Pink Lesbian Flag

Overview

The flag is the Lipstick Lesbian Flag without the kiss mark, by a person who has never been identified. Its earliest documented appearance is a Tumblr pride flag compilation posted by @trans-wife on 8 December 2013, in which the design is rendered as a square; the same blog posted it again on 10 January 2014, saying it was in use at the time. ^[1][3]

Whether the mark was removed or simply left out is unsettled even at that first appearance. Reviewing the post in 2019, the lesbianflaghistory blog observed that @trans-wife posted no other flags carrying symbols and that a lip print sits awkwardly on a square, and asked whether she was "removing the lipstick herself for aesthetic purposes, or ... cropping an already-lipstickless flag down to size." Neither reading has been established. ^[3]

On 7 October 2015 the DeviantArt account Pride-Flags published the design as "Lesbian," describing it as "an adaptation of the lipstick lesbian flag by This Lesbian Life" and adding, in the same paragraph, "We do not know who first removed the lipstick to represent all lesbians, though." The file was 5,000 by 3,000 pixels. That is a publication and circulation point, not the date of the change, and it is where the design began to spread. ^[2]

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

lesbian

Creators

Origin

Digital Origin

Community internet circulation

Digital origin; no verified physical location.

Derivative community adaptation of the Lipstick Lesbian Flag, circulated online rather than issued from any place. The earliest known appearance is on Tumblr on 8 December 2013; the design spread from a DeviantArt publication of 7 October 2015. ^[1][2][3]

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2013

First public use

December 8, 2013

Period in Use

2013 to the present

Creation Bounds

The design existed by 8 December 2013. That date is the earliest documented appearance located, not a date of design: it is an online publication, a Tumblr pride flag compilation, and not a record of a physical flag. Nothing establishes when the mark was taken off, or whether the person who posted that compilation removed it or reposted a version already circulating without it. ^[1][3] The 2010 date the entry once carried belongs to the Lipstick Lesbian Flag it derives from; no source places the kissless design that early. Having identified the December 2013 post as the earliest record, the lesbianflaghistory blog stated that it "is extremely interested in any other evidence of pre-2015 use of the pink flag outside of this blog." None has been produced since. ^[3] The historical design and its later digital reproductions are separate things. The Wikimedia Commons vector and this entry's own rendering are reproductions of a design that circulated for years as low-resolution raster images; neither is the artefact the design first appeared as. ^[4]

**2013.** Earliest documented appearance: @trans-wife's Tumblr pride flag compilation of 8 December, the design rendered as a square. ^[1][3]

**2014.** The same blog posted it again on 10 January, saying it was in use. ^[3]

**2015.** Pride-Flags published it on DeviantArt on 7 October at 5,000 by 3,000 pixels, the first high-resolution publication and the point from which it spread. ^[2]

**2016.** Wide Tumblr circulation, in three posts over nine months. On 11 March @emtmercy posted it captioned "the lesbian flag is so cute"; the image measured 1,280 by 768, a proportion matching the Pride-Flags file rather than the 1,892 by 1,204 original, making it a downscale of the DeviantArt upload rather than an independent edit. ^[6][3] @sappharah saw it there on 27 March and, on 8 June, posted a reworded version: "the lesbian flag is so pretty why don't we use it more." That post reached 82,784 notes. lesbianflaghistory credits it with launching the design into the Tumblr mainstream and notes that its wording presents the flag as an established community flag, "which leads most people to believe that it is." ^[7][3]

**2018.** Replacement polls. The blog @official-lesbian-flag-blog ran a series of them, and when asked "where the fuck the original" was, answered: "if you're talking about the pink one, that's specifically for lipstick lesbians, and if you're talking about the rainbow, we're searching a flag for specifically lesbians." Respondents nonetheless wanted the seven-stripe shape kept, "mirroring the lipstick flag," and three of the four most popular designs the blog posted hold to that format. Emily Gwen's orange-pink design came out of the same year. ^[8][9]

**2022.** A photograph on Wikimedia Commons records the flag carried at Christopher Street Day in Berlin on 23 July, alongside an orange-pink lesbian flag. ^[10]

Writing in 2019, lesbianflaghistory placed the flag in "semi-common usage since 2016" and "still mostly confined to younger online communities." ^[3]

No account of the removal survives from whoever made it, but the absence in the Pride-Flags version is documented. Asked at the time whether they had the lipstick flag, the account answered that they did not: "I've been putting it off because I'd have to redraw the lips since I don't think theres a vector I can use," adding they would try to find someone to redraw it. They published the lipstick original fourteen months later, on 25 December 2016, with help from outside their team. ^[3][11]

lesbianflaghistory uses that sequence against the widely repeated claim that the mark was taken off to make the flag inclusive: "There's no proof of this ... the first instance of the mark being 'removed' (i.e. not included) was due to it being too complex to easily convert into a high resolution image." The same page rejects the inverse claim, that the lipstick flag is an edit of an older pink one, on the ground that the lipstick flag was documented online for years first. ^[3] The vector explanation covers the October 2015 upload; it does not account for the December 2013 square, which the same essay identifies as the earliest known instance.

The objections to the flag were recorded as it spread, and lesbianflaghistory lists four: that it originated as a flag for lipstick lesbians only, that it carries no symbolism deeper than shades of lipstick, that it alienates butch and gender-nonconforming lesbians, and that its designer had posted cruel remarks about Asian, bisexual, butch and anorexic women. ^[3] The palette itself was part of the objection rather than only its origin: contributors to the 2018 polls said the pink read as a gender role, and butches said they were not comfortable using it. ^[8] Writing in 2020, the blog genderqueerpositivity described the design as "just an adaptation of the original, a blending of the modified versions, and you can't make people ignore or forget that." ^[12]

The argument has outlasted the flag's currency. The MOGAI Wiki's article on lesbian identity, which devotes a section to the flag history and dates the kissless version to the same 8 December 2013 Tumblr post, is editable only by request: it carries the notice "This article has been locked because it's a target of vandalism." ^[13]

Lineage

Evolved from

Lipstick Lesbian Flag

Direct children

Sunset Lesbian Flag, Orange-Pink Lesbian Precursor (2017)

Related flags

Butch Lesbian Flag (Butchspace, 2017), Labrys Lesbian Flag, Sapphic Flag

Sits between the Lipstick Lesbian Flag and the orange-pink branch. The pink palette Emily Gwen combined with butch-coded orange tones in 2018 is this one, McCray's colours carried forward without the subcommunity emblem, and Gwen said so herself: writing in June 2018, she described her ideal lesbian flag as a combination of the pink flag and the orange one. ^[14][9]

One later account goes further on the intermediate step. Writing in 2020, genderqueerpositivity described the orange-pink flag as "literally a blending of the modified lipstick lesbian flag and the butch flag (which was just the lipstick flag without the lipstick mark, but orange)." That would make the butch flag a recolour of this design rather than an independent line. No other located source states it that way, and it is recorded here as one account rather than as the relationship. ^[12]

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 7 records across 4 generations.

Ancestor

Lipstick Lesbian Flag

This record

Pink Lesbian Flag

Children

Orange-Pink Lesbian Precursor (2017), Sunset Lesbian Flag

Generation 3

Five-Stripe Sunset Lesbian Flag, Lesbian Lesboy Ally Flag, Lesbian Mspec Lesbian Ally Flag

Colors & Symbolism

No symbolism was issued with the design. The seven colours are the Lipstick Lesbian Flag's, carried over unchanged, and neither McCray nor whoever removed the mark published per-stripe meanings. The flag was used as a broader lesbian symbol than the lipstick-specific original, but that role was assigned by the people using it. ^[3]

Documented reproduction value, measured from the archive's standardized rendering and matching the Wikimedia Commons file of the parent flag ^[15][4]

This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.

The absence of published symbolism is itself one of the recorded objections: lesbianflaghistory lists "no deeper symbolism beyond 'shades of lipstick'" among the criticisms the flag drew as it spread. ^[3]

The palette is the Lipstick Lesbian Flag's, inherited unchanged: the same seven values in the same order, with only the kiss mark gone. No creator published values for either flag, and these are reproduction values rather than a specification. They are the values of the Wikimedia Commons illustration of the parent, which is the version in worldwide circulation, and they match the archive's own standardized rendering measured band by band. ^[15][4]

Design

Aspect Ratio

5:3

Ratio Notes

No ratio was issued for either this flag or its parent. The archive renders it at 5:3, its standard proportion, at 1,500 by 900 pixels. The Pride-Flags file of 2015 was 5,000 by 3,000, the same proportion. ^[2][4]

Orientation

horizontal

Stripe Count

7

Layout

horizontal_stripes

Stripes (Top → Bottom)

Dark Magenta, Medium Magenta-Pink, Light Magenta-Pink, White, Light Pink, Medium Pink-Red, Dark Red

Seven equal horizontal stripes, identical to the Lipstick Lesbian Flag with the lip print absent. The parent's Commons file is 1,575 by 945. ^[15]

Seven horizontal stripes in a magenta-to-white-to-red gradient, no emblem. Stripe colours identical to the Lipstick Lesbian Flag.

Usage & Adoption

Online Usage

Tumblr, from @trans-wife's compilation of 8 December 2013 and in wide circulation after @sappharah's post of 8 June 2016 (82,784 notes). ^[1][7][3], DeviantArt, published by the Pride-Flags account on 7 October 2015 at 5000 by 3000 pixels. ^[2]

Event Usage

Christopher Street Day, Berlin, 23 July 2022, carried alongside an orange-pink lesbian flag ^[10]

Current Status

active

A transitional design between the Lipstick Lesbian Flag and the orange-pink redesigns, and not the dominant current flag. Its use was concentrated on Tumblr from mid-2016. Participants in the 2018 replacement discussions cited the difficulty and expense of reproducing seven closely related shades: one flag proposer wrote that "the six different shades of pink can be extremely difficult to source in things like thread and material," and said merchandise carrying the design sold "so poorly that they don't even make enough off them to continue to pay to list them on online vending sites." The blog running the polls made the same point about replication and, when a five-stripe simplification of the eventual winner appeared, adopted it on those grounds. ^[8]

Image Archive

The 2018 replacement polls

Discourse & Debates

• Whether the kiss mark was removed as a deliberate broadening act or for practical image-conversion reasons. lesbianflaghistory argues the first removal it can document was technical rather than political, and that the broadening interpretation was applied afterwards by users. ^[3]

Common misidentifications

• Often confused with the Lipstick Lesbian Flag when the kiss distinction is ignored. The two are separate records here: this design is the parent without the mark, not the parent with a mark added. ^[15]

Criticisms

• Objection came from two directions. Butch lesbians contested the substitution of a lipstick-lesbian design for a general one at the time it happened. Separately, once the flag gained traction in 2016, lesbians objected to the palette itself, feeling excluded by an all-pink, femininity-coded scheme. That critique drove the later orange-pink redesign family, which introduced warm tones to broaden the visual coding. ^[3][16]
• The flag inherited the controversy surrounding Natalie McCray, designer of the parent Lipstick Lesbian Flag, whose blog carried racist and biphobic posts. Because the pink flag keeps her palette unchanged, some regard it as carrying that association whether or not the kiss mark is there. ^[3]

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

without kiss mark

• Redrawn from the documented reproduction values: seven equal stripes, no emblem, at the archive's standard 5:3. · Credit: Encycloflaggia · Reference: Wikimedia Commons, File:Lesbian Pride pink flag.svg
• Posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog during its 2018 replacement polls. The poll at 102 responses. ^[8] · Credit: @official-lesbian-flag-blog · Tumblr
• Posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog during its 2018 replacement polls. The same poll at 137 responses, posted with the note that it had "gotten ever so slightly more popular." ^[8] · Credit: @official-lesbian-flag-blog · Tumblr
• Posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog during its 2018 replacement polls. One of the four most popular designs in the first round: the orange-pink direction that Emily Gwen's redesign came out of the same year. ^[8] · Credit: Designs by contributors not named in the post; images as posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog · Tumblr
• Posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog during its 2018 replacement polls. One of the four most popular designs in the first round, keeping the seven-stripe format respondents said they wanted, "mirroring the lipstick flag." ^[8] · Credit: Designs by contributors not named in the post; images as posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog · Tumblr
• Posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog during its 2018 replacement polls. One of the four most popular designs in the first round. ^[8] · Credit: Designs by contributors not named in the post; images as posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog · Tumblr
• Posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog during its 2018 replacement polls. One of the four most popular designs in the first round, the one that broke with the stripe format entirely. ^[8] · Credit: Designs by contributors not named in the post; images as posted by @official-lesbian-flag-blog · Tumblr