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    This behaviour varies across different browsers and different OSes; it's worth clarifying if you're talking mainly about IE on Windows. Commented Apr 19, 2013 at 9:10
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    You can style select > option, but there are no reliable crossbrowser solution for doing so and, on chrome at least you can at most customize font size, family, background and foreground color. Maybe some more tweaks, but things as padding, hover color and such I couldn't succeed on changing. Indeed there might be alternatives, but depending on the project the <select> tag might be necessary for example for angular validation or some other reason. Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 14:49
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    @none I have posted an answer to Styling option tags. It does not show how to style <option>, but it does show how to emulate <select> so you can style the options. Commented Apr 5, 2016 at 18:55
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    In the introduction of mobile devices, this is even less styleable, as the options elements are not even displayed in relation to the select in the page flow - it is listed in a separate scrollable section at the bottom of the screen - styled very differently than how you expect in a traditional browser. Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 7:07
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    Cannot be styled for sure (only minor things to options). Please take a look at this how-to from the guys at w3schools to completely customize it with only JS: w3schools.com/howto/howto_custom_select.asp so you can Commented Jun 4, 2018 at 11:40