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His and Hers Colours

As witnessed from the results of a hue test, I’m pretty awful with colours. It’s in serious fail territory if I have to go about naming them. And I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Scientist Stephen Von Worley took the 5+ million results from a colour survey conducted by XKCD and created an interactive infographic that shows the differences between men and women when it comes to colours. Von Worley plots the 2,000 most commonly-used colour names as a series of dots on a graph. The size of the colour dot indicates how common the colour is and the horizontal axis divides the gender – women tend to use colour names towards the top part, men uses one the bottom part, and dividing line represents the 50-50 split between the sexes.

It’s interesting to see the different colour preferences. While men seem to use some lolworthy descriptions like goblin green, vomit yellow, shit, and really dark blue, women tend to prefer colours like chartruese, antique rose, dark cornflower, and islamic green.

See the interactive version of the infographic on Data Pointed. Mouse over the dots for more information and read Von Worley’s writeup.

[via iamFinch on Twitter]

2 replies on “His and Hers Colours”

Interesting … seems to be more a gender-choice difference in words rather than colours though. With regard to colours (and the whole idea that boys prefer blues and girls pinks), you may find it interesting to know that less than a hundred years ago this was the reverse. Boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue! It’s thought that blue is more “soft” and gentle”, e.g. the Virgin Mary, whereas pinks were considered as “stronger” and more “masculine”.

I do remember something about the pink and blue thing in the early 1900s. I’d think a blog featuring autochrome plates of little boys in pink would be such a hit. Speaking of old photos, have you seen Okinawa Soba?