Andrew Elliot, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York has found that men think a woman in red or crimson clothes are sexier than if they're wearing another colour. "We only determined the result for attraction, males don't value females in red as smarter, more likable, or as having a more respectable personality; they only rate her as sexier and more visually appealing," he says
Five studies were undertaken with around 125 heterosexual men (men with color blindness were excluded for obvious reasons). The men were shown photos of women "framed in red, white, gray, green, or blue, or with the woman in a red or blue shirt," wrote Theresa Tamkins on cnn. Based on a seven-point scale, with seven being the sexiest and one the least sexy, Andrew Elliott discovered that the color red added 1.25 to the overall sexiness rating.
"We believe that red, due to the connection with hearts and Valentine's Day and intimate apparel and things like that, assumes a sexy meaning," says the research worker. "There's also a theory - a rather intriguing possibleness - that there's a profoundly embedded sort of propensity for heterosexual men to see red as an attraction prompt because that's what occurs in the wild"
