Seeing Red: Anger or Attraction?

In western societies, the colour red is often linked inextricably with sex. Red lipstick and a red dress are likely to send a red blooded man’s pulse racing. Experimental evidence shows that when the same woman wears red, yellow, green, blue, white or black clothing, it’s the red ensemble that best boosts her beauty.

There’s got to be a reason for that red bikini. And those red sandals. And the red lipstick. And the red nail polish. Also: a pearl bracelet on the beach? Classy! Illusion by Stephen Coles is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

And the effect isn’t confined to the lab, either: the undisputed king of the attractiveness psychology field study, Nicolas Gueguen, showed in 2010 that female hitchhikers who wear red are more successful at soliciting lifts from male drivers than are hitchhikers who wear other colours. If the drivers were female rather than male, the red-clad hitchhikers were no more successful than if they wore yellow, blue or green, suggesting that it can’t be that men simply prefer red: they prefer women who wear red.

There could be several reasons for our associating red with sex and attractiveness. Perhaps because red is used to signal romance and sexual availability — with red roses, red love hearts and red light districts prominent examples — we’ve been conditioned to link red with arousal. Or it could be that the connection is deeper, with a biological basis that stretches back to our pre-human ancestors. After all, we all know what happens to the colour of a female chimpanzee’s backside when her fertility reaches its peak.

Maybe this is overdoing it a touch? Young women who wear red (and are surrounded by red) are more attractive to men. BB & 1954 Packard (6) by David Clow is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Andrew Elliot and his colleagues at the University of Rochester in New York decided to test whether the human preference for red is universal by catching a flight to Burkina Faso, a small landlocked nation in west Africa. Conveniently for the researchers, the people of rural Burkina have little access to Western media and so are unlikely to have been swayed by our own cultural associations of red with sex. In fact, in Burkina the colour red has associations of its own that are pretty negative, as there the colour is commonly taken to represent bad luck, sickness and death.

The researchers presented men from Burkina with photographs of women and asked them to rate how positively they felt towards each woman. One group of men saw photographs with a red border, and another saw the same photographs with a blue border. The results of the experiment showed that men who saw the red bordered photographs rated the women as more attractive and were more interested in courting them then were men who’d seen the blue-bordered photographs.

Schwarz found that young woman pictured in front of the red background was perceived by the men to be more appealing than the same young woman in front of the grey background

So the effect of red on women’s attractiveness appears to be consistent across cultures. But is it consistent across women and men of different ages?

She’s a good looking lady, but women of her age are unlikely to find their beauty boosted by a red top or red jewellery, found Schwarz. Amaa hugging goat by *saipal is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A second study on the red effect was published this month by Sascha Schwarz of the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany. She stopped men as they walked around a local shopping district or the university campus and showed them a photograph of a woman. The woman was either in her 20s or her 50s and was pictured in front of a red or a grey background. Additionally, the men Schwarz stopped were either in their 20s or their 50s too. The men rated the sexual attractiveness of the women and, as expected, Schwarz found that young woman pictured in front of the red background was perceived by the men to be more appealing than the same young woman in front of the grey background.

But Schwarz also found that there was no effect of background colour on the sexual attractiveness of the older woman. So red doesn’t boost beauty across the board: it only works when the woman already appears young and fertile. Unfortunately for men, their preference for young women in the presence of red doesn’t diminish as they themselves age. Men in their 50s might find it more difficult to woo a woman in her 20s, but they still find those women more attractive when they slap on the scarlet.

Elliot, A. J., Tracy, J. L., Pazda, A. D., & Beall, A. T. (in press). Red enhances women’s attractiveness to men: First evidence suggesting universality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Read summary

Schwarz, S., & Singer, M. (in press). Romantic red revisited: Red enhances men’s attraction to young, but not menopausal women. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Read summary

The content of this post first appeared in the August 2012 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.