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Men think a woman in red is more likely to sleep with them on a first date, according to a new study.

Psychologists at the University of South Brittany in France, who studied 120 male students aged 18 to 21, found that most thought choosing to wear red meant a woman had "greater sexual intent" and was more likely to jump into bed with a man, even if the outfits weren't sexually suggestive.

"For the first time, our experiment shows clothes have the ability to lead men to perceive a woman wearing a red tee-shirt as having greater sexual intent than one wearing blue, white, or green," said the researchers.

In the study, 120 male undergraduates were split  into four groups. 

Each volunteer spent 30 seconds looking at an image of the same 20-year-old woman but with the color of her top altered for each group to red, blue, green or white. 

The participants then completed a questionnaire, which asked them to rate, on a scale of one to nine, how attractive they thought the woman was. 

They also had to rate her in terms of how likely they thought it was that she would have sex with a man on the first date. 

The woman was viewed to be most attractive when she was wearing the red top, followed by white, blue and finally green. 

She was also judged, by some considerable margin, to be most likely to agree to have sex when she wore red, followed by blue, green and finally white. 

"Studies have shown that red is connected to lust and romantic love as well as to female fertility," said authors. "But biological evolution could also explain the importance of redness. During their fertility phase, the perineum of female baboons, macaques and chimpanzees becomes red, probably to attract males."

The study was published in the latest Journal of Social Psychology.