If you've popped into a store anytime recently to buy a birthday or anniversary card, you may have noticed the cards were shelved and organized by their intended audience — labels such as ‘Boy,’ ‘Girl,’ ‘Husband,’ and ‘Wife’ direct shoppers to the section meant for whomever they’re shopping for. In practice, this ends up making most card aisles looking like walls of alternating blue and pink.
To further explore how Hallmark uses color to arbitrarily distinguish their cards by intended audience, we web scraped Hallmark's website to pull thousands of greeting cards images. Because Hallmark also arranges cards by recipient on their online store, we were able to quickly analyze their color choices by group.
For each image of a greeting card, we determined the color that covers the majority (or plurality) of its canvas — the dominant color, in other words. This reveals which colors Hallmark uses most commonly...and which are rarely used (only 10 percent of greeting cards come in green!). Of course, these cards' color schemes varied by intened audience:
38 percent of cards designed for female recipients are either a red or violet hue (which would include shades of pink), making them the most likely colors a woman will see when she is given a greeting card. The next most offered colors for women are orange (22%), blue (17%), and yellow (16%).
Meanwhile, 30 percent of cards designed for male recipients are blue, making it the most likely color a man will see on his cards. The next most offered colors for men are orange (22%), yellow (21%), and red (13%).
Curiously, the pink-blue divide is much more pronounced among cards aimed at younger audiences. 42 percent of cards in the ‘Girl’ category are red or violet, while 42 percent of cards in the ‘Boy’ category are blue. To be fair, 23 percent of cards designed for girls are blue, making it their second most offered color. On the flip side, only 12 percent of cards meant for boys are red or violet.
Ultimately, the generic usage of pink for cards for female recipients and blue for cards for male recipients reflects similar gender stereotypes evident in other products and industries. Pay attention the next time you go buy a birthday or anniversary card — the aisles may start to feel like walls of baby blue and pink, especially if you’re shopping for a younger age. However, Hallmark does provide some options, so you’ll likely find at least a few red, orange, blue greeting cards in any section...just not green.
Notes & Methodology
Images were scraped from Hallmark, which categorizes greeting cards into groups by recipient. We pulled a total of 4,196 cards from the following categories: Girl, Boy, Daughter, Son, Granddaughter, Grandson, Sister, Brother, Wife, Husband, Mother, Father, Grandmother, Grandfather, Any Woman, and Any Man.
Hue was calculated using the RGB values of the dominant color of each card. In cases where white was the dominant color of a card image, we used the second most dominant color instead. Hue shade names (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) were categorized using ranges from Colblinder.