Waitresses may want to stock their wardrobes full of crimson-hued T-shirts after a new French study found that men are much more generous in tipping women who wear red. By the same token, gents may want to take a step back and take off their red-tinted glasses when tipping.
Those are the conclusions of a study published in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research and released this week, which put waitresses in various colored Ts and observed 722 restaurant consumers in France.
Not only did the researchers find male diners to be more generous tippers than female customers, but they also found that men gave between 15 to 26 percent more in tips to waitresses when they wore red.
The color had no effect, meanwhile, on the female patrons.
For their study, researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob from the Université de Bretagne-Sud instructed 11 waitresses in five different restaurants to wear the same T-shirt in different colors -- black, white, red, blue, green and yellow on different days over a six-week period.
They were also instructed to act normally every day and record how much they received in tips from each customer.
The results further support the powerful seductive sway that the color red holds for males. A 2008 study out of the University of Rochester, New York, claimed to provide the first empirical evidence that the color -- long associated with feelings of love and passion -- made men feel more "amorous" towards women.
