The BIC® 4-Color™ Pen was created in 1970 and was meant to facilitate French students’ writing by providing four colours in one pen. While seen as a novelty at first, people soon realised the utility of packaging four colours into one.
The pen was made to be affordable and, in those days, disposable. The first advertisement in France boasted “4 colours for only 3 francs".
The “4C” had a little white ball at the top, representing the famous “Bic boy” head, from the trademark. In the 1970s it was used to dial the numbers on the old rotary phones. These days there’s a hole in that head, for use on a lanyard.
The pen is a favourite among students and nurses, who use different colours on medical charts for each shift.
Fixated on the pen as an industrial design object, journalist Rick Marin, researching for his piece “Just a Pen, you say? Not to Bic Boy” in The New York Times in 2000, tried to find out who invented it. The BIC people were not helpful. They cited only an “internal team”. He then quotes Donald Albrecht, a guest curator at the National Design Triennial at Cooper-Hewitt: “Trying to reclaim the history of these things is really hard. The brand becomes the designer, and the company forgets after a while who designed its products.”
Marin’s article is an homage to the pen. He writes:
“My pen is my life. Literally. Bic's four-color ballpoint is the organizing principle of my day-planner diary: blue for work-related entries; red for personal; black for illness, public appearances and acts of God; green for miscellaneous ‘creative projects’. Much more than just a pen, it's my Palm Pilot.” [Ed: Remember those?]
Here in Australia, Dr Mark Nethercote, a consultant paediatrician in Ballarat, Victoria opines in a 2017 piece for The Sydney Morning Herald:
“The ultimate joy in a four-pen is that it's non-conformist yet reliable, honest and faithful. It's not trying to be anything other than what it is. It is a pen for the visual in all of us. I hadn't quite understood until now, but it embodies the exact values I'm trying to instil in my own young family. I guess that's why I have 20 of them in my bag, ready to go, at any one time.”
Finally, some French school children have become obsessed with the pens. A collection craze of 4C limited editions (a relatively new product development) has led to theft and trading. “The four-colour pen from BIC has always seen strong infatuation from French schoolchildren”, says Astrid Canevet, European communication director for BIC in a 2022 issue of French news website The Connexion.
Does all of this make you want to go out and buy one?
Story Idea: Monty Coles
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Postscript
Photographer Monty Coles worked and lived in London, New York and Paris before moving to Australia where he shot major stories with Vogue for over a decade. We gave Monty the credit for this idea because it was his loyalty to the BIC 4-Color Pen (there was one always peeking out of his top pocket) that first brought it to our attention. Some things, taken out of their typical context, emit an energy that is otherwise hard to detect.
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References
plastics-themag.com/The-4-colour-BIC:-a-timeless-50-year-old-pen
smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-i-have-20-bic-fourcolour-pens-in-my-bag-20170914
nytimes.com/2000/03/16/garden/close-to-home-just-a-pen-you-say-not-to-bic-boy
connexionfrance.com/article/Practical/Family/French-school-pupils-obsession-with-Bic-pens-is-disrupting-classes
Images
1. BIC 4-Color Pen
2. BIC Boy in the BIC registered trademark
3. BIC founder Marcel Bich in 1953
4. One of the early French ads for the BIC 4-Color Pen
5. Faux historical ad for the BIC 4-Color Pen. Watch it HERE.
6. BIC 4-Color Pens pack of 3
7. Hole for lanyard
8. Photographer Monty Coles with Jean Paul Gaultier. Photo: Olivia Tran.
