How to give each hair particle system in one object its own color

Question

How to give each hair particle system its own color (ideally from a texture)?

Example: an object has two hair particle systems, one which is blue, second which is red. The mesh underneath is a third color or one of the previous two (but one can achieve that by assigning a material in edit mode to all the faces in the mesh).

Is there a way to assign a material to a particle system? Multiple hair particle systems all seem to only be using the very first material in an object.

Vertex groups can control so much, but not what color the hair particles have. There is a "textures" tab in particle settings, just below the vertex groups, but it doesn't seem to do anything color-related.

Answer 1

You need to create 3 Material Slots and 3 Materials for your emitter object (1). In this example, Blue and Red aren't assigned to any face.

For each Particle System, under Render/Material (2), select the desired material in the list.