Blue is what most women liked about

In the course of the most recent 100 years, a lot of work has been done to get some information about their preferred shading. Practically these investigations show that the most well known shading for individuals (regardless of whether male or female) is blue. Below is an infographic from What’s your favorite color? [Infographic] who surveyed 3,750+ people from 141 countries about their favourite colour.

You can see that blue was the most mainstream shading for the two guys and females. Note, nonetheless, that red and purple were somewhat more well known with females than with guys.

When we look at all the colours females do tend to prefer warmer colours than males; so, for example, they might both like blue but females may prefer redder blues than their male counter-parts.

I had a neighbour who undertook her whole PhD about the colour black. One of the things that she found was that females prefer slightly warmer (redder) blacks whereas males prefer slightly cooler (greener) blacks. This could have implications for the design of mobile devices, for example. Anyway, this finding was not inconsistent with the general trend that I have observed that females in general prefer slightly warmer shades of colours.

For children the situation is quite different with pink being very popular with young girls. This is no doubt reinforced by marketing campaigns. Go into any toy store and look at the toys for young girls – it is a sea of pink.

I should point out that although in general people prefer blue, you can see that even in my study more than 10% of people prefer red. I am one of those. I love red and dislike blue. Why are there individual differences in colour preference? I like the explanations offered by Stephen Palmer, an academic in California. Good Stephen Palmer and Ecovalence Theory of Colour Preference for more if you are interested.