch retro-kitsch and is centred on a building painted several kinds of pink.

Right. Others say the tipping point was the “rose gold” iPhone in 2015. That was pink, too, although it didn’t say so. Pantone named rose quartz its joint colour of 2016, and pale dogwood is one of its colours for spring 2017. Pink is certainly a craze among many big designers currently.

Which ones? Marc Jacobs, Gucci, Céline, Balenciaga …

I’ve heard of some of those. Congratulations.

Let me guess: it has got something to do with Donald Trump or populism or Brexit or whatever? Almost certainly. Plus it goes beautifully with black, grey, white and other pinks.

What the living heck is pale dogwood? It’s “a quiet and peaceful pink shade that engenders an aura of innocence and purity”.

Well, it engenders something else in me. Seriously though, why has everyone gone nuts about pink all of a sudden? Remember how brown was the new black and grey was the new magnolia?

I think it will save a lot of time if I just say yes. Well, this is one of those moments. Millennial pink, or “Tumblr pink”, as it is also known, represents a kind of ironic prettiness, or post-prettiness. It’s a way to be pretty while retaining your intellectual detachment. It’s a wish that prettiness could de-problematised.

And that’s what salmon are going for as well, is it? Theirs is a pre-ironic version.

Do say: “Wow. Your snack is so on-trend!”

Don’t say: “Look, I just like apricots, OK?”