MUSING ON THE EMERGING COLOUR OF TRANSFORMATION

This text was re-written by Sir Phil for The Inari Papers and is based on an earlier version published by Ben Grosser at Inari on LinkedIn as an explorative article. It has been presented with an open-ended approach, allowing for future refinements as understanding of the topic evolves and the text is updated to reflect new insights.

A Jungian Inquiry Into Teal, Turquoise… And The Arrival Of Pink
“Colour expresses the soul of things.” — C.G. Jung

This blog is not a conclusion. It is not a thesis. It is a wandering, a musing, a kind of daylight colour-dream.
Here, I explore, rather than assert, the notion that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new colour of transformation within the field of psychology. A shift from the cool, lucid depths of teal and turquoise into the warm, relational sphere of pink and magenta. This is a blog still in motion, like an unfinished mandala, a pigment mid-mix, a dream not yet interpreted, just as the emergence of pink itself is still unfolding.

The Era Of Teal: Transformation Through Vision, Solitude, And Depth

In the symbolic palette of psychological change, the blue-green spectrum has long carried the torch of transformation. Teal, turquoise, and aquamarine embody liminality: not quite water, not quite air; not wholly earthbound, yet deeply rooted. They align with intuition, clarity, emotional healing, and inner coherence and often appear in dreams and artwork during times of personal transition. Even book covers, art, and self-development branding have leaned heavily on these colours, perhaps unconsciously echoing the inward journey.

In Jungian symbolic psychology, blue is traditionally associated with the Thinking function, while yellow or gold is linked to Intuition, the realm of spontaneous insight and the perception of unconscious possibilities (Jung, 1921/1971). Their fusion, seen in teal or aquamarine, can be read as a symbolic expression of the Thinking–Intuition axis: the meeting point between mental clarity and visionary perception (Sharp, 1991). Although Jung did not explicitly name teal, its composite nature renders it a natural metaphor for liminal awareness, inner seeking, and the solitude of the psychological wanderer.

Furthermore, in Jung’s alchemical writings, white dominates the albedo stage, a moment of purification following the chaos of nigredo. Albedo marks the dawning of psychic clarity and the emergence of lunar, feminine consciousness: a symbolic cleansing of the soul before the final unification of opposites in rubedo (Jung, 1944/1980). The soft, lucid brightness of aquamarine, both as crystal and hue, mirrors this inner alchemical phase, a cooling, light-filled interval in which truth becomes visible and the psyche prepares for integration. But now, something warmer stirs.

The Rise Of Pink: An Unexpected Colour Of Collective Emergence?

Not long ago, I noticed a shift, first within, then around me. A subtle yet unmistakable pull towards pink. When I shared this with a fellow Jungian, their response was almost instinctive: “Yes. We are entering a different time.” And so this inquiry began.

Across Jungian and therapeutic circles, pink and its deeper cousin magenta are appearing on book covers, in logos, in imagery linked to change, emotion, or healing. This is not the infantilised or romanticised pink of mid-20th-century gender coding. This is something else. This pink feels archetypal. Elemental. A colour not of passivity but of relational transformation.

What Might Pink Symbolise In Jungian Terms?

In Jungian psychology, the feeling function draws the psyche into a realm marked by tenderness, empathy, and relational connection. Where teal evokes solitude and inward vision, pink symbolically calls us into visibility, emotional openness, and the risking of softness. Jung described the feeling function as a rational process that assigns value, acceptance or rejection to inner and outer contents. It is distinct from affect by its lack of physiological arousal; instead, it offers a subjective criterion of worth (Jung, 1921/1971; depthtypology.org, 2024).

In dreams, pink often evokes the wounded anima, the inner child, or the relational self long buried beneath defence and performance. While explicit Jungian references to pink in dreams are scarce, the anima frequently appears through water motifs or soft feminine imagery, suggesting associations with delicate, heart-attuned hues (Wikipedia, 2024).

Magenta, an extra-spectral tone fusing red and violet, has been described in psychological literature as a symbol of integration, echoing Jung’s coincidentia oppositorum, the sacred union of opposites. Thus, magenta becomes a powerful metaphor for psychic wholeness: passion tempered by transcendence, emotional depth harnessed to visionary clarity (Carl Jung Depth Psychology blog, 2020).

In energy systems such as the chakra tradition, the heart centre is governed by green and pink. While green represents stability and grounding, pink invites openness, vulnerability, and relational presence. Pink, symbolically, instructs us: feel this now.

Teal and Pink: Two Sides Of The Transformational Path?

What if teal does not fade? What if it remains the colour of individual inner transformation, while pink emerges as a collective or systemic hue?

In social dreaming, group coaching, and large-system constellations, I have begun to wonder: might pink, especially in its duskier or deeper shades, become the chromatic marker of group dynamics, systemic healing, and collective integration?

Consider it thus:

• Teal is the journey inward: quiet, intuitive, alchemical.

• Pink is the journey outward: into the group, the family, the emotional matrix, where transformation rests less on insight and more on connection.

• Pink appears where relationships strain yet yearn to heal. It arrives when a system softens. It blooms in the room when a group dares to relinquish its mask.

Reflections From The Collective Unconscious

Jung taught that the collective psyche speaks not in facts but in images and symbols. Its movements are rarely linear or explicit; rather, it murmurs through shifting colour palettes, emerging myths, recurring dream hues, and aesthetic changes across art, design, and culture. The question that lingers is quietly potent: Are we dreaming in pink again?

In the Nordic winter, mornings sometimes hold a fragile hush, a pale sky brushed first with icy blue, the land locked in snow, then faint strokes of orange, pink, and soft red glimmering at the edge of light. These delicate, sacred hues herald the slow resurrection of brightness after the long dark. Symbolically, a pink dawn is a harbinger: the first light of a new beginning, gentle yet inevitable. Elsewhere, pink appears where heat meets dusk. Around a summer fire in the cooling evening, embers glow—deep reds, dusky pinks, and warm ambers flickering across shared space. These are not pastel comforts, but warming pinks, tempered by memory and ancestral connection. They remind us that pink can be fire’s soft exhale, a connective glow across generations.

Pink’s Ambiguity: Past And Present

Colour psychology is messy and culturally shaped. Historically, pink was considered a masculine colour in Western societies. In the early 20th century, many American and European publications advised pink for boys and blue for girls, describing pink as a pale red, strong, active, decisive (Ladies’ Home Journal, 1918; Paoletti, 2012; Britannica, 2025). The reversal, pink for girls, blue for boys, only solidified after the 1940s through marketing and cultural consensus (Britannica, 2025; CNN, 2018; Springerboard Trust, 2024). This ambiguity makes pink symbolically rich. It can signal strength and softness, convention and subversion, heat and heart. It lives between tradition and transgression, much like the anima herself.

Collective Colouring Of Change

When groups soften, when systems crack open and relational fields shift, pink often enters the symbolic frame, not as décor, but as a relic rising from the collective unconscious. These pinks, sunrise-bright or ember-warm, may herald emerging archetypes: the relational healer, the wounded community renewed, the feminine principle awakening within the collective.

In the cyclical logic of depth psychology, teal may continue to function as the colour of individual transformation, the alchemical inward journey of clarity and vision. Pink, especially in its deeper, dusk-tinted shades, may become the colour of group initiation: relational vulnerability, communal healing, emotional integration.

Perhaps this is precisely what the times demand: a new mythic palette for an age in transition.

Teal Within, Pink Between: Two Paths Of The Same Transformation

And perhaps, if we attend carefully to this shifting palette, we may recognise that no colour truly supplants another. Teal and turquoise may remain the steadfast hues of inner metamorphosis, liminal tones guiding the solitary descent into depth, while pink and magenta assume their place within the relational and systemic sphere. In systems psychodynamics, where the currents of transference, projection, and collective affect move through a room like unseen tides, these warmer hues may well become the chromatic language of the field.

Some would argue that systems psychodynamics is a distant cousin, if not an echo, of psychoanalytic thought, which situates transformation at its very heart under names such as individuation, integration, or symbolic death and rebirth. If so, the emergence of pink does not contradict teal; it completes it. The two may simply be differing expressions of the same archetypal movement: one turned inward toward clarity, the other outward toward connection. Two sides of the same coin, gleaming with the promise of change.

This Is Not A Conclusion

These musings are not a pronouncement. It is a colour meditation, a space in which to ask: What is changing within us, and how is that shift expressed in hue? The world is undergoing profound psychic tension. Perhaps we require new myths, new archetypes, and new colours to hold such complexity. Teal may continue guiding the solitary journey inward. Pink may rise to accompany us on the collective journey back towards one another.

And between them, a bridge, a new mandala forming, a new palette of becoming.

—

References

• Carl Jung Depth Psychology. (2020, April 4). Carl Jung on the four functions. Retrieved from https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/04/04/four-functions-7

• CNN. (2018, January 12). The complicated gender history of pink. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/colorscope-pink

• DepthTypology.org. (2024). Resurrecting the feeling function – Personality Type in Depth. Retrieved from https://depthtypology.org/resurrecting-the-feeling-function

• Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2025, June 13). Has pink always been a “girly” colour? Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/story/has-pink-always-been-a-girly-color

• Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire, Eds.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected Works Vol. 6). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

• Jung, C. G. (1980). Psychology and alchemy (H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire, Eds.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works Vol. 12). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1944)

• Paoletti, J. B. (2012). Pink and blue: Telling the boys from the girls in America. Indiana University Press.

• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.

• Springboard Trust. (2024). Colour coded: The story of ‘pink for girls, blue for boys’. Retrieved from https://www.springboardtrust.org.nz

• Wikipedia contributors. (2024, February). Anima and animus. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus