Un-normalised redshift distributions of VIPERS galaxies in the redshift range 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 1.2. The red and blue filled histograms show the observed number of blue and red galaxies respectively, i.e. when each galaxy is weighted by its blue w_b or red w_r colour weight only (see Eq. (3)), resulting from our classification scheme (Sect. 2). Thedistribution of all galaxies is also shown with green filled histogram. The continuous lines superposedon the histograms show the same distributions after convolving with a Gaussian kernel with σ_z = 0.07. Vertical black lines delimit the redshift range used in this analysis.