As an interior designer, I’ve long been interested in how different colors can affect our mood and behavior.

For example, if you’ve recently been to a fast food restaurant, you might notice that there’s a lot of red – red chairs and red signs, red trays and red cups.

When, on the other hand, was the last time you ate in a blue restaurant?

There’s a reason for this: Red, it turns out, has been shown to stimulate the appetite. Blue, on the other hand, has been shown to be an appetite suppressant.

But when it comes to interior design, the color pink has been particularly controversial.

After some psychologists were able to show that certain shades of pink reduced aggression, it was famously used in prison cells to limit aggression in inmates. Yet pink toes a shaky line. Is it a benign means of subtle manipulation? A tool to humiliate? An outgrowth of gender stereotyping? Or some combination of the three?