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Mating

What Color Should You Wear on a First Date?

In humans and other species, one color signals attraction most strongly.

Lucky Business/Shutterstcok
Source: Lucky Business/Shutterstcok

You may have wondered whether it's true that wearing a certain color can make you appear more attractive to the opposite sex. Many researchers have addressed this question, with just some of the results summarized below.

In many non-human primate species, including baboons and chimpanzees, females display red on their bodies when they are more fertile and ready to mate. These red displays have been shown to increase attraction behavior in their male counterparts (e.g., Bielert, Girolami, & Jowell, 2009).

This has led researchers to ask: Are humans similarly affected by the color red when it comes to romance? Two fairly recent experiments tested whether men would be more attracted to women wearing the color red (Kaiser, Elliot, & Feltman, 2010).

In the first study, men were told that they were participating in research designed to imitate an online conversation with a woman. They were naive to the experiment's true purpose, which was to find out if wearing the color red would make a woman appear more attractive to the opposite sex.

Participants were shown a picture of the woman that they would be “communicating with” online. Men were randomly assigned to view a picture of the same woman wearing either a red shirt or a green shirt. Later, all the men were asked to choose questions to ask the woman. Results showed that men who viewed the woman in red chose more intimate questions as compared to the group of men who viewed the woman in green.

In the second experiment, male participants were told that they were taking part in a study in which they would have a five-minute conversation with a person of the opposite sex and shown a picture of the woman with whom they were about to converse. Participants were randomly assigned to see a picture of the same woman wearing either a red or a blue shirt. Then, they were taken to a room to wait for the woman to enter and told to “grab a chair." The men who had seen the picture of the woman in red positioned their chair more closely with the chair set out for the woman.

These results suggest that men are affected by the color red when it comes to the mating game, not entirely unlike the baboons and chimps. Women may decide, based on this research, to post online dating profile pictures in which they are wearing red, to attract more potential dates, or to wear the color red on a first date if they desire to make their partner want to get a little closer to them (literally and figuratively).

Original research articles cited above:

C. Bielert, L. Girolami, and S. Jowell (2009). An experimental examination of the colour component in visually mediated sexual arousal of the male chacma baboon (Papio ursinus). Journal of Zoology, 219 (4), 569-579.

Kaiser, D. N., Andrew, Kenrick, D. T., Feltman R (2010). Red and romantic behavior in
men viewing women. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 901–908.

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