The Rails' built-in options_for_select helper doesnt let you put styles in the <option> tag. Here's a replacement that does. It assumes the collection is in array format, it respects the convention that option.first is the text, and option.last is the value. We specify that the 2nd item is the style string.

Thus, our choices might look like this:

    @role_choices = [ 
      ['Anyone',      'padding: 2px; padding-left: 20px; background: no-repeat url(/images/world.png)',       'public'], 
      ['Submitters',  'padding: 2px; padding-left: 20px; background: no-repeat url(/images/user_green.png)',  'submitter'], 
      ['Screeners',   'padding: 2px; padding-left: 20px; background: no-repeat url(/images/user_go.png)',     'screener'],
      ['Reviewers',   'padding: 2px; padding-left: 20px; background: no-repeat url(/images/user_comment.png)', 'reviewer'], 
      ['Managers',    'padding: 2px; padding-left: 20px; background: no-repeat url(/images/user_suit.png)',   'manager'] 
    ]

The view template may contain

  <%= select_tag( :role, options_for_select_with_style(@role_choices) %>

This can go into helpers/application_helper.rb

  def options_for_select_with_style( container, selected=nil )
    container = container.to_a if Hash === container
    options_for_select = container.inject([]) do |options, element|
      text, value = option_text_and_value(element)
      selected_attribute = ' selected="selected"' if option_value_selected?(value, selected)
      style = " style=\"#{element[1]}\"" if element[1] && element[1]!=value
      options << %(<option value="#{html_escape(value.to_s)}"#{selected_attribute}#{style}>#{html_escape(text.to_s)}</option>)
    end
    options_for_select.join("\n")
  end

And you get something like this:

Thanks to http://technology.amis.nl/blog/?p=994 which I found on Google