I cannot reproduce this in XL03. Following these steps

enter 1, 2, 3, in cells A1 to A3, Yes, and it could be any text or numbers the results are the same.
select all three cells Yes
set font color to red - all cells will display red text Yes
Make the red text BOLD - Color changes to Blue
set color to automatic - all cells will display black text Yep
click bold - all cell will display bold black text. True

So there is different behavior if color is set to "automatic" then if a sepcific color is chosen.

Also see my first picture that I posted, as you can see the color chosen is red but the preveiw windows shows the text as blue.