Colour Preferences of Men and Women
Studies of colour preferences by sex give different answers at different ages. The laboratory lean towards red in young women, the toddler split at about two and a half, and the Swiss favourites each measure something else.
Answer to the question
Do men and women have different colour preferences?
Sometimes, and the gap depends on age, country and how it is measured. Toddlers show none before about two and a large one near three. Adults mostly drop pink as a favourite, and women lean towards red in several samples. Blue is the commonest favourite for both sexes. A Saudi and English comparison did not repeat the 2007 pattern.
Key takeaways
- Anya Hurlbert's 2007 letter, reported with 171 British and 37 Chinese young adults, found both sexes leaned towards blue and women leaned further towards the red end of the red-green dimension.
- A 2015 rerun with Saudi and English participants, 71 and 38 as reported, found male curves alike across countries and female curves not, and concluded a universal sex difference in red-green weighting was not supported.
- A 2010 study found no sex difference in pink or blue preference at 12 to 24 months. A 2011 study of 192 children and a 2015 study of 126 toddlers found the split opening between about two and three.
- In Jonauskaite's 2019 Swiss samples, almost no adult of either sex named pink as a favourite, women favoured red more than men, and blue stayed common.
Asked whether men and women have different colour preferences, most people answer from the toy aisle, and the toy aisle says yes. Shops sort clothes, bedding and toys by sex, so the answer feels settled before anyone checks. Researchers who asked it of adults in a laboratory, of toddlers in a nursery and of teenagers on a questionnaire found three different gaps, because each measured something different at a different age. A rapid choice between two coloured rectangles is one measurement. A two-year-old reaching for a pink coaster is another. An adult naming a favourite colour is a third. The better question is which gap, measured how, in whom and from what age.
Young Adults Choosing Between Coloured Rectangles
Anya Hurlbert of Newcastle University and a co-author ran the best-known laboratory test and reported it in Current Biology. Young adults chose, as fast as they could, between pairs of coloured rectangles on a screen. The team summarised each person's choices as two weights, one on the blue-yellow dimension of colour vision and one on the red-green dimension.
Both sexes leaned towards blue. Women leaned further than men towards the red end of the red-green dimension, which pulled their colour preferences towards pinks and lilacs, and the Chinese volunteers differed in the same direction, with Chinese men and women both preferring red more than the British group did. Hurlbert offered an evolutionary reading: women who were good at spotting ripe red fruit may have been favoured during early humans' gathering, and culture could then amplify the tendency. She called her account of why blue is liked speculation, and the team planned to test infants next. What the letter reports is a lean along one colour dimension in two groups of young adults, with blue ahead for everyone.
Press reports of the 2007 letter put the sample at 208 volunteers aged 20 to 26, 171 of them British and 37 recent arrivals from mainland China. The letter's abstract, read at Newcastle's repository, states the method and reports a consistent sex difference in those weights across cultures, without sample counts. The counts above come from the press accounts, which give no effect sizes, so the size of the lean cannot be judged here.
Does a Second Country Draw the Same Curve?
In 2015 a psychologist at King Saud University in Riyadh repeated the method with Saudi and English participants and published it in Frontiers in Psychology. The stimuli were eight hues at one fixed lightness and one fixed saturation, shown on a calibrated monitor in a dark room, in 56 paired trials, to people screened for normal red-green colour vision. The samples were small, 71 Saudi and 38 English participants as reported.
The male curves looked alike across the two countries, peaking in blue-green. The female curves did not. Saudi women peaked in the red-pink region, English women nearer purple and blue-green. The author concluded that a universal, evolutionary sex difference in red-green weighting "is not supported", and that colour preferences vary with both sex and culture.
Arabic and English preference curves were found to differ, yet there was greater similarity for Arabic and English males than Arabic and English females.
In both papers culture moved the curves, and in the 2007 letter the Chinese volunteers of both sexes sat further towards red than the British. If a difference between the sexes shifts with the country, something is being learned, and the next question is when.
When and Where Pink Preferences Take Hold
Infants give the first clue about when colour preferences diverge. A 2010 study by Vasanti Jadva, Melissa Hines and Susan Golombok used a looking task with 120 infants aged 12, 18 or 24 months and found no significant sex differences in preferences for colours or shapes. Girls and boys alike preferred reddish colours over blue. The authors suggested that girls may learn to prefer pink because the toys they enjoy are often pink.
The split shows up afterwards. A 2011 study in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology offered children from 7 months to 5 years eight pairs of objects, one always pink. By age two girls chose pink more often than boys did, and by two and a half they had a significant preference for it, while boys showed a growing avoidance.
The paper's abstract gives the pattern. The detail below comes from the British Psychological Society's Research Digest report of it, and the paper's tables were not read. There were 192 children, offered pairs of small objects identical but for colour, with pink against green, blue, yellow or orange. Girls chose pink just under 80 per cent of the time at age four, and boys about 20 per cent by age five.
A second experiment with 64 children aged two to three found both sexes choosing pink about half the time, which is chance, under two and a half, and the split opening between two and a half and three. The authors argued that a biological predisposition should show regardless of experience with gender concepts, and the timing coincides with the age at which children start to talk about gender. The supposed calming power of pink is a separate claim, taken apart in [What the Pink Cell Never Proved](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/does-pink-really-calm-people-down).
The longest look comes from 126 toddlers, 29 months old on average at the start and tested again six to eight months later, in a study by Hines and a co-author. Sex differences in colour preferences appeared between ages two and three and, near the third birthday, were large, with an effect size above 1, which means the group averages sat more than one standard deviation apart. The toddlers' preferences were stronger and less stable than their parents', emerged later than their toy and activity preferences, and were largely unrelated to them. The authors suggested social and cognitive influences, together with play with toys that happen to come in gender-typed colours.
Why would a colour attached to one group's toys come to be liked by that group? The general account is ecological valence theory, set out in 2010 by Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss: colour preferences track the average feeling about the things a colour is attached to. Their account of blue is in [Why Brands Reach for Blue](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-brands-reach-for-blue). The same machinery appears in a plain adult case. In a 2011 study led by Schloss, 57 Berkeley and 46 Stanford students rated 40 colours one at a time, and each group rated its own university's colours above its rival's, with the gap widening as self-rated school spirit rose. The authors read this as learned association.
The Berkeley and Stanford result shows group membership moving liking in adults. For toddlers, the chain from a colour's attachments to a child's sense of belonging is the authors' proposal, and the 2015 toddler study reads as consistent with it.
Favourite Colours Named by Adults
Favourites that adults name tell a quieter story. Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues asked Swiss participants to state their colour preferences by naming a favourite colour from an unrestricted set, in a 2019 paper in Sex Roles titled "Pink for girls, red for boys, and blue for both genders". Among 129 children aged 10 to 14, girls chose pink or purple more often than boys did, boys chose red more often than girls, and blue was the commonest favourite for both. Among 180 adults aged 17 to 48, almost nobody of either sex chose pink as a favourite, women were more likely than men to favour red, and blue stayed common.
How red behaves on a person, as opposed to being liked, is covered in [What Red Actually Does](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-red-actually-does). Red is also where the 2007 laboratory curves and the Swiss questionnaires meet, a tilt towards it in women, and the Saudi and English curves meet it only for Saudi women.
A third study of 183 Swiss participants asked about emotions. Pink was linked with positive emotions as much as blue and red were, women linked more positive emotions to pink than men did, and the emotions did not fully explain the differences in liking. The authors tie the pattern to gender stereotypes and to status differences between women and men.
| Account | Best evidence | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Colour-vision biology | Hurlbert's 2007 letter: young British and Chinese adults, women leaning towards red | A Saudi and English comparison in 2015 did not repeat the pattern, and infants under two show no gap |
| Learned association | The 2011 and 2015 child studies, Schloss 2011 in adults | Where the adult lean towards red comes from |
| Stereotype and status | Jonauskaite 2019, Swiss children and adults | The authors' emotion test did not account for the gap, and all the samples are Swiss |
What the Book Forecast for Hospital Rooms
Your Brain on Art, by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, does not address sex differences in colour preference, and nothing in it bears on the studies above. It treats colour as something to apply. Pages 40 and 41 report that people in a grey room had higher heart rates, that mild blues and greens calm a workplace while yellow helps attention, and that red objects must be about half a degree Celsius hotter than blue ones before they register as warm. Each is introduced as "one study", "in one study" or "a fascinating study in 2014", with no author, year or title in the text. Page 239 lists hospital rooms with preferential colour among its personalised settings of the future.
Personalised colour needs a rule for choosing it, and the research on colour preferences supplies a poor one. Sex fares badly on this evidence: the gap is absent in infants, very large at three, mostly gone from pink in adults, and different from one country to the next. Every study above measured what individuals chose, and the pattern moved with the group each individual belonged to.
Those passages cannot be weighed here, and this piece makes no claim about colour and health. The premise that preference should be the input is the part the research can speak to, and it sides with asking. A room painted for a sex is a guess, and one painted for its occupant starts with asking.
Common questions
Do men and women have different colour preferences?
Sometimes, and the gap depends on age, country and how it is measured. Toddlers show none before about two and a large one near three. Adults mostly drop pink as a favourite, and women lean towards red in several samples. Blue is the commonest favourite for both sexes. A Saudi and English comparison did not repeat the 2007 pattern.
Is a girl's liking for pink inborn?
The toddler studies point to learning. A 2010 study of 120 infants found no sex difference in colour preference at 12 to 24 months, and the 2011 experiments found the split opening between two and a half and three, when children start to talk about gender. Hurlbert's 2007 letter argues for a biological component in the lean towards red, which is a different claim from a liking for pink.
Which colour do most people like best?
Blue. Both sexes leaned towards it in the 2007 laboratory sample, and it was the commonest favourite among Swiss children and common among Swiss adults. Palmer and Schloss trace such colour preferences to what blue is attached to, such as clear skies and clean water.
Sources
Hurlbert, A. C., & Ling, Y. (2007). 'Biological components of sex differences in color preference.' Current Biology, 17(16), R623-R625. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.022. Sample counts are from ScienceDaily (20 August 2007) and Scientific American.
Al-Rasheed, A. S. (2015). 'An experimental study of gender and cultural differences in hue preference.' Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 30. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00030. Read at the publisher's page. Participant counts as stated there: 71 Arabic (Saudi) and 38 English.
LoBue, V., & DeLoache, J. S. (2011). 'Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences.' British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29(3), 656-667. doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02027.x. Sample sizes and percentages are from the British Psychological Society's Research Digest (5 September 2011).
Wong, W. I., & Hines, M. (2015). 'Preferences for pink and blue: The development of color preferences as a distinct gender-typed behavior in toddlers.' Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44(5), 1243-1254. Read at the publisher's page.
Jadva, V., Hines, M., & Golombok, S. (2010). 'Infants' preferences for toys, colors, and shapes: Sex differences and similarities.' Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39(6), 1261-1273. doi:10.1007/s10508-010-9618-z.
Jonauskaite, D., Dael, N., Chèvre, L., Althaus, B., Tremea, A., Charalambides, L., & Mohr, C. (2019). 'Pink for girls, red for boys, and blue for both genders: Colour preferences in children and adults.' Sex Roles, 80(9-10), 630-642. doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0955-z. Citation confirmed through Crossref; sample sizes and findings from the abstract record.
Palmer, S. E., & Schloss, K. B. (2010). 'An ecological valence theory of human color preference.' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(19), 8877-8882. doi:10.1073/pnas.0906172107.
Schloss, K. B., Poggesi, R. M., & Palmer, S. E. (2011). 'Effects of university affiliation and school spirit on color preferences: Berkeley versus Stanford.' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(3), 498-504. doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0073-1.
Magsamen, S., & Ross, I. (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Edinburgh: Canongate. Pages 40 to 41 and 239. Read through the vault source notes and audit; the colour passages give no study names and are not relied on as evidence.