Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/381

Rh. While blue is pre-eminently and overwhelmingly the masculine favorite, it is by no means so general a feminine favorite. The favorite woman's color, standing at the head of the female list, is red. Roughly speaking, of every thirty masculine votes, ten would be for blue and three for red; while of every thirty feminine votes, four would be for blue and five for red. Red and blue are thus much more nearly equally popular among women than among men. Other relatively marked masculine preferences are for the colors related to blue (blue violet and violet), and other feminine preferences are for lighter red (or pink), and, to a less extent, for green and yellow. Further, men confine their selections to relatively fewer colors than do women; and finally, while all men and women alike are much more apt to choose a normal than a transitional color and a darker than a lighter shade, yet the tendency to do so (about the same in the former direction) is markedly different in the latter respect; of a dozen men, ten would choose among the darker colors and only two among the lighter for the most pleasing color; while of a dozen women, seven would choose among the darker and five among the lighter shades. This feminine fondness for the lighter and daintier shades appears also in other respects, to be noted presently.

Passing next to the discussion of the preferences among the combinations of colors enumerated above, the first noteworthy result is that no combination of colors occupies the position of a decided favorite as did blue among the single colors; but that preferences for the several combinations vary gradually from the most to the least favorite. The two most frequently (and about equally) preferred combinations are red with violet and red with blue, which are somewhat similar in effect (the violet being very dark in appearance); more than one fifth of all the persons contributing to the results choose one or the other of these combinations. The third in the list is blue with violet. The three most favorite combinations are those composed of the three colors, red, violet, and blue. The next position on the list is taken by those who are unable to decide upon any one combination as their favorite, and it should be noted that this group is nearly twice as large in the selection of the combination as it is in the selection of a single color. Then follow lighter red with lighter green, red with green, lighter red with lighter blue, and red with lighter green. Some one of the above eight color combinations was chosen by three out of every five persons who recorded a preference, the remaining two fifths of the preferences being distributed very widely and rather uniformly among the remaining seventeen colors. The combinations most generally avoided are orange with green, orange with violet, lighter orange with lighter blue.