As part of one of the interminable marketing surveys with which I torment myself, I got asked to take a look at kidzdens.co.uk, a new online shop for kids’ bedrooms, and give my feedback. I’m not going to reproduce my feedback here because I can’t remember the precise wording of the rant, but I think you can guess where this is going. Before looking at the details, just look at the overall colours of the “themes” on offer for boys and girls:
Theme and no variations
Theme and theme and theme until I'm thick
Boys: Aeroplanes; Camouflage; Cars; Dinosaurs; Farmyard; Football; Jungle; Knights, Wizards & Castles; Pirates; Sailing; Space; Trains; Trucks and Diggers; Under the Sea.
Girls: Ballerinas; Butterflies; Cup Cakes; Disney Princess; Fairies; Flowers; Gingham and Polka Dots; Hearts; Horses; Princess; Strawberry Patch.
Needless to say, I didn’t give them very positive feedback. If I was the sort of person who was going to do this sort of “theme” decorating (my daughter’s room will probably be decorated in a theme which I call “hasty magnolia”, which she can then cover with posters), I’d hope I could come up with something more interesting than any of the options on offer here — even the Care Bears wallpaper I coveted as a child was more colourful.
Anyway, here’s an interesting test, unrelated to the colours: if you were asked to make a noise to represent each of the things in those lists above, how many of the boys’ themes could you do that for? What about the girls?
Two colours in my head 
‘Retch’ is a noise?
K’s duvets are dinosaurs, pirates, jungle, more dinosaurs (why don’t they make adult bedding in dinosaurs?), oh, and a pink princessy thing from when she was about four. Fortunately the dinosaurs don’t tend to say “BOY” on them. (I’ve had kiddie clothes with little sewn-in tags that say “BOY” which I’ve had to cut off; what’s with that, then?)
I would definitely have dinosaur bedding if they did it in adult sizes (this dinosaur duvet cover set is available in double-bed size but it’s the only one I could find and it’s not very exciting!). Never seen the sewn-in “BOY” tags! Can you remember where you saw them? I will look out for them & blog them if I can find them…
I like my dinosaurs less stylised than that 8-(
The “Boy” tag was on something I got in a charity shop in Bristol, and have probably handed on now to the niece. I have a random synapse saying Next or Gap, but I don’t have any reason to trust it.
John Lewis things say “John Lewis Boy” and “John Lewis Girl” on the label – about half of the area of the baby-clothes bit in their Cambridge shop is given over to stuff that is labelled in this way. I did manage to find some dinosaur things there that didn’t say “boy” when I was last looking for clothes for a baby girl, and was briefly heartened until I noticed that they were in a display of brightly coloured clothes, some depicting machines of various kinds, opposite another display of pink/white/lilac clothes, many depicting flowers.
My noises would be “cool!” for most things in the boy category, and “bleeeuuurgh” for most things in the girl section.
My parents (not knowing the sex of their forthcoming child) painted my bedroom bright yellow, with Magic Roundabout wallpaper. I don’t know whether they would have otherwise gone down the blue/pink dichotomic route, but my bedroom was fab.
I was just browsing there, because *dinosaur mirrors!*, and being predictably irritated about what colour wall the different mirrors were mounted on. But if you look at the reflections in the mirrors, I actually quite approve of “Fairyland Castle”…
http://www.kidzdens.co.uk/shop-by-category/mirrors.html
Hee hee! Well spotted! It’s like reflectoporn.
And yes, the dinosaur mirrors are ace. But I would be so reluctant to give any money to that site. Bah. Looked around for dinosaur mirrors elsewhere and here’s the first one I found: perfect for boys of all ages. Sigh.
However there are more dinosaur mirrors on the internet than I’d ever thought possible! I love these.
The dottyhippo background is exactly the same orange. I bet it’s the same picture, cropped.