It's accepted that searching a table on an int column is faster than on a string column (say varchar). 

However, if I have a Shirt table with a Color column, would it be more performant to create a Color table with the primary key on that table being the foreign key on the Shirt table? Would the join negate the performance advantage of having the value in the Color column on Shirt being an int instead of a string value such as "Green" when searching for green Shirts?