She’s frustrated. Outfitted in head-to-toe pink—visor, hair, sweatshirt, shorts, running tights, and the satin ribbon on her Converse—she’s busy turning her (also pink) fanny pack this way and that, trying to conceal its black belt. “This strap is driving me nuts,” she murmurs.
Then, a lightbulb: She blouses her sweatshirt over it. “There!” she says, winking. “Pink positivity.”
Kitten Kay Sera is a monochromatic—someone who lives her life in a signature color—and almost everything in her apartment is pink, from her kitchen appliances to her cleaning supplies. Photos: JUCO Photography
It’s the kind of obsessiveness you’d expect from someone Ripley’s Believe It Or Not named the World’s Pinkest Person. Because Kitten Kay Sera isn’t just wearing pink for a photo shoot, or for the day, or on a whim. She’s a self-proclaimed “monochromatic,” someone who lives her life in nothing but her signature shade, and her commitment is complete: She’s going on 38 years of marriage to all things pink, from her wardrobe to her fridge to her pleather toilet seat. “I don’t ever venture from my color ever,” she says. “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to do another color. That’s how devoted I am.”
She’s not just tossing off the money thing, by the way. Being monochromatic isn’t some quirk Kitten indulges—her very singular eye for color is literally her full-time job, thanks to her robust social-media following and her willingness to entertain the world’s insatiable curiosity about her life. Kitten was recently featured in Netflix’s home-makeover show Amazing Interiors; she’s currently shooting an episode of a Yahoo series called Obsessed; and she has an upcoming project in London which she’s keeping close to the vest, although she did joke that “the Queen of Pink needs to meet the Queen of England.”
Kitten painted the walls of her one-bedroom apartment pink and special-ordered a pink fridge and bathtub.
Kitten calls her small, otherwise unremarkable one-bedroom West Hollywood apartment the Pink Pepto Palace—in part a nod to the national spot she’s shooting there for Pepto Bismol—and it’s as full-body pink as its occupant.
“This place is going to be a landmark!” Kitten says, grinning. Within a week of moving there 18 years ago, she’d slathered the walls in pink—the cabinets soon followed, and she’s since carpeted, coated her electrical outlets and carbon monoxide detector, and special-ordered everything from a fridge to a tub in her signature shade. The small thing that stands out most amidst this sea: Even Kitten’s cleaning supplies are pink.
Her countertops are currently cluttered with prop pink cakes and painted telephones from a recent music video in which she wears, among other things, a cotton-candy wig that she actually breaks off and eats on camera. She got it from a local restaurant that serves it on a mannequin head and had to rush it home and film before it melted. From that same shoot comes the most noteworthy item in her house: a giant pink coffin, plonked casually next to her kitchen alongside a faux tombstone. Pun-loving Kitten wanted to turn it into a “coffin table” but couldn’t make it work, so it’s waiting to journey to its final resting place: an 11-by-11 storage unit that’s basically her pink overflow zone.
The only concessions Kitten makes to the idea of a non-pink world are her popcorn ceiling (left untouched at the request of her landlord) and her toilet paper. There are three pink rolls over the commode, but they sit untouched; they’re hard to find, she explains, so they have to last. These are from eBay: “It smells like grandma’s attic, but so what? It’s pink!”
All told, from the tinted TP to her brand-new pink treadmill and everything in between, Kitten reckons she’s spent millions of dollars to turn her pad into a pink paradise.
“I don’t even do 50 shades of pink. I do a million shades of pink,” she says. “Pink is everything to me. Pink is compassion—it’s powerful, it’s punk, it’s soft, it’s flirty, it’s girly, it’s everything. It is all. I can’t say that about any other color.”
Running Pink Inc. is beyond a full-time job, especially when you need a coffin or a major appliance to change color on short notice. So for the past 18 months, Meg Gill—who confesses she doesn’t even really like pink that much; her hair is purple—has stood by Kitten’s side as her assistant, helping source what can’t be sourced and pinkify what must be pinkified. She made over the coffin herself with a paint roller.
“It’s used,” Gill says of the casket, delighting in the slack-jawed reaction to that statement. “New coffins are expensive. This one had been used 200 or 300 times for burials at sea.” She points to the base, which has a detachable panel. “It’s seen the world. I saged it out.”
Before she was able to earn real money off her monochromatic lifestyle, Kitten found a tall pink throne on Craigslist and paid for it by cleaning the owner’s home for three months.
Suddenly from across the apartment, where she’s donning a dyed-pink satin suit, Kitten can be heard belting a verse of Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” She appears and gestures expansively at the seven or so pink cell-phone covers lined up on her coffee table. “Is this a lifestyle or what?” she says, beaming.
For a person who calls herself “monochromatic,” Kitten is a colorful character. She is unfailingly warm. She’s peppy and cheerful even when missing an earring (it’s hard to find lost items in a space where everything is roughly the same color) and she all but bounces from room to room, giddy that she gets to so blatantly be who she is.
It wasn’t always like this. A testament to her early days sits in the corner of her living room: a tall pink throne underneath a custom neon sign that reads, in a casual half-cursive, “Queen of Pink.”
“It’s feast or famine in this city, and now I’m feast, thank God, but back then it was famine, and I saw that on Craigslist,” Kitten says, pointing to the chair. “I was totally broke at the time and I wrote the guy selling that and I said, ‘I’ll clean your house for a year.’ He was like, ‘Are you a good house-cleaner?’ and I said, ‘I’m the best.’ I was lying like a dog. But I went out and cleaned that house for three months to get it.”
She stops for a moment, overcome with tears. “I went from scrubbing those f*cking floors to sitting in that throne,” she says. “Working hard and keeping your eye on the prize, that’s everything I try to do.”
Kitten owns a customized pink Volkswagen, which she got for free in exchange for social-media promotion.
Kitten grew up in Texas in a family of artists and performers and dreamed of being a pop star. But she remembers the day in 1980 that pure pinkness popped into her life: On her birthday—she declines to say which, but The Sun put her at 53 earlier this year—the pink tennis shoes and sweatshirt she wore that day gave her a particular vibe.
Kitten dreamed of becoming a pop singer, but she became known for her distinctive pink look and landed commercial and TV work before social media helped make her famous.
“They weren’t anything special, and it wasn’t high fashion, but I just felt really good,” she recalls. “I felt like pink chose me. It just felt right, and I thought, ‘This is something I love. I love the way I feel.’” Over the course of the next year, she emptied her closet of anything that didn’t fit the bill—her four older sisters were her happy beneficiaries—and honed her resourcefulness by dyeing things like her white Doc Martens. “They liked it, but they thought I was going through a phase,” she says of her friends and family. “By the fifth year, they knew it was a lifestyle. I’m a pink passionista.”
But even the pinkest passionista could only go so far in Texas, so at the turn of the millennium, Kitten sold her classic pink 1967 car to finance a move to Hollywood. Her original goal was to sing, but she quickly got snapped up for commercial and TV work due to her distinctive look. Eventually, she changed her name—Kitten is a childhood nickname; Kay Sera is a twist on “Que Sera Sera” in honor of one of her similarly chipper inspirations, Doris Day—and finally social media caught on to her.
Kitten’s rise to fame in the 2010s happened to coincide with the explosion of millennial pink—not that she buys into the hype: “It’s not really pink, it’s almost tan,” she says. “Some of that new stuff is not pink to me—it’s a dusty beige.”
By 2013, she was raking in endorsem*nt deals for TV commercials and Instagram, where she has more than 81,000 followers, and by renting out her apartment for celebrity photo shoots. She finagled a customized pink Volkswagen for free in exchange for the sheer power of a pinkstagram social-media push. She’s also written a children’s book called Miss Kisses - The Pup Who Turned Pink based on her own dyed-to-match pooch (safely, she insists, via beet-based coloring), and she auditioned for America’s Got Talent in 2017.
Kitten goes to great lengths to pinkify her life, including dyeing a satin suit in her signature color. Photos: JUCO Photography
She’s even megastar-approved: When Kitten began recording music of her own a few years ago, she hired a fellow alumna from her performing-arts school in Houston to sing backup vocals. You might have heard of her. “I used to go in and mentor the girls, and I asked the choir teacher who her standout student was. She said it was Beyoncé,” Kitten recalls. “My friend was like, ‘She isn’t going to agree to it,’ and I said, ‘Wait and see.’ Tell me I can’t do something, and it makes me want to do it more and harder.”
Bam: Both Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland came in and did vocals, and the Houston Chronicle, in 2013, reported it with this lede: “Beyoncé doesn’t do backup. Unless you’re her husband. Or Kitten Kay Sera.” Says Kitten, with a wink, “I was tickled pink.”
The good news is Kitten doesn’t mind venturing out into a world that isn’t as pink as she is. When she travels, she might bring her own bedsheets, but she mostly relies on the pink contents of her pink suitcases to give hotel rooms a rosy glow. Her favorite drink is a pinktini—a martini with pomegranate juice—or strawberry Nesquik, but she enjoys food too much to keep to a pink diet.
When it comes to love, though, pink appreciation is a must-have. “I had a date with this guy. We go out and halfway through the date, I’m like, ‘So what do you think?’ Because usually I get some kind of comment. And he said, ‘Oh, you’re wearing pink? It’s all gray to me. I’m color-blind,’” she says, giggling at the memory. “I need someone who can appreciate the pink and see how great it is. So I gave him the pink slip.”
A treadmill is one of the most recent additions to Kitten’s all-pink abode, which includes even a pink coffin.
Ultimately, Kitten’s goal is to produce a documentary about herself and some of the world’s other monochromatics (she’s not the only one, although she is the pinkest), as well as write her autobiography, tentatively titled My Big Pink Life. Beyond that, it’s que sera, sera for Kitten Kay Sera, and if you don’t like it, you’re the one missing out.
“Not everyone is going to love everything I do or who I am, but I think if you are true to yourself and are genuinely happy with your life and yourself it really doesn’t matter,” Kitten says.
“Sometimes people are going to reject you because you shine too brightly for them. Baby, I’m a shine machine.”
Visit the Fug Girls on their website, or follow them on Twitter. Their book, The Royal We, is available here.
