Women Wear Pink When They Ovulate
When you’re getting dressed for work, or maybe to go out in the evening, how do you decide what to wear? Maybe you check the weather forecast and throw on a few extra layers if the sun isn’t shining? Or maybe you think about where you’re going, and what you’d like to seen wearing when you get there? I don’t know, maybe you close your eyes and grab the first thing off the rack. But it could also be the case — at least if you’re a woman — that the time of the month influences your clothing choices.
We already know that women become facially more attractive, speak with more attractive voices, and even smell more attractive around the time of ovulation, when the chances of becoming pregnant are highest. Researchers have speculated that this might help women to snare the most attractive men when it counts the most. In the same way that chimpanzee and bonobo females develop swollen red backsides during the oestrus phase of their cycles, red backsides that the males find irresistible, human females might advertise their own fertility through changes in their appearance, voice and odour.
80% of women who reported wearing red or pink were near ovulation
But perhaps their strongest signals come from the clothes they choose to wear.
Researchers have established that women choose to wear more revealing clothes and spend more time on their hair and makeup when they’re ovulating. Alec Beall and Jessica Tracy of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, wondered whether women’s clothing choices might be about more than how much skin they show. Realising that the colour red is associated with attraction not only in chimpanzees but across the animal kingdom, they decided to test whether women are more likely to dress in red during the fertile, middle-part of their cycles.
Beall and Tracy ran a simple online survey. They asked 100 normally-cycling non-pill-using American women what colour shirt they were currently wearing. They also asked the women how long it had been since their last period, which allowed them to work out whether the women were currently ovulating. The women were classified as wearing a red or pink shirt or a shirt of any other colour. The researchers found that women at the fertile phase of their cycles were substantially more likely to be wearing a red or pink-coloured shirt compared to women at the less fertile phases. In fact, around 80% of women who reported that they were wearing red or pink were near ovulation, making red or pink clothing an extremely good indicator of fertility status.
Beall and Tracy suggest that women may choose red clothes because there is biological link between sex and the colour red. Many animals, male and female alike, advertise their attractiveness with red displays: from the European robin to the stickleback and the chimpanzee. Red may also be associated with arousal, since, during sex, the skin is perfused with blood, making it appear redder. There is also a cultural association in the West between the colour red and sex: think red light districts, red lipstick, and red valentines hearts. And although pink was once a colour associated with boys rather than girls, today pink may be the most feminine shade. If, one day, blue or yellow are seen as the most feminine colours, we might see women choosing clothes of those colours more commonly when they’re fertile.
It might be a bit disheartening to think that your choice of clothes isn’t entirely up to you, and that every four weeks your subconscious is working on your behalf to dress you, against your conscious will, as a life size Barbie doll. But at least you’ve got it better than a bonobo: your bum doesn’t turn bright red and inflate to the size of a beach ball.
Beall, A. T., & Tracy, J. L. (in press). Women more likely to wear red or pink at peak fertility. Psychological Science. Read paper [pdf]
The content of this post first appeared in the January 2013 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
