How Sex Toy Makers Pick Vibrator Colors (Gizmodo)

Read the full article by Claire Lampen at Gizmodo.com

Scoring a color’s sexiness calls for a sketchy rubric at best: Although someone appointed it the color of romance and passion, red is also the color of blood and chaos (see: panic buttons, fire trucks). Sleek, sophisticated black does double duty as the uniform of death. Purple can communicate richness, royalty, sensuality, what have you; it can also announce gout, bruising, raw meat. Pink is pretty, if also heavily associated with babies, emphatically unsexy creatures. The same argument could be made for blue, whose calming vibes also call up medical wardrobes. White similarly signals sterile, hospital environments, unless it’s dirty, in which case it’s dingy.

Then there’s orange, reserved for hunters and construction cones and other items that shout LOOK OUT; green, the color of nature, that also characterizes mold and decay; and yellow, who even likes yellow anyway? But when you’re slinging sex toys, you have to make them some kind of color. So: how do you pick a winner when every winner is also a loser?

According to Hallie Lieberman—author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy—vaginal vibrators broke from their putty-toned hard plastic molds in the ‘80s, designers cautiously dipping their toes into the color spectrum. Whether because certain pinks mimic certain skin tones or because—whether we’re talking tools or guns or sex toys—manufacturers use pinks as shorthand to whisper “for women,” Lieberman couldn’t definitively say, but everything came up roses. And while the ‘90s ushered in phalate-laden jelly plastics available in garish new hues, the emergence of high-end sex tech companies meant designers started thinking critically about color. Two decades on, a vibrator rainbow has highlighted a few patterns.

Almost uniformly, the sex toy companies’ representatives with whom I spoke said blacks, purples, pinks, and blues topped North American sales charts; reds, meanwhile, put people off—unless the red veered toward maroon or berry. Green and orange proved prohibitively hard to move, collecting dust on stock room shelves alongside skin toned vibes. Yellow always ranks low in the color preference hierarchy, no matter what you’re selling.

Following a three-decade reign over the vibrator market, pink feels somewhat stale—if also familiar. Apparently, it polarizes customers: People either list it as their top choice, or their last. But which color rules them all? “Purple,” said Coyote Amrich, director of purchasing and product development for Good Vibrations and Babeland, who’s watched the color rise over her fourteen years as a buyer. “Whether you like it, love it, hate it, or are indifferent to it, it just is always the top-selling color of any product that comes in a variety of colors.”