this just in: study finds men think red is sexy, woo-hoo!

I love a good study reported as news.  Don’t you?  Here are the results of a study of which I’m trying to decipher.  The following is from CNN.com by Theresa Tampkins (from the Health section).

Does wearing the color red give you a sexual edge? Maybe, according to a new study, which found that men find women sexier if they’re sporting a crimson hue rather than, say, blue or green.

One of the images used in the study that found red clothing fans the flames of passion.

One of the images used in the study that found red clothing fans the flames of passion.

However, red won’t make you look smarter or more competent, says study author Andrew Elliot, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York.

“We only found the effect for attraction, so males don’t rate females in red as more intelligent, more likable, or as having a better personality; they only rate her as sexier and more attractive,” he says.

Men also were more likely to say they wanted to have sex with a woman and that they would be willing to spend more on a date if she were in red, according to the report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In a series of five studies, about 150 heterosexual men (homosexual men and those with red-green color blindness were excluded) rated photographs of women framed in red, white, gray, green, or blue, or with the woman in a red or blue shirt. On a 7-point scale, with 1 being the least sexy and 7 a white-hot sex goddess, the color red added about 1.25 points to the rating, says Elliot.

So, just to be clear, is it only while women are wearing red?  What if you — and I’m not naming names or anything — have red hair? You know, like any of the 2 -6% of us in the US who have naturally red hair.  Guess we’ll never know.  Damn, I’ll never know if I’m sexy or not.  Guess I’ll have to conduct my own study.  I’ll be hanging out in Home Depot tomorrow afternoon in the power tool section.

I love the part about not rating females in red as more intelligent or likable, because frankly, who the hell cares?  Even more, I LOVE the part where they state homosexual men and men with red-green color blindness were excluded from the study.  Yeah, that would have made the study useless! By the way is “white-hot sex goddess” a scientific term?  I’ll have to ask some friends in the scientific community.  I’m pretty sure I missed that in my biology classes, but I might have been writing “Mrs. Andrew McCarthy” on my Trapper Keeper the day that was covered.

Being a redhead, I’ve never worn a lot of red.  But now that I’ve thought about it a little, I do get a lot of attention when I wear my red cardigan.  No man can resist a chick in a cardigan.  That just screams white-hot sex goddess.

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