What's the most popular color in the world?

It may be blue, teal, or anything in between, depending on the poll.

Between the colors of red for roses and blue for violets are a million different shades. But which of these hues is, according to statistics, the most well-liked globally?

It seems that humankind's preferred color isn't consistent. According to a YouGov study from 2015(opens in new tab), blue is the most preferred hue worldwide. Meanwhile, The Independent stated that in 2017, a poll of 30,000 individuals in 100 different nations revealed that deep teal was the most preferred hue (opens in new tab). According to the year, survey technique, and population sampled, the answer appears to change.

In addition, culture has a big impact on people's color choices. For instance, a 2019 research in the journal Perception(opens in new tab) examined persons from the Polish, Papuan, and Hadza cultures in terms of their preferences for colors. (The Hadza are a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer people.) The preferred colors varied significantly amongst different civilizations.

Life events and socialization can influence color taste, even within the same culture. For instance, pink is seen as a "girl's hue" in contemporary Western society while blue is historically linked with boys. It also comes as no surprise that a 2013 research published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior(opens in new tab) that polled 749 American parents discovered that men tended to favor blue while women tended to choose red, purple, and pink. In other words, men who had only boys expressed their preference for blue more vehemently than did men who had daughters. This gender disparity was accentuated in households with had sons. The Perception research discovered that color choices were about the same for men and women among the Hadza, a tribe that is generally equal.

However, it does appear that color perception and classification are pretty widespread.

The World Color Assessment(opens in new tab) scholars conducted an exceptionally thorough survey of the color terminology in 110 unwritten languages worldwide in the late 1970s. The goal was to test the theory that, as stated in MIT Technology Review(opens in new tab) in 1940 by American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, "We analyze nature using the rules established by our native tongue. Language serves as both a reporting tool and a defining framework for experience."

In other words, language affects how people perceive the world.

However, the World Color Survey discovered something different. Instead, the study discovered that participants generally named colours in the same way regardless of culture. For instance, if you show someone several colors that are similar to "blue" in English, chances are good that Tagalog, Turkish, or Tajik all have words that approximately translate to "blue" to describe those same colors. Additionally, speakers from different cultures have a propensity to draw the line separating basic hues like red, blue, yellow, and green nearly in the same location. Therefore, the boundaries between blue and green or yellow and orange were the same in all civilizations.