Dude, pink is not your color

LONDON (Reuters) - Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn't much anybody can do about it, researchers said on Monday in one of the first studies to show scientifically that there are gender-based colour preferences.

Researchers said these differences may have a basis in evolution in which females developed a preference for reddish colours associated with riper fruit and healthier faces.

Recent studies have suggested there is a universal preference for "blue", and there has not been much previous evidence to support the idea of sex differences when picking colours, said Anya Hurlbert, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University who led the study.

"We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specialization in the evolutionary division of labour," she wrote in Current Biology. "There are biological reasons for liking reddish things."