What is the best way, or ideal way to represent product variants?

I am trying to work out what is the best way, or ideal way to have variants in nopcommerce.

To explain I will use the nopcommerce store demo and the adidas Women's Supernova CSH 7 Running Shoe.

Option 1
In the demo store the product variant for product: adidas Women's Supernova CSH 7 Running Shoe has no variant name and combinations are done within the Product Variant Attributes tab.  This includes the shoe colour and sizes.

Option 2
The other way I have found out is to have the shoe colour as a variant of the main product (that way you can have pictures).  Then you would just have the shoe sizes in the Product Variant Attributes tab.

I'm tending to lean towards Option 2... as the best way, but why does the store demo use option 1?

Which way have other users done this?
Which is the best way?

Thanks

Anyone have any feedback on this?

I'm doing variants like option 1 as the demo does in fear that other functionality is limited... already noticed that the bulk edit doesn't work very well for when you have variants.