Wear red if you want to make an impact

RESEARCH:WHATEVER YOU wear, wear red if you want to impress. Research on monkeys and more recently humans has shown that this is certainly a colour that sets you apart.

Scientists have long studied how the colour red seems to have an impact in the animal world, but researchers were taken aback when it was found that simply wearing red helped improve chances of a win in the Olympic Games, Dr Russell Hill of Durham University told a session of the Festival of Science, currently under way in Guildford, England.

The theory holds that wearing red delivers a signal to others of being more aggressive. It creates an unconscious bias, associating redness with dominance, something that could impart an unfair advantage in athletic competitions as hard-fought as during the Olympic Games, he suggested.

Athletes battle to win competitions by hundredths of a second, so any slight benefit conferred by wearing red might represent an unfair advantage.

There is good evidence for this already, so the next step in the research will be to gauge what effect having red on your back might deliver, he said.

The whole red thing certainly works for mandrill monkeys, stated Dr Joanna Setchell, also of Durham University. Her group has been studying a mandrill colony in Gabon since 1996 and, like Munster rugby and Manchester United, she knows quite a bit about the power of red.

The alpha mandrill invariably has the brightest red nose, rump and genitalia and readily faces down interlopers sporting a paler red, and females also actively seek males sporting the most intense red possible. Now might be the time to check out your wardrobe.