The Pink Girl Returns Kitsch to the Cairo Home With Eccentric Homeware

Whenever we sit down to watch our favourite pristine period pieces (i.e. romcoms), yearning glasses on and ready to long for times we have never known, we’re hit with a foreign colour palette. Yellow kitchens, green bathrooms and red bedrooms catch us off guard in our strictly minimalistic white-walled apartments. As our minds stray from the plots we know by heart (someone ends up getting mail or something), we tend to linger more on the little trinkets that make the houses onscreen homes and wonder what on earth happened to urban living. 

When did Cairo get painted in exclusively white, beige and grey? 

This is the question Zeina El Sirgany asked herself in the founding stages of homeware art brand The Pink Girl. What started as a cathartic release of artistic ability in a point of stagnancy soon blossomed into a revolution in pink, one that is making its way into Cairene homes. 

El Sirgany and art have walked together since the beginning of her life. Her first exhibition, at age 11, marked the inauguration of this beautiful affair, and put her on the track to build a career in the field. In 2020, when COVID-19 hit, El Sirgany found herself at a point of stagnancy, feeling like her art carried no centre, no identity. In a wave of frustration, she sat down with a canvas and, behind the comfortable confines of quarantine privacy, was able to paint with the most ease and comfort she had experienced throughout her career. It was on this fateful night that The Pink Girl was born, peeping at El Sirgany from her very own canvas. 

“I was thinking about people not defining themselves by the objects that surround them,” El Sirgany tells SceneHome. “Ironically, I surrounded her in the painting with really expensive things - a rendition of the most expensive painting in the world, for example. And yet, The Pink Girl remained detached.”

There she was - very pink, naked and with very prominent hair on her shins. Her mission? To redefine pink. 

“My whole life I was obsessed with the colour pink,” El Sirgany says. “We all know how it’s portrayed normally. I wanted to challenge that, to view pink in a more abstract way, and allow people to incorporate it more in fields like design.”

In 2021, El Sirgany seized the opportunity of The Pink Girl as an alter ego, and launched the brand as a means to commodify her art in a more accessible way. Compared to purchasing El Sirgany’s paintings, The Pink Girl’s prints were more affordable, lighter and simply a more versatile pop of colour for offices and homes. The Pink Girl became where El Sirgany could have her fun with prints and other stationery. 

Left to her own, the Pink Girl could not, of course, stay still. Driven by stubborn defiance, she couldn’t possibly allow herself to slip into the conventionally defined. So, just when people got comfortable with the Pink Girl being what it - she - is, she shifted, creating a collection of beautiful homeware, including dotted milk vases, textured mugs, adorable bird pots, and floral wine glasses.

“I feel like people are kind of afraid of experimenting with colour,” El Sirgany shares. “So, that was a big goal: to add colour to the decor and make it chic in a way that could encourage them to do so. Future Pink Girl products would also serve the same purpose, following in the vision for eccentric, and chic, home decor.”

And just like that, The Pink Girl began her crusade of all things peculiar through our feeds and homes. 

“It’s a very niche brand. It has very strange items. That’s my plan, I want all my items later on to be strange and unique,” El Sirgany says. “It definitely brings uniqueness, style, colour, and confidence into a home. It elevates surroundings in a bit of an eccentric way. It would just be the type of product that when someone comes into your home they’d be like, ‘What is this?’. It’s just a conversation sparker.”

Perhaps most striking of her products are the twin glass flowers, a two-piece set of flower-shaped wine glasses that took El Sirgany on adventures through the glass-throwing workshops of Cairo in the pursuit of the perfect flower. “The Pink Girl is not just about redefining pink, it’s also pink in the presence of green and nature and plants. It’s incorporating colour and nature at the core.”

Naturally, a brand that assumes the very definition of uniqueness must preach it in every creation, which is, according to El Sirgany, “Individually moulded, coloured and baked based on the first mockup. It’s a very personal process. I’m not the only artist in the equation, there are many more people involved and these individual differences just accentuate each piece’s beauty.”

When Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip commenced in October 2023, El Sirgany created a print for Palestine, and then donated all of the proceeds from the project. “The Palestine poster was created to facilitate donations for Palestine, including moving hospital beds, sanitary pads, and more medical supplies to Palestine,” El Sirgany explains. “This poster was very tricky, because I wanted it to feel warm and relatable, without making it too dark, but I still wanted it to be as emotional as the situation is. It was a very emotional project of course, but the donations ended up being very useful.”