If guys are turned on by women who wear red, are they also attracted to crimson labia? That’s what a group of researchers from the University of Kent attempted to find out — the results are published in this month’s PLoS ONE scientific journal.
As we see in the animal kingdom, red is a signal of sexual readiness to males. Just look at baboons. But are human men keen on crimson as well? For the experiment, researchers combed through numerous photos of normal vulva (read: not surgically enhanced or porn-y) featured on the website Velvet Vulva, selected four different pictures, and rendered them in different hues on the labia color spectrum: pale pink, light pink, dark pink, and red. Study participants (all were male) ranked the labia for attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 100. Each of the pink shades were rated a solid 40, on average, but the reddest one was given a mere 35.
Hm. It appears, the study authors posited, that men’s preference for women wearing red clothing or standing against a red wall doesn’t really have anything to do with biology.
Slate offers up an analysis of the research and suggests that the results might be biased because the red vulva looked so odd:
[I]t seems like the researchers ought to have asked their male subjects what it was about the reddest vulvae that turned them off. The men might not have been able to articulate their color preferences in clear terms, but a direct question would still have given us some useful insight into their thought processes. Factoring in such limitations, however, Johns and her colleagues have at least given us reason to believe that—after decades of our having swallowed it up as an evolutionary truth—the sexually salient hypothesis might be a lot of bunk.
The takeaway: The color of your vulva is just fine as is, ladies. We’d rather not see a cottage industry of labia-dyeing spring up.
[Slate]
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