Fact: pink is the first colour that any living creature on Earth ever wore.

We might live in more accepting, gender-fluid times, but as anyone who has recently attempted to buy a Babygro – or, please make it stop, attended a “gender reveal party” – will tell you, stubborn societal conventions suggest that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. Speaking on their behalf, Ms Janelle Monáe’s recent hit “Pynk” declared girls to be fine with this, reclaiming pink for the feminist cause. “Cos boy it’s cool if you got blue/ We got the pink,” she sings, alluding to the colour of a particular, ahem, feature of the female anatomy.

But while it is true that most men’s wardrobes are awash with navies, pink has increasingly seen a resurgence, notably in its dusty “millennial” form, which was embraced as the colour of last year. Where way back in an early 1990s episode of The Simpsons, a rogue red hat in with a white wash had Homer branded a “free-thinking anarchist” and slung into a mental institution, in most offices today, colleagues are unlikely to bat an eyelid should you rock up to your desk in the morning wearing a pink shirt.

However, by taking things back to our biological core, Ms Monáe might be onto something. This month, scientists from the Australian National University unearthed the oldest known organic pigmentation (in other words, the first colour of a living creature in the world) – and it’s bright pink.

The vibrant colouring belonged to tiny cyanobacteria, 1,000 times smaller than microscopic algae, which lived in the ocean some 1.1 billion years ago, and was found in a marine shale deposit in the Taoudeni Basin, beneath what is now the Sahara desert.

What this means today is that – deep down, at a cellular level, buried way back along the ancestral line – there’s a bit of pink in all of us. Handily, if you fancy embracing any primordial preference for a pink pigmentation, MR PORTER has plenty of particulars to provide for your perusal. And why not – used wisely, pink will actually complement most other colours. Below, then, is an edit of the corals, salmons, fuchsias and roses that have piqued our interest over the past few months.