ROME — When Inspector Luca Sita picked up two new N95 masks at his police station in Ferrara in central Italy on Thursday, he was thrown for a loop: One mask was white, and the other was pink.
Mr. Sita works in plainclothes, so he was more perplexed than vexed, but he immediately thought of his colleagues working the streets and in squad cars who had to intervene in various situations, including making arrests.
“Institutionally,” he said, wearing a pink mask “is a bad look.”
The pink in itself was not offensive, he said: A mask of any color other than white, black or blue, which match the national police uniform, would have been just as unacceptable.
“Green, orange — any lively color would have been unwearable,” he said.
The Sindacato Autonomo di Polizia, a trade union, immediately fired off a missive to Lamberto Giannini, Italy’s police chief, expressing “perplexity” that pink N95 masks had been sent to a few police stations in various regions.