There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot.
After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.
One could argue that those are two different questions. E.g. what would look nice on itself vs what would look good in your kitchen or might be more timeless
I remember reading a feature/native advertisement about Lenovo's ThinkPad focus groups a while back (I think on Ars or The Verge) that had a similar conclusion.
People would go crazy over a red or white ThinkPad in focus groups, but would never buy one because they couldn't see themselves as "that person" with the red laptop at a meeting.
Lenovo did make both a red and white x100e a long while ago, but those were more like netbooks.
That's really interesting to read about (and the comment above); I hope that the people running these things know this is a thing too.
It adds up too. Companies like Apple have long advertised with a diverse range of colors for their devices, but I think most people settle on black / white in the end because it's more neutral / doesn't stand out.
At some point people had trouble distinguishing their grey macbook pro from the hundred other macbook pros. First that was resolved with full size sticker and covers (which were cute in that they used the illuminated apple logo on the back as a feature), then with... a very wild and colorful range of stickers they save up from conferences and the like.
It was an interesting thing to witness, having big groups of people with bland, uniform, sleek and neutral, to a very nerdy form of self-expression and standing out from the crowd.
Then it's fatter and heavier and I may as well have gotten the 14" Pro. Macs aren't like iPhones that constantly fall out of your pocket and need the extra padding.
The reason for that seems obvious to me. Grey, steel, white and black will work in basically every kitchen. If you want a more colorful pallet in any room in your house, then you need to put a lot more thought into planning it. I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that.
palate / palette / pallet
Your “palate” is the roof of your mouth, and by extension, your sense of taste. A “palette” is the flat board an artist mixes paint on (or by extension, a range of colors). A “pallet” is either a bed (now rare) or a flat platform onto which goods are loaded.
They're talking about a design perspective. People like the lime green toaster because it by itself looks nice, but if they placed it in _their_ kitchen, it would probably look absolutely ridiculous unless they're designers and know how to perfectly balance such a strong color in the room.
In contrast, neutral colors will look good in any color palette and require zero design talent from your side.
We're talking about the context of this "study". If people are asked which toaster they want to take home, the vast majority of them will have a kitchen where "grey, steel, white or black" works the best, even if they prefer another color. They're not going to redesign their entire kitchen for a particular toaster.
Alternatively, people in the past had fewer possesions (not out of virtuous minimialism as some people portray, but sheer economic reality), and so had more time to consider how each would fit in.
Seems like a stretch that using screens has led to a decline in interior decorating. You could argue a whole generation including men are now devolved into desk setups, plants, terrariums, "earthy colors", hygge, woodworking, aesthetics, etc through Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The same revolution has happened for the glorification of cooks -> chefs and the proliferation of home bakers
I think this is part of it. I don't think people (in real life, not in magazines) cared as much whether something "went with" the rest of the room. Like, I'm sure some people did, but it wasn't a normal thing for middle class folks to care much about, as far as trying to make their own house look that way.
There's, relatedly, probably some effect from all those home makeover & house-buying shows, which constantly push "any 'weird' color is bad, and any room without great color coordination is bad, and it's not OK not to mind it". There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about this, in which two home-buyers on such a show are presented a bathroom with avocado fixtures, and the host berates them over multiple takes because their initial reaction isn't as negative as it ought to be. Fiction, but there's definitely a kind of same-ness to people's reactions to any but a few acceptable colors on those shows.
That seems unlikely. Look at fashion and decor magazines from the past and you see lots of lively colours that are coordinated. If you go house hunting and see a couple houses that haven’t been updated for decades they have a definite palette.
Magazines are a reflection of a narrow slice of reality, usually the slice that could afford to buy the stuff advertised in magazines. Anyone can buy a magazine and aspire to the lifestyles depicted, but most can only aspire.
If I had to guess it was short term vs long term color preference, and focus preference.
Lime green is nice when it is short lived, but lime green isn't as nice in year 25, after your tastes have changed.
Hot pink is very eye catching, so it got the votes. On the other hand hot pink is very eye catching, who wants their toaster to be the center of attention?
They obviously mean "natural" stainless steel finish.
The name of the color would be silver, but silver color is a wider range of colors, silver is also confusingly just the name of a metal which it is not, and also would include "silver paint on top of stainless steel".
If you want to be pedantic, there is no such thing as a "color". There are light waves with a frequency that hit a highly non-linear detector (our eye) and what comes from that is analyzed by your brain to put a label such as "red".
What you see is different from what I see (not to mention that I am a daltonist) - and none of these are standardized.
We are used to colors and this is why we label them.
So "chrome" is absolutely a color, like "salmon" and "fuschia" is, or "gold" or "brownish"
I'm referring to a "color" in the product customization sense of the word.
You could buy a red toaster or a blue toaster, and you'd have every reason to think that it's different paint or dyes, but an otherwise equivalent product made of the same underlying materials.
Whereas stainless steel partly refers to a small range of colors, but mainly to the properties of the material.
In the context of kitchen appliances stainless steel products are almost always of higher quality and durability.
As an example: You can find stainless steel fridges, and cheap fridges, but no cheap stainless steel fridges.
If you were offering me a red or stainless steel fridge sight unseen I'd always go for the stainless one, even if I much preferred red to stainless as a look.
I could always glue a red MDF panel to the door, but the advantages of "stainless" would extend to other premium aspects of the fridge.
> Red–green color blindness: This form of colorblindness is sometimes referred to as daltonism after John Dalton, who had red-green dichromacy. In some languages, daltonism is still used to describe red-green color blindness.
From the search results that popped up, the word "daltonist" seems to be used in Romanian, Serbian, and Bosnian languages.
Stainless steel as darker than that, and typically "brushed". That's chrome.
In any case, many people might have a vague idea that stainless steel is more durable, but not be able to tell the difference between stainless steel, chrome painted hard plastic, or galvanized steel. I wonder if the study accounted for that.
Somebody actually flag-killed you for saying stainless steel wasn't a color.
I think you're making a really good point. If there was an obvious durability difference between toasters (plastic vs. stainless steel), I'd take the steel one even if I liked the cherry red one better. If the red one I preferred were also steel, then that would be the question this experiment intends to examine (I'd be choosing on color.)
Colorful shit is often cheap shit.
edit: You can get plastic stuff "stainless steel color" by plating it with a thin foil, but then I'm definitely going for one of the colorful, dyed plastics, because that stuff is going to flake off.
After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.