How do change the color of the text of an <option> within a <select>?

I was recently having trouble with this same thing and I found a really simple solution.

All you have to do is set the first option to disabled and selected. Like this:

<select id="select">
    <option disabled="disabled" selected="selected">select one option</option>
    <option>one</option>
    <option>two</option>
    <option>three</option>
    <option>four</option>
    <option>five</option>
</select>

This will display the first option (grayed out) when the page is loaded. It also prevents the user from being able to select it once they click on the list.

Suresh, you don't need use anything in your codes. What you need is just something like this:

.others {
    color:black
}

<select id="select">
    <option style="color:gray" value="null">select one option</option>
    <option value="1" class="others">one</option>
    <option value="2" class="others">two</option>
</select>

But as you can see, because your first item in options is the first thing that your select control shows, you can not see its assigned color. While if you open the select list and see the opened items, you will see you could assign a gray color to the first option. So you need something else in jQuery.

$(document).ready(function() {
   $('#select').css('color','gray');
   $('#select').change(function() {
      var current = $('#select').val();
      if (current != 'null') {
          $('#select').css('color','black');
      } else {
          $('#select').css('color','gray');
      }
   }); 
});

This is my code in jsFiddle.