UNITED STATES (THE WASHINGTON POST) - Maybe you'll start your day with a pink smoothie bowl, full of chia seeds and raspberries and other pink fruits. On your way to work, you'll pick up a Starbucks pink drink - a "crisp, Strawberry Acai Refreshers Beverage, with...accents of passion fruit" and an Instagram cult following.

But it's not just about alcohol. The colour itself came to take on the qualities we associated with rose - which were, in part, assigned by marketers. Free-spiritedness, casual luxury, youth, popularity: These are all qualities brands would like to associate with their products. They're also inherently Instagrammable: Just look at the more than 13,000 photos with the millennial pink hashtag on Instagram.

But most pink foods and beverages are unambiguously marketed toward women. A Bloomberg News article about La Croix's triumph over its sparkling-water competition notes that "National Beverage originally marketed LaCroix as a women's drink," handing it out at women's sporting events and partnering with Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It has male fans, too, but men make only sporadic appearances in La Croix's hyper-feminine Instagram account, which features plenty of flower crowns, millennial pink nail polish and a "La Croix Over Boys" T-shirt.

La Croix's customer base "skews more towards professional women," said a spokesman for the brand, though he said their marketing targets many demographics.

The divide is especially apparent at Pietro Nolita. "We have a few dudes that come to the restaurant, but I think they come with their girlfriends," Quaglia said. "I would love to have more men, but I feel like some men are a little bit insecure about the fact that the place is so pink." Is all any of this pink stuff as good as it looks? That's in the eye, and taste buds, of the beholder, of course. But pink food fatigue is setting in: "While no one can deny that rose rhymes with #allday and #yesway and s'il vous plait, for me, the truly telling coincidence is that it rhymes with okay," wrote Sarah Miller in a recent Eater essay. Okay, as in: meh.

But pink is here to stay, at least until another colour knocks it off its peppermint-coloured pedestal."This is a trend right now, and every trend leaves and there's another trend," Quaglia said. But pink, he believes, is eternal. "This millennial concept, I don't really get it. Yes, it's cool now, but...pink has been around longer than that." What colour will be next? According to industry-watchers, all bets are on purple.