‘What becomes of Emily?’ ‘Does June get Hannah back and will she end up with Nick or Luke?’ These are just some of the questions that fans of The Handmaid’s Tale are asking, as the sixth — and final — season of the show finally begins to air in the UK.

One such question is why, by the sixth series’ third episode, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) starts wearing a new series of outfits crafted in a different tone of pink in New Bethlehem. While no theories have been concretely confirmed or denied, there are some pretty interesting propositions out there as to why Gilead’s very own has made such a drastic sartorial switch.

Why does Serena wear pink in The Handmaid’s Tale season six?

We might have been hoping for Serena to have had baby Noah taken away from her and for her to have been made a Handmaid, but alas, this is Gilead and nothing is ever quite as it seems.

In the sixth season, we learn that Serena wasn’t arrested for war crimes on the way to Alaska and sent back to Gilead, instead she’s working as an ambassador in New Bethlehem. Her job involves her working towards Gilead reform and righting the wrongs she played a big part in; work which is being done as Serena sports an array of pastel pink clothes. But what exactly do the pink clothes mean?

There are several schools of thought; the first, given Serena has always worn different shades of pink, is that her character merely enjoys the colour pink. She wore the hue when she left Gilead and in other flashbacks throughout the show, she’s seen wearing pink-coloured normal clothes, meaning that given her new situation in the more liberal New Bethlehem, Serena may well just be wearing clothes that she likes, given that she can now leave the bluey greens associated with Wives behind and wear what she wants.

Another theory that’s convincing fans is that Serena’s embrace of the colour pink is a reference to Hannah (Jordana Blake) who, the last time audiences saw her, was wearing a pale lavender colour. Serena could’ve taken on this colour to symbolise her fertility and readiness to remarry and become a Wife again.

The final theory relates to The Handmaid’s Tale‘s spin-off The Testaments. In The Testaments, groups of women called the Pearl Girls act as missionaries, crossing into Canada and beyond in order to recruit women to convert to the Gilead faith.

Given that Serena’s role in New Bethlehem is still being figured out and as a widowed Wife with a child, she’s a bit of an anomaly, so the soft and gentle washes of pink may well be intended to highlight Serena as the original missionary. The pinks she wears, after all, are soft, feminine and motherly, and could be seen as a colour that the women Gilead wants to recruit, could relate to.

If Serena starts to lead the group of missionaries that become the Pearl Girls, then the overtly feminine colours she wears could act as the blueprint for the ultimate virginal/womanly uniform the Pearl Girls wear — silvery dresses and pearls.

One thing that’s for certain is that the series’ producers have long used colour as a means of typecasting their characters on the show; Handmaids wear red, Wives wear blue, and Marthas wear green, while in more recent series younger girls who are transitioning to womanhood seem to be dressed in pale lilacs.

The Handmaid’s Tale is on Prime Video and Channel 4 in the UK, on SBS and SBS on Demand in Australia and Hulu in the US.