The theory of females preferring pinks and reds while men blues and greens goes back to our hunter-gatherer past, a new study by Chinese scientists has shown. “As the gatherers of the operation, women’s brains became fine-tuned to the purples and reds of ripe fruits and berries, meanwhile men developed a preference for the clear blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting,” said the Zhejiang University researchers.
They reached the conclusion after analysing more than 350 students, who were asked to study 11 colours for three minutes, and then ranked them in order of preference. The students also underwent personality tests. This result showed the women to favour pink, purple and white and the men to like blue and green. The experiment also revealed introverted men to be fond of yellow and neurotic women to be keen on grey. Orange went down well with women with a sunny disposition, while brown was out of favour with both sexes.
“The colour white, usually associated with clean, pure, harmonious and refreshing concepts, and which is usually preferred in Eastern countries, was preferred by our female participants,” the Daily Mail quoted the researchers as saying. “Moreover, consistent with many previous studies, the women in our study preferred ‘reddish’ colours – purple and pink – to ‘bluish’ ones – blue and green. This result fitted well with the hunter-gatherer theory on sex difference.” The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
