This year, Slayer is going to play Reign in Blood on my birthday
Red seems to affect us in a way that other colors don’t. (…)
Johns and colleagues test an hypothesis for why red on women looks so attractive to me. The hypothesis is that red is sexy because it reminds men of… lady parts. (…) One version of the hypothesis is that as females are approaching ovulation, the vulva becomes more red than is is at other points in the cycle.
If this “red is code for female sex organs” hypothesis is true, you might predict that men would judge female genitals as more attractive as they became more red.
Explicit images of anatomically normal, un-retouched, nonpornographic, similarly-orientated female genitals were surprisingly difficult to obtain… We selected photographs that … did not contain other, potentially distracting, objects (fingers, sex toys, piercings etc.) and were hairless to account for current fashion.
They showed their pictures to 40 males. Most of the men were in their 20s. (…) They rated the attractiveness of each image.
The ratings of attractiveness were the exact opposite of those predicted by the signalling hypothesis. The reddest images were rated the least attractive.
The authors are then tasked to come up with an hypothesis as to why redness is less attractive. Their suggestion is that red is suggestive of menstrual blood.
