early to bed

The folks at XKCD did a color survey a little while back, and while I didn’t do the survey, nor did I even read the questions, I quite enjoyed the wrap-up of the data. Feel free to read the whole blog entry, but my particular favorite part was the gender breakdown of popular colors:

I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

1. Dusty Teal
2. Blush Pink
3. Dusty Lavender
4. Butter Yellow
5. Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

1. Penis
2. Gay
3. WTF
4. Dunno
5. Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.

Check out all the data here.