NEW ORLEANS (Reuters Health) - New research shows that people may prefer a color called avocado to one dubbed light green--even if the two shades are identical.

Jeanine Skorinko of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville demonstrated that, when rating their preferences for certain hues, people will choose one color over others based on its name. She presented her team's findings here Friday at the American Psychological Society's annual meeting.

Skorinko told Reuters Health that she and her colleagues decided to conduct this study when they realized that many cosmetic companies give products such as lipstick and blush elaborate names that often don't relate to the actual color.

"And we were interested: does this make a difference? Would people buy it more just because it has a fancy name?" she asked.

Skorinko and her colleagues tested perceptions of color names by presenting 235 people with four different shades of either blue, green or brown. All of the colors were given elaborate names except one, and the researchers altered which color received the generic name for different viewers. Each person was asked to rate the colors in order of their preference, and indicate how much they would like to see each color as a sweater, upholstery, wall or rug.

For example, different shades of brown were decoratively termed Desert Sand, Chocolate, Mocha Almond Fudge and Dark Coffee.

"What we found is that, overall, the generic name was rated worse than the fancy name," Skorinko said. "When they ranked (the generically named color), it was ranked as their third or fourth favorite."

And when the researchers analyzed the results, they found that the actual shade of the preferred color didn't make a difference, meaning respondents were influenced by color names when picking their favorites.

"It's just the fancy name that's drawing them in--it doesn't even matter what color it is," Skorinko noted.

Furthermore, when rating which color they would prefer on certain items, such as sweaters or walls, the participants still ranked the nicely named colors as their favorites.

However, naming appears to have a silent influence on color preferences, for when respondents were asked to explain why they picked a color as their favorite, none of them said it was because of the name.

Skorinko said that these findings suggest that some people may be buying products they don't actually want, simply because the name is appealing.

"There's a couple of lipsticks that have really cool names that I won't use, but are in my cosmetics bag," she said. "But I bought them."

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