pink or red?

The purpose of this blog is to collate all sorts of interesting facts and news stories for which colour is a main component and also to provide some education about colour and colour science. So I scan the newspapers and websites for interesting stories about colour that I can comment on (actually, I mainly look at news stories on google). Over the last three years or so I have come across all kinds of interesting topics but today I came across something quite unexpected.

Today I came across some research led by Sarah Johns at the University of Kent that reveals that men prefer pink female genitals to red ones. Her team set up a website that allowed women to submit (anonymously, you will be pleased to know) photographs of their parts. Four of these photos were each retouched (digitally) so that one pale pink, another light pink, one dark pink and the final one red. They then asked 40 heterosexual men to rate each of the 16 images on a scale of 0-100 for attractiveness. The researchers had thought that men may prefer red vulvas since it is commonly thought that red lipstick and clothing is a proxy for genitals. So it was somewhat surprising when they found that men preferred the pink photographs to the red ones.

For more details on this story please visit here.

One thought on “pink or red?

  1. And sort of related to this I came across a story today that psychologists at the University of South Brittany in France have carried out research that finds that men think that a scarlet-clad woman is more likely to sleep with them on a first date than a woman clad in other colours. The work, which involved 120 male student volunteers, was published in the Journal of Social Psychology.

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