Gender Difference in Colour Preference of Lighting: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Gender difference has been widely reported in many research fields. However, in the topic of colour preference of lighting, such an issue has not aroused much attention. In this study, therefore, three groups of visual experiments with different illuminance (E) levels (50 lx, 200 lx, 600 lx) were conducted which investigated the preferred correlated colour temperature (CCT: 3500 K, 5000 K, 6500 K) for six single-coloured decorative artificial bird-shaped objects (red, green, yellow, blue, white and black). Twenty subjects, ten males and ten females, were invited to respond with their visual colour preference of the experimental objects. The aim of this work was to investigate if gender difference exists when the observers judge objects with different colours under different E-CCT conditions. The results indicate that there is significant difference between males and females for the 200 lx and 600 lx conditions, especially for the cases with higher CCTs (5000 K and 6500 K). In addition, it was found that under certain E-CCT conditions the preference ratings of males and females for certain colours were obviously different. Similarly, for some scenarios the subjective ratings from observers of the same gender also varied with object colour.

Experimental setting and protocol impact human colour preference assessment under multiple white light sources

“…(2015) males and females usually perceive the environment differently due to the differences in sensory system. Similar findings have been extensively reported by researchers from multiple research areas, including genetics ( Foote et al, 2014 ; Vanston and Strother, 2016 ), neuroscience ( Palmer et al, 2013 ), biology ( Hurlbert and Ling, 2007 ; Schwarzkopf et al, 2011 ), ophthalmology ( Panorgias et al, 2010 ), and colour science ( Bimler et al, 2010 ; Huang et al, 2020a ). However, the inherent visual mechanism of such difference is indeed complicated by the interaction of biological, environmental, evolutional, and cultural factors.…”

“…Thus, till now consensus has not been reached upon which factors shape these sex differences. As stated above, the light sources with Duv values of 0.015 and 0.02 are the only two sources that exhibited significant sex difference among our visual studies (Huang et al, 2017(Huang et al, , 2018(Huang et al, , 2019a(Huang et al, , 2020a(Huang et al, ,b, 2021bChen et al, 2020b;Liu et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020). However, in this work with different experimental settings (e.g., the use of diverse objects with distinct colour features) and protocol (e.g., the consecutive judgement for multiple objects in one test), no sex difference was observed for such "distinctive" light sources, even for the jeans that had been evaluated under the same sources before (Liu et al, 2020).…”

“…In this study, we used a Mann-Whitney U test to investigate whether the colour preference between men and women for certain object under certain light source was significantly different (p < 0.05). Surprisingly, for all the 357 lighting scenarios (visual tests with a certain combination of test object and test light source) depicted in our former papers (Huang et al, 2017(Huang et al, , 2018(Huang et al, , 2019a(Huang et al, , 2020a(Huang et al, ,b, 2021bChen et al, 2020b;Liu et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020), significant sex difference was only observed in the work that related to blue jeans (Liu et al, 2020). In that study, males and females judged the colour appearance of seven pairs of jeans consecutively and their responses were significantly different for all jeans under two specific lighting conditions: male observers provided significantly higher scores than females under two light sources of 5,500 K, with Duv values (the distance from the test chromaticity coordinates to the Planckian locus) of 0.02 and 0.015, respectively.…”

“…Another conspicuous finding we obtained after revisiting our former psychophysical data ( Huang et al, 2017 , 2018 , 2019a , 2020a , 2020b , 2021b ; Chen et al, 2020b ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Wang et al, 2020 ) is about sex difference. In our former studies, various objects were adopted in light booth experiments, including blue jeans ( Huang et al, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2020 ), paintings ( Huang et al, 2017 , 2020a ), artware ( Wang et al, 2020 ), calligraphy ( Huang et al, 2017 ), black and white objects ( Huang et al, 2019b ), fruit and vegetables ( Huang et al, 2017 , 2021b ), bread and cakes ( Chen et al, 2022 ), and so on, and they were illuminated by different groups of white light sources. In every visual study, equal amount of male and female observers were invited.…”

“…However, consensus has not been reached upon which object should be adopted to evaluate the colour rendition performance. Currently, various objects have been used including fruit and vegetables ( Jost-Boissard et al, 2009 , 2015 ), skin tones ( Islam et al, 2013 ; Wei et al, 2014 ; Tan and Stephen, 2019 ), artwork ( Nascimento and Masuda, 2014 ; Zhai et al, 2014 ; Huang et al, 2017 , 2020a ), printed images ( Islam et al, 2013 ), cosmetics ( Khanh and Bodrogi, 2016 ), consumer goods ( Khanh et al, 2016 ) as well as combined objects ( Royer et al, 2016 ; Khanh et al, 2017 ). Many researchers preferred to ask the subjects to observe familiar objects like fruit, vegetables, and bread ( Thornton, 1974 ; Jost-Boissard et al, 2009 ; Wang and Wei, 2018 ) but others used unfamiliar objects like artwork ( Nascimento and Masuda, 2014 ) and printed images ( Islam et al, 2013 ).…”