Arrange by attribute?

[haircrazy]

My shop sells hair dye. I have 3 brands but about 100 colours. Currently I don't use attributes - each colour is in as a separate item. Each type of dye is in its own category.
My customers are requesting that I allow the products to be displayed in groups of colours. So, for example, I could have all purple hair dye shown at once regardless of the manufacturer. Searching "purple" wouldn't work because they don't all have the word purple in the title or description.
Ideally I'd like to display this in something like a drop down menu where customers could choose the colours.
I'm aware that I'll probably have to set attributes. If anyone can give me a kick in the right direction for setting this up I'd be really grateful.

[groggory]

I'm thinking that the easy way out of this might be to tack on a single descriptive word at the each of each of your descriptions and make it a color to match your background. Just make a new CSS style called "backtext" or something. Cheap fix I know...but it'll let them search for it.

[vinces]

Would any of these work:

http://www.oscommerce.com/community?...p;category=all

[haircrazy]

From what I can tell those contributions are more about adding attributes quickly than displaying products in the way I'd like to. It's not really a problem adding attributes because I only have about 100 colours and quite a lot of patience. I'd like to set an attribute to categorise colours into reds, greens, blues etc and have an "arrange by colour" option in the main hair dye category as well as by brand as it already is.

Thanks for the replies.