2009-01-20

Colour-metrics Beijing Winter 2009

I did some counting while sitting at different Starbucks cafes and looking at the passers-by. I counted the colours of the people's over coats until one of the columns filled up with one hundred passers-by, and that was always BLACK. The three spots I chose were 1) next to Jianguomen underground station, 2) shopping mall The Place and 3) shopping mall Oriental Plaza. All in all, 29 % of women and 56 % of men had BLACK overcoats. For women, the next most popular colours were WHITE (14 %), RED (10 %) and GREY (7 %), followed by BROWN (6%), YELLOW, PINK and BEIGE (5 % each). KHAKI, BLUE and PURPLE each gained 4 % popularity, and finally BLUE-GREEN or TURQUOISE 2 % and PALE-BLUE 1 %.
For men, the palette was much more limited. As the black ruled, the following favourites were GREY (10%), RED, KHAKI and DARK BLUE (7 % each), and BROWN (5 %). ORANGE and BEIGE gained 2 % popularity, and odd votes were given to white, yellow, green, pink, turquoise, and purple.
Photo Tiananmen Square January 2009.