Women in red really do make men go weak in the knees

In their study, Professor Andrew Elliot and Dr Daniela Niesta of the University of Rochester, New York, have said that men find women in red more sexually attractive, confirming it really is the colour of romance.

Elliot claimed that men rated a woman shown in photographs as more sexually attractive if she was wearing red clothing or if she was shown in an image framed by a red border rather than some other colour.
The researchers also speculated that the attraction towards red could be an evolutionary trait too.

“It could be this very deep, biologically based automatic tendency to respond to red as an attraction cue given our evolutionary heritage,” ABC Online quoted Elliot as saying.

In the study more than 100 men, mostly college undergraduates, were shown pictures of women and asked to rate how pretty they were, how much the men would like to kiss them and how much the men would like to have sex with them.

They were then shown a woman, with some of the pictures bordered in red and some bordered in white, grey or green.

When framed in red, the men rated a woman as more attractive if she was framed in red, than when she was bordered by another colour.

Later, the men were shown photographs of a woman that were identical, but in some versions, the researchers digitally made her shirt red or blue in others.

And the researchers again saw the inclination towards woman in red.

They pointed out that the colour red only altered men’s attractiveness and not likability, intelligence or kindness – only attractiveness.

The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.