Did you know “in the pink” didn’t originally refer to health at all?

In Georgian and Regency England, “pink” often meant the finest or most perfect example of something.

A fashionable gentleman might be described as “the pink of fashion,” meaning he was the very height of elegance and style. With this in mind, you might have heard of someone being called a pink. This was not a social archetype or category, like Corinthians, dandies, fops, etc., rather this was a descriptor of someone fashionable, regardless of their social inclination or societal circle. For instance, all dandies strived to be a pink, as in the absolute, most fashionable of the dandies.

The phrase likely traces back to older English usage, most popularly attributed to Shakespeare since we see it used in Romeo and Juliet to mean perfection, the pinnacle, excellence, the peak, or the very flower of something.

Only later in the 19th century did “in the pink” shift towards the meaning we recognize today: flourishing health and rosy vitality.

So if a Regency heroine called someone “the pink of fashion,” she wasn’t complimenting his complexion… she was admiring his tailoring!

Are you familiar with this phrase? If so, by which meaning do you best know it?