Sayonara, Saturday. Farewell, Friday. Think again, Thursday. The sexiest night of the week is Tuesday, according to scientists at the Stanford University Institute for Debauchery Research.

The new study contradicts conventional wisdom that weekend evenings provide peak sex appeal and opportunities for general hot-bloodedness. But researchers analyzed the habits and feelings of 1,372 young adults each day of the week and found that Tuesday night offers the optimal environment for getting down.

“There’s a stereotype, one that’s very difficult to break, that Friday and Saturday evenings are the hotness,” said Dr. Robert Seager, a Stanford professor who first had the idea for the study. “I wanted to start from scratch, with no preconceptions, and use new formulas to measure the hedonism of each day.

Music icons of the early 1970s created the now-longstanding idea that Saturday was the sexiest of the seven days, said Seager, raising the profile of the week’s final day with such hit songs as Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park” and Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting).”

Seager notes that Saturday night may have in fact been “peak sexy” during the 1970s and the 1980s, but he believes his institute’s study confirms that today’s young people should find Tuesday to be even steamier than the weekend.

“If people had listened to me — to my research — back in the day, I always had suspicions that the early part of the week had its merits,” Seager said. “You’re looking for ladies who have all of the skills? Are you young? Restless? Bored? Head out on a Tuesday.”

The Institute for Debauchery Research (IDR) studied subjects between the ages of 20 to 29 (“the sexiest decade,” Seager notes). The study emphasized quantitative aspects of sexiness, including hemline index, abdominal saturation, grenade avoidance, makeup retention and subjects evaluating members of the opposite sex on the “traditional” 1-to-10 scale.

IDR’s conclusion that Tuesday night represented the height of eroticism was surprising to many of the researchers, including D. Michael Carter, a graduate fellow on the project.

“I just always thought the weekends were the sexiest segment of the week,” Carter said. “But when you analyze the data set, it proves that Tuesday has the greatest concentration of bodies that got that A1 credit — that filet mignon, if you will.”

Carter reiterated that the institute was not interested in finding the day most people frequent bars and clubs, but rather the day that featured the highest average of appealing individuals.

“Sure, you’ll always find hotties on Fridays and Saturdays. We’re not reinventing the wheel,” Carter said. “We just want people to know that if you go out on a Tuesday, you will generally find a higher percentage of lovely lady lump and shawties who tend to wanna hump.

“The science just proves it.”