True-Blue Femininity

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Blue is a common color to represent femininity. Thus a girl or woman wearing blue is a sign that she is fair and gentle (to certain limits).

This could have started at least as far back as ancient Greece and Rome, and even why the Virgin Mary is often depicted in a blue robe. The logic was that blue symbolizes peace, serenity, kindness, and other such aspects that were considered womanly virtues. And from the early to mid 20th century, some argued that blue should be the color for girls, and red should be the color for boys. And even though we ended up with Pink Girl, Blue Boy after World War II, putting a woman in blue is still considered a sign of her femininity, if not as obvious as colors like pink and purple.

This can apply to any feminine woman at any age, some more than others, like a Winter Royal Lady.

Now blue can have other meanings, such as sadness and loneliness. Those can overlap with this trope (as in representing both femininity and sadness).

A Sub-Trope of Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.

A Sister Trope to Pink Means Feminine, Princesses Prefer Pink, Graceful Ladies Like Purple.

Compare Shy Blue-Haired Girl, Woman in White.

Contrast Woman in Black and Lady in Red.

Examples of True-Blue Femininity include:

Anime and Manga

  • While more action oriented princess Allura/Fala of Voltron/GoLion wore pink, Romelle/Amue wore a blue dress while she was less active, and switched to a pink Mini-Dress of Power when she took an active role.
  • Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury from Sailor Moon primarily wears blue and is the most shy of the Inner Senshi, while Haruka Tenou/Sailor Uranus wears navy and gold. The very feminine Michiru/Sailor Neptune wears dark blue and teal.
  • Minto Aizawa/Mew Mint from Tokyo Mew Mew.
  • One too many blue Pretty Cures, Cure Marine and Cure Beat being the only notable exceptions.

Comic Books

  • When Jean Grey first appeared in X-Men #1, she was wearing a blue dress, jacket, and hat.

Film

Disney

  • This is perhaps the most common dress color for the Disney Princesses, even more than pink. The first three involve blue in their Pimped Out Dresses, while later ones more often use them in their non-fancy dresses.
    • Snow White's dress, though mostly yellow, has a blue bodice and sleeves.
    • The Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.
    • Cinderella's dress is blue mainly in stuff outside the movie. The dress was meant to be silver (although the glass slippers were blue tinted), but coloring issues made appear blue. Her nightgown was definitely blue.
    • Sleeping Beauty played with this by making fairies have a color war over making Aurora's dress blue or pink. It stays blue for most of the movie.
    • Lady Kluck from Disney's Robin Hood is a inversion. She is anything BUT peaceful and serene.
    • In The Little Mermaid, Ariel wore a large blue hair ribbon and a dress with a blue skirt, when Eric was showing her around his lands. When she finally became human, she wore a blue sparkling slip.
    • Belle's blue dress in Beauty and the Beast got the most screen time of any of her dresses.
    • In Aladdin, Jasmine's main outfit is blue, meant to invoke the most precious of all things in a desert: water.
    • Tiana gets a fancy blue dress in The Princess and the Frog. On a side note, since it took place in The Roaring Twenties, that color would have been seen as more feminine than Charlotte's wardrobe.
  • The dress Mulan wore to infiltrate the invaded palace, disguised as a courtesan.
  • Lady from Lady and the Tramp, while never wearing clothes per se, receives a blue collar from her masters.
  • In 101 Dalmatians, Anita is usually seen wearing blue.
    • As with Perdita, in a similar fashion to Lady.
      • In the animated movie, all her daughters have blue colars (In the live action film, the boys have blue, and it's mixed up in the TV show). In the series, Cadpig and Two-Tone both wear blue colars.
  • In an inversion of Pink Girl, Blue Boy, Wendy Moira Angelina Darling from Peter Pan is portrayed as wearing a long, blue nightgown, while her youngest brother Michael is portrayed as wearing pink footie pajamas.

Others

  • Kida of Atlantis: The Lost Empire wore blue, that matched nicely with her large blue eyes. The tattoos are also colored blue as well. In this case its the 'sadness' version.
    • The color arrangements for her two outfits swap two shades of blue: she normally wears a dark blue sarong with pink and gold stripes on it with a light blue sash hanging down from the front (her bra is also light blue), but wears a long, flowing light blue dress at the end with a dark blue sash with pink chevron patterns, a vertical gold stripe down the middle, and gold outlines hanging down from the front (we only get to see part of it in the film, the full dress and its sash can be seen in this illustration).
  • Thumbelina
  • Sally Carrera from Cars is portrayed as a light blue Porsche 911 Carrera. Other female blue cars include a racecar sponsoring RevNGo and the Queen of England.
  • The princess in The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland has a light blue dress.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Prairie Dawn, Abby Cadabby, and Rosita from Sesame Street. The former two have pink skin and fur, respectively, while the latter has light blue fur.
  • Although most Super Sentai/Power Rangers Blues are male, the few times they are female, this comes into play.

Toys

  • Several outfits Barbie has worn have been blue, as well as several characters in the Direct to Video movies.
  • In Bionicle, all the Toa/Matoran of the Water element are female and have blue armor. The female elements of Lightning and Psionics also have blue as their main color.

Video Games

  • Princess Sally Acorn of Sonic the Hedgehog media wears blue boots and vest and plays the trope straight except to Robotnik. He gets G-rated swears.
  • Rinoa in Final Fantasy VIII wears a blue coat, and is perhaps the most feminine of the women player characters (aside from Selphie, who is more perky).
  • Rosalina from Super Mario Galaxy primarily wears cyan.
  • Alisa Bosconovitch of Tekken wears an outfit with blue flowers and blue jewels.

Web Animation

  • Yihwa Yeon's outfit in Tower of God consists of a royal blue sweater and some shorts over stockings. Mainly because fighting in a dress seems rather inconvenient. It also displays perfectly that all the females (aside from Nare and Miseng) are asskickers first and women second.
    • Maria however is truly blue feminine and a Princess Classic, if one can believe Koon's twisted memories.

Web Comics

Western Animation