Why women love a red, red rose

— -- Anyone who ever wondered why dying vegetation — say like a freshly-clipped red rose — may appeal to a lady friend, might take some comfort in science, which once again offers us a rational answer to one of the world's great irrationalities.

Beyond a universal preference in people for blue, "the long history of color preference studies has been described as 'bewildering, confused and contradictory'," write neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling of England's Newcastle University, authors of a new study in the journal Current Biology. "This fact is perhaps surprising," they add, "given the prevalence and longevity of the notion that little girls differ from boys in preferring pink."

But the neuroscientists believe they have an answer to this scientific riddle, uncovering a distaff preference for red, hidden atop the universal liking for blue.

In their study, the pair quickly flashed color cards, displaying numerous variations in shade, hue and saturation, at 208 volunteers, mostly Britishers but with a substantial number of Han Chinese, who were recent emigrants to the United Kingdom. Tested in three different experiments, the researchers teased out a small but significant preference for reddish hues in the female volunteers.

Puzzled, the authors realized that most of the difference between men and women came in the form of a preference for red versus green in the color cards, regardless of the other shadings such as the bluish ones that everyone liked. Why might this be?

Evolution might offer an answer, they reason. Human color perception, the "trichromacy" assessment of three separate color types — red-green-blue — in our vision is a relatively recent addition to our line of mammals.

"We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specializations in the evolutionary division of labour," suggests the study. In primate evolution, the "hunter-gatherer" theory holds that women were inordinately "gatherers," looking for ripe, yellow fruits and edible red leaves hidden in green vegetation.