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Q: Why is learning Yoga like learning your colours?

A: Because it’s the same as learning anything.

It takes a Winter to make black look interesting, deep, meaningful.

Only a Summer’s colouring can take pastel yellow, and greenish yellow at that because how else can you make yellow cool but add blue, and have it look happily, generously, fully, softly, buttery yellow.

The drape colours and our clothing colours, they have an effect on us. We have an effect right back on them.

The heat of True Autumn doesn’t look too hot under that face, nor does it make her face too yellow. The gold, teal, and bittersweet look perfectly at home and she looks peaceful and honest, Autumn’s claims to fame. I so love these qualities in these people. There is nothing for neuroses to stick to. It just bounces back in the best way.

The Dark Seasons aren’t necessarily dark to look at. There’s lots of hair and eye variation, just like any other Season. What Dark means is that on them, dark looks normal. On other colourings, it would look too dark. My normal lips lipstick is darker than you’d expect because as a Dark Winter, my colouring takes dark and turns it into right. Once we learn our own colouring, we control the retail world, a nice change from the other way round, which is how most folks live.

A Spring guy in Autumn colour tells the world, “Hi, I’m John and I’m a little angry all the time. Watch out, I piss off easy.” And yet, nothing of the sort is true, but no wonder nobody will give him leadership positions.

You walk into an office. Before you cross the carpet to shake his hand, the Autumn guy in Autumn colours has said to you, “I am THE guy who’s going to get you and your 8 cats out of a burning building.” And as you cross that carpet, you think, “Buddy, you are THE guy I want around to get me and Poochie out of the fire.” If he’d been wearing Summer colours, he looks lucky to get himself out, let alone Poochie and you.

Find the first edge of your Season. Settle, wait, and become. Grow back into your natural colouring.

Here’s a stereotype for you: the Bright Winter being told she’s a Light Summer. Happens often. Both are Neutral Seasons that have much in common in 12 Season personal colour analysis (PCA). Both add the same amount (small) of the same kind of heat (Spring). But we forget the differences between icy and pastel and can’t interpret them on a human face without right drapes. Bright Winter’s super concentrated blue looks normal on her, just blue, even more normal and balanced if it’s shiny. She looks reasonable in it. Reasonable, exciting, and could be taken perfectly seriously without being remembered only for what she wore.

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Digression 1: about comments that Winters can’t be blonde-haired or beige-haired and blue-eyed because it lacks in contrast. It simply isn’t true. Please, come and watch a real analysis with accurate drapes. Please, at least be open to the possibility that there is another way. Once you see this person balance pitch black, or once you watch their presence fade, the lower half of the face weaken and recede, see the face appear dusted with white powder in Light Summer colour, the face become mottled and yellow in Summer whites, you begin to understand. PCA is about discovering your natural colours. If this light-appearing person harmonizes with pitch black and pure white, then they contain those pigments. Therefore, they contain the contrast of a Winter. The fact that this information can’t be discerned by staring at the complexity of a human face doesn’t make the information incorrect. It’s the part about knowing human pigmentation without measuring it that might need some revision.

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Digression 2: I see things online about the relationships between Neutral Seasons that have a similar start point and add the same amount of the same kind of colour warmth/coolness. So, Dark Autumn and Bright Spring begin as pure warm Seasons (True Autumn and True Spring) and move one step into Winter. When they share colours, to my eye, it doesn’t work as well as the theoretical/conceptual argument would have you think. Keep the overall balance in mind. Try not to borrow from the other palette precisely, but rather from a space between it and yours. It’s not a bad idea at all, it’s quite clever. There is a relationship between these groups for sure, as there are many relationships between the groups of natural colouring, the Seasons. I find the Winter Neutral Seasons of Dark and Bright actually do better in True Summer than Soft or Light respectively. True Summer is just a little warm relative to Winter, has more clarity than Soft and more darkness than Light. The overall of True Summer looks closer to home on a Winter Neutral than Summer’s Neutrals do. In clothes or drapes, it’s the True Summer that looks better on Dark and Bright Winter, IMO.

On a Light Spring-coloured person, Soft Autumn colour looks bulky and chunky.

The reverse: an Autumn woman wearing Spring colour. Well, you know how tiny, dinky jewelry on a large-framed body can make the jewelry look smaller and the body bigger? The strength and substance of Autumn colouring forcibly placed next to Spring’s lightness and fun makes the face look more solid (I’m trying not to say masculine) and the colours immature and inexpensive. In her right colours, Autumn women project all the feminine beauty that Summer can in Summer colours. I mean, Autumn is Raquel Welch territory. There’s a reason that picture of her wearing a fur bikini was iconic. Wouldn’t have happened in Twiggy psychedelic daisies. Even at a tiny level, this effect takes place. A Soft Summer woman wearing True Summer colours looks a little more muscular or macho somehow.

On a Light Summer, the Bright Winter colour is the only thing you see. Even if it’s only one part of an outfit, it becomes either the only thing you notice or the only thing you don’t notice. Of course, there’s a middle ground, where a dark Soft Summer that’s a bit more saturated could be close-enough-is-good-enough on a Dark Winter.

What’s really good about these relationships is that they get the heat level correct. That’s absolutely huge. It’s amazing how just getting this one colour dimension right changes your whole appearance and the feeling of your appearance. In cool colour, you look grayed and a little cyanotic. The good news is that your transfusion is as easy as changing your shirt. In too warm colour, the skin is yellow, teeth yellow, eyes dull, bone structure is blunted and flat, all true whether it’s your hair, foundation, or clothing. It’s so hard to get cool foundation. All these makeup artists talked companies into yellowing foundation, but it’s way too much. Chanel, Merle Norman, some of the L’Oreal True Match, they make some decent cool choices. Cool foundation, especially Winter’s, is grayish in the bottle.

Some theoretical arguments don’t work well IRL. For instance, you could draw a line in colour space where 2 Seasons meet and there would be some shared coordinates, meaning colour dots belonging in either Season. No right or wrong, it depends on the system and the palette designer. I have never once seen the textile colour that belongs equally well in 2 groups, nor the person in 2 Seasons. This is partly why other PCA systems don’t cross-over well into our Sci\ART based system. Not only is their logic process different to arrive at the Season, but the colours often belong to more than 1 Season.

In Sci\ART, at least my vision of it, every colour stands alone and every Season stands alone. That’s a very big deal as distinctions go. Our drapes don’t work with other systems, nor their drapes with ours. You can’t just say, It’s all colour analysis, should be interchangeable. Trust me, it ain’t. You’ll get yourself in a mess that will need some fixing. (more about this in the comments to the Career article, one back). I am absolutely not saying that one is righter or wronger because every system and every vision has its merits, just that they don’t mesh together.

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We should be defined in our clothing, bringing out the best in each other. Our face should be in front of our clothes and distinct from them. A Bright Winter in True Spring colours is very close to greatness. Except that she is draining the colour from the fabric and backing it up from our awareness. The lower half of her face is disappearing into the garment so her presence is dissolving into her clothing. The face yellows and the drape is already yellow, like a big yellow circle of flatness. There’s no excitement. Another person or analyst might see that as harmony or as a glowing tan effect, but I don’t. A difference of opinion perhaps. It depends on your ideal of beauty. You might totally subscribe to Hollywood’s love of a solid yellow wall of hair. That’s great and fine, but I wouldn’t. We don’t all need to line up behind the same idea. There is no right and wrong here.

Summer’s skim milk white looks as cloudy as skim milk white is relative to Winter white, placed under a Winter face. They don’t belong together and push each other even further in opposite directions. They find the thing that makes them most different and widen a little adjustment into a chasm of unbelonging. Under a Summer face, her white looks like white. Just white.

Notice grouchiness, confusion, and doubt. “They don’t make anything in my colours.”

In training, I ask students, In that colour, how does the person look like he’s feeling? We sense that he must be feeling in a way that he doesn’t at all. Bright Spring in Light Summer colours can look feeble and frail. Like, “Hi, I’m Ted and I’m exhausted.” No kidding he’s had trouble getting hired. His inner and outer energies come rushing back when he wears what he is. Vitality and health can be as simple as choosing a different T-shirt.

The Dark Winter in Soft Autumn colour announces, “Hi, I’m Ellen and I’m running out of gas. I’m checking out.” Change your shirt. Suddenly, your hair looks clean, more coloured, the skin is tight to the bones, all good. Suddenly, people are more interested in giving you money.

A Dark Autumn wearing Light Spring peach looks like a log cabin painted blossom pink. It’s irrational. A floating, disconnected head. This picture says, I can’t make reasonable decisions about myself. How likely am I to make them about you?

Colour analysis matters. Every person should have this information about themselves by the time they are 20. Like a social identity. Social competence has incalculable value in this world. Others decide this about us within about 10 seconds of seeing and greeting.

On a random clothing rack, Soft Summer colours are the grayest relative to all the other colours. The Winter colours are the boldest and darkest. Maybe our character tries to equalize itself, or find balance for the traits that are more extreme in us, so we reach for our opposite. Many a person with Summer’s type of natural colouring wants to project more push by wearing Winter colour. It backfires. Now, the only thing you can see between her nose and toes is the garment. By comparison to the clothing, the woman has faded away even more. Now she looks muted, where in Summer colours, she would look fresh and gorgeous.

She stays with Winter. Hair colour that was fresh, natural, and lively gets is run down and washed out against the Winter background, so she tries a few hair colours. She tries darker eyeliner. But all those bold colours don’t tell the world, “I am audacious and adventurous.” because we can barely register the person at all, nevermind find them daring. The person who is meticulous, tolerant, perceptive, precise, and soft-hearted is telling the world,

“I am unplanned, indiscriminate, possibly abrupt, possibly intense, and possibly odd.”,

so, even before introduction, from the time it took them to get from the door to you, you think, “Note to Self: Prepare. This could go a lot of different ways.”

Ten minutes later, you think, “Wow. This is the nicest person ever. I could talk to them for a week. Didn’t see that coming.”

Once Summer pulls their own colours from the closet, the magic happens. The wavelengths synchronize instead of competing with and neutralizing each other. The whole picture unites. Those grayer colours aren’t gray at all on her. They’re fully energized, present, and focused, and so is she. Her hair is very colourful and enhancing.

Remember that you are safe. You already look way better than you used to. From here, it just gets better.

Bright on Bright = Normal

Bright colours do not look overly bright on Bright Seasons. It’s the rest of us on whom they are too strong and more than we are, a distracting challenge to our natural colouring. On non-Brights, the colours say, “Look at me!!! Look at me!!!! Forget about her up there. Look down here where all the action is!!!” We would look drained and erased, worn out from always competing with our clothing. Not so on the Bright colouring. They look normal.

A Bright Winter can drain colour from most any fabric, including Dark Autumn and Dark Winter. She can dull Dark Winter’s strong coral rose into looking like True or Soft Summer colour. Under her face, Dark Autumn’s fabulous, rich, full, bronzed raisin looks drab and plain, maybe even a little dirty. Which is how Autumn makeup looks on her face.

Even True Winter, one powerful set of colours, looks washed too many times on a Bright Winter. Plus heavy and blue. No excitement. The whole image drags down. Change the drape. The lights come on. The whole picture lifts up. The lines all focus and turn upwards instead of like melting ice cream.

Many Bright Seasons, Winter and Spring, have beige hair. They contain Spring, after all. They often feel the hair is mousy and blah. It sure is if they’re wearing muted colour. All the life goes out of it. Out comes the hair chemistry. If they’d just change their shirt, the hair would sparkle. Bright Season hair is never ever mousy in correct colour.

Trust. Just let gravity take you. The great clothes and cosmetics will start showing up just because you’ve asked them to. Give it your attention but don’t stress. Effortless effort.

A Bright Season in their own colours doesn’t look like a Hiliter marker or more noticeably coloured than anyone else. Her red just looks like normal red. On someone else, the shirt would walk into the room before she does. It’s only on a Bright that it wouldn’t behave that way.

She doesn’t need to shop for shiny purple or neon pink. She just wants to repeat certain colour properties to look normal. That’s what it takes for her to look like she really looks. Colour analysis will find you a pretty lipstick but it’s way more organic than that. It will find what you really look like, in colour, line, and texture. The feeling in the observer is, Oh, is that what you really look like? I couldn’t see you before. You were distorted.

You know how when people take off their glasses and you suddenly get a whole different picture and feeling? It’s like that. An artist could paint you with a thousand different facial expressions. The viewer would expect a thousand different women to own each face. Might as well broadcast the real one.

New Bright Seasons may experience disappointment bordering on fear. She has seen her colours on others and thought, Oh, that’s just too much. Yup, on them, it sure is. But the rest of us see those colours on you, not on your hanger or on everyone else in the room, the way you do. On you, we think, Fine. Nothing to adjust to. Normal. Enough. Good. Interesting. Complete. Balanced. Clear. Healthy. Easy to look at. Nice eyes. That woman gets herself.

She’s here for us to interact with. Otherwise, she’s partly invisible, a place where many of us feel so much safer and try hard to find a reason to justify staying. And oh, boy, when a PCA is pulling out of your hiding place before you’re ready, it’s panicky. Go with it. It serves nobody to play small.

We compensate in so many ways to disguise or adapt our personality, often without knowing it, often in response to demands of the environment, parenting, society, and all the other pressures coming in. In the never-ending journey toward self-knowledge, surprising examples of being untrue to oneself turn up.

Surrender to stillness. Don’t overthink it. Just be in it.

Easing into the Bright Seasons.

You don’t have to wear the test drapes. They’re just measuring you.

You are not head to toe poster paint as a Bright, or dishwater as a Soft, or maudlin if a Dark. I use words that separate the palette from all the others in the mind of a person considering all 12. I have neglected to clarify that solo on the right wearer will it not look as extreme as the description. It finally makes sense.

Combinations matter. Add zing, your way. Wear dark teal jeans, a peach blouse, and wind a shiny, Chinese silk, peacock-printed scarf round your neck. This is a very different Winter from the other two.

The heat matters to Bright Winter. She needs to add the sunny, the sunbeam. This colouring shadows easily in too-dark or too-blue. Bright Winter is close to Bright Spring. A person could design those colour palettes to be closer to True Winter or Bright Spring and still be within the realm of Bright Winter. Who’s to say either is righter or wronger? They need the heat in their colors.

She forgets that the saturation only means pure pigment. It does not mean vaudeville, hussy, burlesque, or Halloween clothing. Purity of pigment matters. Even in True Winter, a palette of pretty high saturation, her skin will dull to the exact degree that True Winter is dull relative to Bright Winter.

The overall picture is too dark. Bright Winter is significantly lighter than the other Winters. Although the darkness range is similar to that of True Winter, the global impression is definitely lighter. Many of these folks have medium beige hair and blue eyes. Even if hair and eyes are dark, there is a light-bright reflectivity in the skin. Too dark or too blue moves to gaunt very fast here. Black is not automatic at all. Very very unique type of Winter.

She’s got the colours right but the garment lines are too straight and serious, when she’s not linear in her body type. Natural shapes make stripes feel like jailhouse prints. If you’re very rounded in your outlines, you should be shopping at Victoria’s Secret. Straight lines don’t work with your curves, they over-accentuate them. Two differently shaped garments tell a different story, despite being identical in colour.

If your character is flighty and whimsical, banker’s stripes make you wonder if the analyst got your Season wrong because your spare and linear-thinking Bright Winter friend looks so good in them. Your analyst did fine. No two women of the same Season will wear it best in the same way. Your colours are when your clothing, cosmetic, and hair colour journey must begin, but it’s not where it ends.

Her makeup is too strong for her age. If you’re 20, wear sheerer and lighter. Feature definition looks like youth but adapt it for your age.

Her makeup is too dry and opaque. High pigment in transparent application is better.

Shine is better than matte. Satin and frost shine is better than dewy and wet shine if Winter, the reverse if Spring. Distinguish the two types of shine in your mind. They look different to the rest of us and tell a different story.

Fun matters. Wear something happy. A polka dot leopard pin. A black watch with a gold daisy motif in the face. Button-down classics drag the whole thing down.

Sweetness. These folks have a cute quality when they’re 70, like kids in an adult body. Add baby peach, yellow, candy colour, peppermint colours. Find colours that would taste good and a little sharp or a little acidic. (But not bitter/vinegar, which is better on Dark Autumn)

Ease in with bigger neutral blocks and smaller colour blocks at first. A Bright might look boring in too much neutral colour, maybe more so if a Natural body type. The 3 Springs are this way, but it extends to Bright Winter, who needs colour in a sharp way, and the Light Summer who is also flattered by colour in an analogous type of scheme (colours that are neighbours on a colour wheel).

Try the bright colours further from the centre in the beginning, as nail polish or a handbag.

Limit to smaller pieces for shine. A watchstrap. All Winter does well in some type and amount of shine.

Explore the lighter colours. I completely disagree with the hair colour myth that lighter hair colour looks younger on all women. I do agree that all colour, and light colour in clothing, looks younger than the Safe Black don’t-notice-me uniform. These can be hard to find and take practice to match. Learn to lay the open palette on the garment rather than matching one little square or dot to anything. That’s what you look like in that garment. Do the light colours of the palette look either wimpy and weak or too strong, sparkly, or separate relative to the garment? If they belong together, the two should just settle in.  Great clothes are part of you, like a great rider and the horse are part of each other. Picture how it would look if horse and rider were out of stride. That’s how wrong colour feels.

Uplight with pale gold for Spring, in sharper lines if Winter, like NARS Albatross.

Our colour palette is where we begin. From that platform, we find our contrast level. the blonde haired blue eyed Bright Winter is a little more gradual, but still supports black mascara than the Asian Bright Winter.

Melt into a new friendship.

Live with it for a month. Then go back and try on the clothes and cosmetics you wore before. Do they still feel like home?

Just like feeling irritability in a pose, if you allow it quietly and calmly, it might flip to its opposite: Peace.

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1. When you can’t be anything else

In his very famous Stanford Commencement address of 2005, Steve Jobs says that your heart and intuition always know what’s best for you. I believe that to be 150% correct. That is, if you can connect with them before judgment arrives. Once judgment settles in, it’s over. No more right or truth can happen. We’re stalled in a character that has reverted to a less mature form.

I watch this video quite often for the reminders.

I began seeing Jennifer for facials two years ago. Before too long, a pattern emerged. Before starting the car, I’d sit in her driveway for 10 minutes writing down all the things she said about how to think (and not think) towards what I want my life to be like.

I’ll experiment with any advice, from Deepak Chopra to Alan Weiss. A woman I adore suggested a Vision Board, among my present projects. Fascinating to me that I wasn’t sure how to make one effectively, so send along your good resources. Experiments tend to work or not pretty fast.

From Visit 1 with Jen, I supervised my mindset according to her guidance and my life direction began to materialize faster. Presently, I’m reading The Power of Framing by Gail Fairhurst, in which she discusses priming the pump of our subconscious so that we can have rehearsed situations for our best reaction as they happen, not a day later. To describe in left-brain language what Jennifer’s guidance does, it would be that.

She listens to me talk for about 60 seconds, evaporates all the irrelevance, and extracts the highest calling. She can link me to my greatest good and the situation to its best outcome near immediately. If her words don’t make sense at the time, I wait 48 hours. Once it took 2 weeks to get the “So that’s what you meant.” light bulb moment.

Sometimes, we begin with a card reading (not Tarot or Zodiac) to give us something to talk around. The results of the four cards I choose are always freakishly related to one another and to new directions that are opening up or something I’m worried about. They might be a confirmation. They might feel uncomfortable and I start with the excuses, but I’ve learned that sooner I stop talking and start listening, sooner things arrive. She can get me out of my own way faster than anything I’ve ever encountered.

As with colour, we sabotage ourselves in so many ways until someone who sees us clearly says,  “This is your colouring. This heat, this darkness range, this softness.” Until the physio says, “Stop hiking your right shoulder and your left hip won’t hurt.” Until an intuitive person says, “Stop right there, that’s a judgment and I hear you apply it every time you bring up that situation”.

Jen taught me how to meditate. The usual ways were boring. I can pay attention to 2.5 breaths max. She said, “Try listening for the most far away noise you can hear.” That was fantastic. You know your eyes and brain relax when you look far away? This is exactly the same. It also creates a big, empty, open space between you and the place you’re listening in.

This is not the usual psychic “you have sorrow in your life” or “money is coming to you” reading. Jen’s readings are clearly “you gotta give something to get something and here’s what you gotta give.” When I leave, I have the jobs for the month. My jobs are the ways that I will hold and transform my thoughts. If I’m willing to do it, change is willing to come.

This isn’t only in person. She’ll do readings just by hearing you talk. She’s at Cloud 313  (www.cloud313.net). Below, she describes the difference between psychic and soul readings:

Regular psychic readings are more likely to tell you what is coming to you in the near future, which will be based on the vibrational energy & thoughts you have been sending out into the universe. Soul sessions/readings are geared more towards me tuning in to your soul, retrieving and interpreting information on the level of soul. When we “hear” the truth from our higher intuition it resonates perfectly with us on every level – we can instantly FEEL a change physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We can use this information to begin to practice new ways of being, allowing us to be easily joyful, confident and loving in all our moments as we move forth towards our soul’s true purpose. Our soul does not require us to analyze our past, present or future meaning. We do not need to focus on our darkest secrets or fears.

She looks quite amazing, not a face you see often or a presence you feel often. You probably have no idea what personality she has. Well, she’s completely down-to-earth and very direct. She enjoys colour but feels most grounded wearing black (oddly, that’s when I feel most tethered – which is the same as grounded, come to think of it). Her house contains more shades of red than any other colour. No question, she had the priestess presence of Zyla’s Soft Winter. Winter that she is, she is completely and unquestioningly internally guided. She will wear black exclusively. That’s her way to be Bright Winter. It’s a success story.

Jennifer had to be a Bright Winter. This mixture of faith and trust that normally resides naturally in children, people who have complete faith in magic because they see it all around them, takes a form in adult bodies. Material magic is in the Bright Season neck of the woods.

I expected her to feel all sorts of energy things during her PCA. No. She was a model for a colour analyst training course, probably the fastest student-directed PCA ever done. Jen flicked away all the other colours like pesky spirits trapped in a middle world to confuse humans. We all saw that every other choice was so far behind that we could barely recognize its presence. Even True Winter was, “Yeah, whatever, get that one off, put the other colour back.”

Variations on the Bright Winter Theme

I have said: “Add Spring’s wonderful humour to Winter’s formality in jewelry that sparkles, belts that are crayon-coloured and shiny, or imaginative hair accessories.”

Bright Winter colouring often reminds us of storybook characters, Snow White being the most familiar. That Katy Perry face, the child in a grown-up body, will follow that advice.

Nothing is for everyone.

Every woman expresses her colours in her own way.

She’s not always Sweet Queen. Sometimes she’s another type of queen. She might be the person that is bigger than life, big, strong, and flamboyant, a super heroine. She will wear the big, bold, bright colours in large areas easily. Pucci designs in prints. Platinum rings that look like silver lava. Shiny zippers and buckles make sense on her. They express a truth about her. They are a rational continuation of her energy. I think of Sci\ART Lauren Battistini of Color My Closet in Houston.

When the image is more mysterious, as the fortune-teller, she enjoys Winter’s ability to wear dark drama like no other colouring can. Try the dignified version in huge eyes and crystal clear-as-glass details (transparent buttons, lip gloss) to convey consummate clarity. These words, divine everlasting infinite immortal omniscient omnipotent. Wear a Zodiac medallion (eternity) on a violet (higher realms, highest Chakra) cord.

The character might be even darker, sensuous and mysterious. Morticia Addams has been suggested. Yes, like that. She was extreme, but still stunning, like a slinky and more dangerous Jessica Rabbit, pale as the most seductive apparition. Subtle, snaky wit and fierce loyalty describes most Winters I know. Morticia radiated power – perhaps that’s the part we’re not ready for.

It was she who said,

You have enslaved him. You have placed Fester under some strange sexual spell. I respect that.

and

Our credo: “Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc.” We gladly feast on those who would subdue us. Not just pretty words.

Winter is the gorgeous Goth, oxymoronic somehow. Some do it so well that their beauty is shocking, as deadly as Morticia. Friends and family may be uncomfortable because it’s just so believable, such a good extension of you, that you seem to be in costume when you’re not. They’re not sure what to think.

If you want to tone it down, wear the hair differently from Morticia, maybe in a sexy secret agent loose bun or a sporty teenager messy bun. Move the hair up, or add shorter, face-framing layers, or add bangs. Avoid black. Add sparkle here and there. Wear a very subtle complexion warming product like Givenchy Croisiere 1, Spring’s pale peach gold, adjusted to be invisible on your skin and set your makeup too. Wear peach-red gloss and blush, not blue-red.

Some folks don’t really remind of any character. And some don’t embody a story character but they certainly have some of those properties – a stunning and beautiful profile and impossibly long fingers that move like feathers, highly theatrical and romantic at once.

Jen is another expression of Bright Winter, quite beyond the naivete of Snow White. Design = Colour + Line. Fully half of a PCA session is concerned with the lines. This colouring can be painted into lines that are very adult, with a far-reaching wisdom, fully grown and ripe with experience, if you see where I’m going. Wear red. Wear velvet. Have a hairstyle that’s luscious. Where does supernatural meet sumptuous, as it does in Jennifer? Rhinestone. Black, but not industrial. Black, but not diesel black or office chair black, those are all Dark Winter.  How do we make black yummy? Beading. Shine. Swirl effects. Lace. Big hair. A darkly luscious Marilyn Monroe.

You understand that I get carried away with words, right? And the image gets bigger than life because it’s fun to see where things will go. Don’t picture a red velvet leotard and a push up bra. Just saying, there are way more kinds of great women in the world than Sweet&Sunny.

Step into your own power. You saw that happen in our mirror when we analyzed your colouring. In Sweet&Sunny or Soft&Dreamy colours, you were literally not there. We couldn’t see you. You were not in the room. Be who you came here to be.

You can convey these pictures with one tiny item. It takes barely anything for the viewer to make a connection. Mary Kay Crystalline eyeshadow highlight, pure as the driven snow, and a mouth-watering accessory, a shiny pomegranate juice wallet. Voila. Not a high wire act.

2. When you wish you were anything else

The tough love section. And please believe me when I tell you that I do love you. For every one of you who is feeling exposed, who is trying something new, who can’t find that hiding place when it was right there yesterday, I have nothing but love and respect for what you’re trying to do.

When your colouring was analyzed, your conscious and subconscious minds got a wake up call they didn’t see coming. I get it.  I was it.

I could have stayed there. Nothing bad would have happened. There is no pretty or ugly. There is no wrong or right. My face is not the same colour as my arms. You can see my Dad but my features are less focused. I know, you can see that for yourself.

Once we see a new way of thinking, we can choose to absorb it or reject it. Our call.  Walk away from it if your heart and intuition say N.O.W.A.Y.

I looked at the Winter makeup and saw a clown. I could see nothing else. And being a Winter, I’m always right. Just ask me. Others might be right but I’m more right. I got compliments the first day, but No, Sir, That Is Not Me.

On the other hand, winters are hard on themselves and they are smart. Winters are good at living at the rules they set for others. They can separate emotion from the problem or the job. So do the job. It’s a sweater. Buy it cheap. If you were the analyst back then and I had been your client, what would you have said to me? Try it for a month. I did. Took me 5 days and then it couldn’t come fast enough. 4 years later, it’s still coming and it will for you too.

You do not have to be perfect. I know, words lost on Winters.

While you’re separating things, separate colours from styles. Every body type, fashion preference, weight issue or non-issue, age, and comfort zone exists in every type of colouring.

A reader:

I was convinced I was a summer, maybe a soft summer.  I had been analyzed as a summer in the past, and advised never to wear gold jewelry.  I like foggy, misty colors.  Pretty much my entire wardrobe is muted blues, violets, & greens, plus black & gray, which I thought complemented my gray (once ash blonde) hair & blue eyes. I’m not arguing with [the] evaluation — I agreed with her that my complexion evened out and livened up with the BW drapes —  but I don’t like bright colors!  Especially red. Reds and pinks make me queasy.   Just looking at my BW color fan makes my head hurt. What to do?  How to embrace an identity of Bright Winter and supposedly present my best self, when the only thing from your BW wisdom that resonates with me is a fondness for tailored, glamorous, nearly formal clothing?

Me:

Part of this is my fault. In describing these colours as highly pure and energized so you could distinguish them on a scale of every possible colour including the other Winters, people heard NEON and felt like STROBE.

Textile colour exceeds human saturation. You’re picturing an extreme and you’ve painted it head to toe.

In What It Takes To Look Normal, we talked about how strawberry red doesn’t look bling on you, it just looks like medium red. I’m not sure how many more tips I can come up with.

The best advice really is to try it for a little while.

Reader:

“Well, you have to start. Do it for a month” is that in my case I’d have to throw out and replace just about everything I own —  and everyone seems to agree that BW is hard to shop for!

Me:

That’s a Winter’s world. Be perfect or do nothing. Why is perfect necessary? Can we put it on hold for a year?

Everyone who learned their colouring replaced everything they own over about 2 years. It’s important to NOT throw anything out. Those items will be how you evaluate progress and make comparisons.

And “everyone” will only be as accurate as “everyone” ever is, which is to say barely. If you listened to “everyone” about other things in your life, you’d know what you did when you were 16 and heard the “everyone” voice for the first time. Live your own experience. Make one move. Wear one sparkling bracelet with one charm on it that has meaning to you and gives you energy. Your little intention that you will open your heart.

There is definitely a bright winter stereotype of vaudeville costumes. I’ve had a role in perpetuating that, probably a big role. The irony is that this is the only coloring that doesn’t look like a silver bullet in these colors.

We’re saying to choose pure pigmentation, nothing more.  Dressing as The Flash isn’t the plan.

The colours looked brighter under the PCA lights. Those are seriously honest lights. They need to be. Same with O.R. lighting. The surgeon has to see the earliest signs of changes in colour of tissues. Some professions have brutal lighting but you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Regular lighting is indirect and bounces off all sorts of objects, which is why close enough is often good enough in foundation. Our brain adjusts a lot, like all the white we think we see that a painter would not paint white. We don’t need accuracy to survive so we didn’t evolve to see it on our own. To survive and reproduce, all evolution really cares about, we need to draw accurate information from our surroundings, which we do by being less absolute. We make correct approximations. Not good enough for a colour analyst.

If you love heathery colours, wear them. My teenagers get along splendidly well wearing what they like. If this is a good plan for you, PCA can save you money even here by suggesting you not buy anything too costly. The clearness of Bright Winter colouring will drain other colours, reducing them into a tired old item that’s been washed a lot. There is no way I know to make those colours interesting on you, if they get noticed at all. Put your cash someplace else.

Biggest part of helping someone is teaching them to help themselves.

Biggest part of helping yourself is answering this: What are you willing to do?

Let’s break it into steps. You decide if you’re willing.

Action Plans

1. Do nothing for a month. Not one thing. Let the whole PCA sit on the highest shelf in the pantry. Leave it there. If your Season grows legs and moves in the night or starts making chirping sounds and bugs you enough, doing something will become the path of least resistance. For now, your best decision is to stay where you are.

Action step: Give this (and your analyst) a chance. Change will be unsettling. The iChing said

“Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.”

Deepak said something similar in the 7 Spiritual Laws of Success. I read one daily. Today, try #2 in the Law of Detachment.

2. Choices. You can choose to look for every reason why it won’t work. Dog trainers experience this day in, day out. My dog is different and not one of your 40 ideas will work. At the end of the day, the trainer’s hands are tied. Keep the dog you have. You made it be the way it is so part of you is already OK with that. Dogs and owners train each other, the dogs doing the massive majority of it.

Action step: Start small. Buy a wallet or nail polish. We still see it as part of you. Wear a sparkly something. I favour these at Macy’s. Simple, symmetrical, repeating, balanced, all good Winter words.

3. Don’t wear the makeup. Or any makeup. Half of women don’t and wouldn’t and don’t care.

Many women wouldn’t have a PCA at all simply because makeup is uncomfortable. Many wouldn’t be trained as analysts only because they’re uncertain about applying makeup on themselves, let alone others.  Sell who you are. Women will think, “Someone like me. I’ll be comfortable with her.”

Many who would bring so much to this career hold back. They worry that they don’t wear makeup and won’t fit into an image industry. Think there’s no market sector that doesn’t wear makeup and still wants to look great? Lord.

Action step: Do it as a group. If I’m writing an article, I’ve gathered from the many emails that the audience must be wide. Here’s another market sector to open up. The New Bright Winter Support Group. Many reading this have figured out this colouring. They could offer the most valuable kind of help. What did you do? How did you think about it? How long did it take to get comfortable? What’s still hard and how are you managing it? Of the advice out there, what do you just ignore? Do you have a vision you’re moving towards in your choices?

4. Two sessions. If you live near the analyst and you know makeup is a problem, ask ahead if you can split the visit in two parts. PCA first, makeup in 2 months. Every analyst should be offering some kind of progress visit after a few months. If you’re hitting the brakes as we get to the end of the analysis, the makeup will go in one ear and out the other. You’ll be processing a thousand things and wanting to get out of there. If you want to sit in your car and weep, you should be free to go do that.

But don’t turn yourself into a victim, ay? In your life, you’ve gotten lots of advice you didn’t take. This can be the same. Here’s a Bright Winter thing: emotional vulnerability on a giant scale. Spring’s emotion and sweet optimism mixed with Winter where everything happens on a grand scale, and drama soon becomes melodrama. The emotional vulnerability is laid out over and over only to have it shot down.  Hopelessness sets in. Rein all that back in. Get out of your life. Look down at yourself from a balcony.

Action step: Winter excels at big perspectives. Go there. “Instead of finding everything about my appearance that I don’t like, I guess I better find the things about me that I do like and notice those for a while. Have I being systematically brainwashing myself over the years? OK, so I can’t unlearn everything as fast as my PCA experience did, but I can take it slow and re-examine a lot of things.”

Energy flows along behind attention. Get conscious about where you’re putting yours because you are literally telling yourself the story of your life. From the balcony, what is the story of your life? “She is going to…”

5. Let’s try out some voices. See if you can recognize yours. There is no wrong or right.

 Christine was right when she said that it’s easy to see the changes. I understand her writing better now but I like my clothes and I’m going to keep them. Interesting experience but I probably won’t do much with it.

 I might try those colors but the people in my life won’t like me wearing them. When I told Christine that, she looked at me funny and said, “Who gives a shit?” but that’s just Christine and she’s kind of hard. She must have felt really strongly about this topic because it was the only time she swore.  She said, “Stop abdicating your power and decide for yourself how you wear your hair and what clothes you choose. Let someone else control the little things, and while you were distracted, poof!, they’re controlling your big things.” Whatever. Might work for her but I care what my husband thinks and I want to look good for him. Good thing her husband is a True Winter, they probably deserve each other, imagine living in that house.

Okie dokie, something is going to have to change. I could see that in Summer colors, I looked like I was being prepped for surgery. In Autumn colors, my skin and eyes reflected light like a farm pickup truck that hasn’t seen rain in a month. I had pea soup skin. The lighter Springs weren’t so bad, but I looked like a horse that has its winter coat. Puffed. No sleek planes and angles. Wider and duller. Am I really going to spend the next 40 years of my life in clothes that tell other people that I’m not really here because I’m nervous about the color of a sweater? My 90 year-old self would kick my butt around the block.

I know that to get anywhere in life, you have to know where you start. PCA gave me that. I got handed my Owner’s Manual, or a chapter of it. I get to decide where and how to drive the car.

Now I need to picture where I’m going. A start place and a going towards place. Two points define a line. I now understand the space from here to there. It know it will get clearer once I start because that’s how life always works.

Action step: Celebrate that you can wear black quite well. Do you know what others would give? I mightn’t advise that you wear a turtleneck of it. Black is a little rough on Bright Winter, even though you’re a Winter. A colour that’s too cold and dark will need adjusting and it’s hard to make sunlit black.

A colour that’s too cold, even if the saturation and darkness levels are Bright Winter, will cause blue shadows and need adjusting, even though you’re a Winter. Some of my drapes might do that if you’re a little warmer than they are, though both you and they reside under the Bright Winter umbrella. That’s a common happening in Bright Winter colouring, male and female. Every human can’t hope to be equally represented in every way when there are only 12 categories.

Let’s be real. Every Winter will have black pants while they’re trying to figure stuff out (if they didn’t before) and so they should. Their colours go well with black.

6. Start with colours you already like. Periwinkle and turquoise are usually easy.

Move towards purer pigmentation. That’s all it is. Go top to bottom.

7. You like soft colours. You already like gray. Wear more. Rely heavily on neutral colours.

Action step: Little adjustments the next time you buy pants or decide which pants to keep.

The Winter lineup on the bottom.

Winter gray is made of black and white. Might look a touch blue or red.

Pink and purple gray are not so good. A red gray like the cords on the right side is better.

Blue gray is ok too if it’s close to white. Rainclouds and pigeon medium-blue-gray won’t be the best choice you can  make.

Winter white pants are good.

Trade soft blue for more blue, 3rd from left.

The top center pants are not bad at all. They’re just very dark. I like dark clean gray better than black but it’s very dependent on the person. Some Bright Winters have beige hair and wear black exceptionally well, no problems of any sort even in a turtleneck.

8. Forget about contrast. Revisit it in a few months.

Action step: I’m going to build me an outfit on the internet.

Learn Polyvore. Learning your Season is much like learning software. You Google and YouTube about it. In the end, you figure it out by messing with it, getting some stuff wrong, remembering what worked, setting up new maps in your head till they are easy and automatic.

On the internet, it’s free. As many times as I need.

My pants are going to be gray. Already own those. I’m going to wear a light peach colored sweater. Peach is hardly ballistic. The wool will soften the look and the colours. I might go for mint too. Today, I give myself permission to buy anything I want. The only deal is, I can’t pick anything I would normally buy.

I’m going to wear a white blouse under it. Easy and pretty. I’m not even going to think about shiny fabric for a year.

Maybe it’s Christmas. I’m going to pin one sweet little Jingle Bell to my cardigan as a brooch. Maybe a sparkly angel. No other jewelry. Actually that doesn’t sound very hard.

Christine asked me to do her one favour. I can hear her voice. “Please, don’t buy a brown or black purse. Please. Anything else. Pick crystal gray. Doesn’t have to be fuchsia sequins. Just not functional.”

I hid the big colour inside a purse.  That allover purple purse, we’ll just put it up there in the corner, top shelf of the pantry.

Saw some jewelry I had to have.

If I saw this on another woman, I can admit that I wouldn’t brace myself.

At first, I got many Soft Summer clients. I know what the lesson was. Learn from them to be a nicer version of yourself.

Lately, it’s Bright Winter. I still cannot figure out the lesson so we’ll be here for awhile.

—–

I seem to be in a groove of seeing so many Bright Winters lately that I figure I’m still supposed to write about it.

The reaction a person has to learning that their natural colouring falls into the Bright Winter group is either delight or despair. Seldom is there anything in between. The reason for most Season misgivings comes from misunderstanding the colours or the analysis process.

Some of the information below may be hard to imagine. It’s the only way I know to explain it. (Analyst who were trained by me will receive the discussion below soon in their Review Topics documents – and it will be even more technical.)

Here some come concerns Bright Winters may have:

Q: If I’m a Bright Winter, why do I look too blue in some of the Bright Winter drapes?

Short A: Because you’re warmer than the drape.

Long A: Depending on the person, this type of colouring is extremely finely adjusted and very sensitive to excessive darkness, redness, and or blueness. Some people handle the blue very well, almost as cool as True Winter can handle, but they become gaunt in black. Others can develop red spots in the cheeks, like a feverish face, in too much blue-red influence but they have no problem with darkness.

To match the exact coolness level of every Bright Winter, the analyst would need approximately 4 blue drapes. And then 4 reds, 4 greens. And then repeat that for all the possible tolerances to hue, value, and chroma of every person in all 12 Seasons. Not reasonable.

Also not necessary. The analyst with a comprehensive understanding of the analysis process is prepared to choose the Season because it’s better than the others, not necessarily it’s the best possible choice of this colour on this person. The client shouldn’t expect every Bright Winter drape to be perfection on every Bright Winter face. You find yourself inside your correct colour parameters. Sometimes, an analyst’s decision feels like a compromise and doesn’t make sense, but it’s still the best and correct decision of the comparison.

I am a Dark Winter.

I need makeup to wear black. Makes sense, black is only automatic on True Winter.

I can wear some medium and dark True Summer colour. Makes sense, True Summer is a little warmer and more muted than True Winter. So is Dark Winter.

True Spring colours clear my eyes better than True Autumn, if the two are being compared. Makes sense, Winter is looking for more clarity than Autumn provides.

I love and can wear Dark Autumn dark colours. Makes sense, I’m more warm and muted than many Dark Winters and darker colours are pretty easy on Dark Seasons.

None of that makes me a Spring, Summer, or Autumn.

If all people were exactly the same within one Season, then all the women of that Season could wear exactly the same lipsticks equally. Not the truth at all. My perfect lipstick colour is dull and disappearing on a cooler, clearer Dark Winter. There are ranges inside each Season. If the information clues were picked up along the analysis path, the right decision will be made at the end. The analyst doesn’t need to have my perfect Dark Winter blue drape in her set to know I am a Dark Winter. There might be versions of blue that I would wear a lot better than the blue drape she might have, but she learned my face, did her comparisons, knew what to look for and how to interpret it. A Season decision is a moving target until the very last comparison.

The Test Drapes are special. They’re measuring and comparing. Don’t look for home in them. Don’t expect to be finally and ultimately perfected. You need only be better than in any other. The same exquisite tolerance to colour parameters happens in all Seasons, but because Winter’s scale is so big and this colouring quite delicate, the disparity gets noticed more.

The public might not always understand. Don’t pay too much attention to the chat room group. They can’t know how it works because they’ve never been shown. All they see is the end result. One appendectomy can look like another if all you see are the people 3 weeks later. What happened in between may be wildly different. One person might never have had appendicitis in the first place. One might finally get rid of abdominal pain that’s haunted her for months. Another might be sure the surgeon made a mistake, but the fact is that sutures are more irritating to her tissues than the average while the surgical technique was exemplary. Her chat room group wouldn’t know any of that, but they’d make judgments and give opinions anyhow in an effort to support her.

clear water, close to white, more icy (Winter)

Q: Why is the bottom half of the face so darkened by black if I am Winter?

Short A: This is a WAY lighter Winter. Even True Winter isn’t all that dark. There are many blonde and light-brown haired True Winters with light eyes. Many.

Long A: Nothing applies to everybody. Some Bright Winters, even blonde haired, blue-eyed persons, are fine with darkness. Others who might be darker to look at will have a definite upper limit for darkness. Some can manage strong darkness in blue or green, but begin having detracting optical effects in the appearance at medium gray. Some are fine with shiny black, as long as True Winter blue is extracted, but are not good in matte black. Texture matters to a composition as much as line and colour do; therefore, texture matters in personal colour analysis (PCA).

The only more ghoulish Goth than Bright Winter would be the Light, True, and Bright Spring. All four types of natural colouring, or Season, or Tone, look light, bright, and clean. What about that sounds Goth? They conflict with the dark, depressing, serious Goth look – OTOH, maybe Goth are supposed to look compromised. Glowing and Goth doesn’t match. Bright Seasons are glowy. That’s how their skin reflects light. They look too healthy and vital for Gothness.

From the document that I send my clients:

Bright Winter epitomizes the sugar frosting of snow and sunlight. The innocent fairy tale character could wear shimmery violet-pink eyeshadow, blush, and lipgloss, adding even more crispness and show biz with near black eyeliner and big lashes.

Many Bright Winters are blonde and blue-eyed, with a feeling of girl-next-door, like the stereotypic Light Summer, except for the strong, clear, sparking eyes. Other lighter Bright Winters look Scandinavian/Nordic Ice Princess. Although some Bright Springs have the coolness that feels like royal distance, most are more informal, bubbly, chatty, rounded in their edges, and natural in their energy.

more pigment, more gray, closer to pastel (more Summer) – where does icy end and pastel begin?

Q: So Christine, you’re saying that all Brights can always take any level of saturation?

Short A: There is no Always, Must, Should, or Never in human colouring.

Long A: Textiles can be saturated beyond what you’d find in a human being. There are colours that will overwhelm even a Bright. I am saying that on a comparative scale of humans, Brights are most harmonized and flattered in the purest pigments.

icy grays made of B&W (Winter eyes)

Q: What if you said I’m a Bright Winter, which still I don’t believe BTW, and I look really dark?

 Short A: Then you are a Bright Winter who looks dark.

Long A: In the colour analyst training course, my students and I spend our first morning proving to ourselves that our eyes are rather clueless about looking at paint chips and knowing their colour dimensions. I guess we could see which is lighter between 2 colours of equal saturation. Change the saturation setting of one paint chip and we lose it. We guess wrong. If we can’t guess a paint chip, how much harder must it be to gauge a human face just by looking. You need a way to measure, a.k.a. drapes.

You look dark, fine. Your most important colour attribute is still that your pigmentation is very clean and clear. You are more clear than you are dark, but no rule says you can’t be both to some degree. It’s knowing the amount of each one relative to the other that’s tricky.

pastel means more pigment + more gray (Summer eyes) – where’s the dividing line between icy and pastel? is there one?

Q: I read RTYNC and Bright Winter felt too zingy. I’m not electric and flashy.

Short A: You can’t see yourself. Compared to a range of other humans, your colouring feels more electric than a foggy day would. I was trying to make a comparison. Who do you know who looks foggy?

Long A: Ignore RTYNC (the blue book over in the right column). I can’t write the sequel because I created what the colour world needed least, 12 more stereotypes. Back then, I knew half what I know today. Maybe there’s another book taking shape that describes the real world better, the enormous variety, how people of the same Season can look incredibly different.

Why write about Seasons at all? Because it’s fun and interesting for us humans to look at one another and see all the possibilities. The stereotypes are like your horoscope. Kathryn Kalisz (founder of the Sci\ART system of PCA) also wrote about how people in the Seasons can look. I asked her once what Season someone was. She laughed and said in the most cheerful voice, “I have absolutely no idea! Until they’re in my chair.”

That book was only intended to help you see who you’re not, give a sense of how those colour energies made me feel so you could ask yourself the same thing, and give you 12 approximate palettes to make comparisons so you don’t have to own 12 swatch books. It got used too literally. The disclaimer at the front says that you will not be able to find yourself accurately, or at all. Should have been in big red print.

SO CUTE!!!

The Light Summer to Bright Winter Spectrum

This picture of Julianne Hough (said “huff”) came my way. It reminded me of a friend.

After thinking about it a bit, I realized that the face is like an exaggerated Reese Witherspoon.

Thing is, Julianne can do this. Is the dress wearing her? Is the makeup stronger than she is? By a lot or a little? If the hair were deeper, would she balance the other colours better? The balance is a little off but it’s hard to know what needs fixing and what doesn’t. Too many unpredictable variables. Just like draping a face. Reese were done like this, would the balance be off by less or by more?

Julianne looks to be in that girl-next-door Bright Winter to Light Summer spectrum. Except the eyes. Those eyes are crystal clear. Who knows what her natural hair colour is? From the gallery of images, I see that too yellow hair makes her face too yellow. Too light hair makes her face look puffed with flour. If you think of Bill Gates as average Light Summer colouring, those eyes would be wild in his face.

Reese seems to me a Light Summer. This makes sense. Winter is like an exaggerated Summer. The Warm Seasons are different. Autumn is not a continuation of Spring. It’s a whole different type of warmth. In a Season circle or progression, I would not Spring and Autumn side by side; I’d put them opposite one another.

the blue – too much pigment for icy; too pure pigment for pastel > probably not strong Winter or Summer ; we see this colour in Bright Spring eyes

Q: If Winter is an exaggerated Summer, why not have a Season in between? Like a continuation between Light Summer and Bright Winter, or True Summer and True Winter?

Short A: You’d get no new colours that weren’t already spoken for in one of the Seasons. I see the brilliance of the Sci\ART method of PCA, a genius that I am more in awe of with each client, as 12 stand alone groups. It makes their unique radiances strong and distinct. Smudging them into one another would dilute that and make analysis decisions much harder. Can a client blur them into each other? Absolutely.

Long A: Because real people don’t drape in between Summer and Winter to my eyes, though other analysts that I respect gigantically might not agree. A Soft Summer still looks better in Summer drapes, just a little weak. A Dark Winter still does better in Winter drapes overall if you know what to look for.

Also, making a cool Season overlap into a cool Season is in contradiction with the physics of light. That’s not how sunlight illuminates objects on our planet as interpreted by our eyes and brains.

Would the Bright Winter person look better True Winter’s drapes than True Summer’s drapes? Not always that easy. The light Bright Winter person’s face loves the lightness of Summer.

We can’t look at faces and know if they’re lighter than saturated, more cool than light, more saturated than warm, etc. Our eyes are not capable. We have to put a quantitative measuring system in between. Those are the drapes. Even then, in the early part of the analysis, all the features don’t behave the same way. That only happens at the end.

You will be wildly surprised at what your eyes will see happen with the drapes. The rug will get yanked out from under the feet of what you think Seasons have to look like. There are a lot of technical reasons for decision-making that Terry Wildfong and I train our students in carefully and thoroughly because we measure many markers at once in each face, with each new colour change.

The analyst evaluates many markers, related to line, colour, and texture, and makes a better-than choice. The markers will not be the same in every face. A Dark Winter man may wear Bright Winter saturation fairly well if his colouring is intense, but his face might look very oily. Another Dark Winter  man will lose eye energy in Bright Winter drapes but the complexion reflects light much the same between the two. We take a lot of time to learn every face because each reacts to colour in a unique and individual way.

And it can still be very difficult. At this point in my career, although I retain near dismay for how complex a PCA can be, I’m usually pretty confident in my Season decision. I saw a woman recently. We went between Bright and Dark Winter. Back and forth, back and forth. Test Drapes, Luxury Drapes, makeup, back and forth, back and forth. In the end, I decided on Bright for a selection of reasons. Not just one reason. Many reasons, which I itemized in the documents I sent her. All the analyst can say sometimes is, “This is how I saw you today. And this why.”

Was I correct? I hope so. Was she so difficult because she was extraordinarily beautiful, like trying to make a child look bad? Was it because she was of darker complexion? I’ve invited her back to model for a training course because I need fresh eyes, a different day, and some outside opinions. Some puzzles are more enigmatic.

Sometimes, facial features are very tough to prioritize. We see good and bad things in 2 Seasons in most every comparison until we’re at or near the end. This is normal and expected.

many a Dark Season eye

Students ask,

Q: Which observation is most important?

Short A: Depends. Every face is different.

Long A: There’s no such thing as most important. Your eyes are not more important than your mouth. A jaundiced face isn’t more important than an unfocused face. It’s the totality of a face. The answer would be different for every client. Even a well-trained or very experienced analyst can be perplexed.

If a client is much more comfortable in one Season, the best decision might be to have them wear it for a while. Throw out nothing. Buy a gloss and a few inexpensive T-shirts. Adjust the hair colour. In a few months, have another draping.

—–

Still happening. Bright Winters are walking in the door with so much to teach us.

Too light for Bright Winter? too warm? too soft? Why isn’t it shocking?  I like it. The pigments are clean. It doesn’t feel like a Light. The shocking part is only one interpretation. There are a million others.

Q: If I’m a Bright Winter, why does half the makeup look terrible on me?

Short A: That’s typical of all 8 Neutral Seasons. Nothing different going on.

Long A: Being a Neutral Season, meaning a blend of a warm and cool parent colour groups in your natural colouring, means that your palette contains warm and cool versions in most every colour family. That in turn is because that’s how the colours in your body are set up.

In a Neutral Season person, the native colours might be very fussy about lightness or darkness, or softness or clearness. The skin says, “You mess with one of those, I’m going to mess with you. ” On the warm to cool issue, the colours say, “A little warmer or cooler, no problem. I’m fine with as long as you don’t drive all over the road. A little right or left of center isn’t a problem. I have a different center line I have to stick to for you to be awesomely beautiful and defined in your clothing, hair, and makeup. A touch warmer or cooler? Fine. Do what you gotta do.”

That’s most people. Nothing is true in everybody. Some Neutral Seasons are as fussy about heat as a True Season is, or almost. Especially Bright Winter because the skin is Spring-delicate but the colour intensity is Winter-big. Touchy combination. The magnitude of Winter’s scale (when it cools, it cools fast and hard; when it darkens, you notice), plus the complexity and high responsiveness of this colouring, and the tolerances are more Yes or No – not unlike everything else Winter.

In clothing, I have never seen the Neutral Season woman who can’t wear her warm and cool colours very well, some more rigorously than others, of course, as we talked about in the previous article, Bright Winter Q and A. We all begin in our 12 Tone or Season palette and adapt it to our particular contrast level, body shape, age, taste, and so on.

That’s clothing we’re talking about. Neutral Seasons look boring if they stick to one edge of their palette, be it warm or cool, regardless of how close to their warm or cool neighbour their colouring sits in the 12 Season cycle. They are far more exciting and interesting if they dress all over their palette.

Cosmetics are different. It’s the rare Neutral Season woman who wears her warm and cool colours equally well in makeup. Most of us have a particular heat level within our palette that seems to work best. It’s less tightly defined with clothes. It is more tightly defined with colours we paint right on our face. The heat level for cosmetics isn’t always related to where our colouring is positioned in our Season or Tone, warmer or cooler, probably because cosmetics mix with skin pigments and are influenced by other aspects of skin chemistry. A bright Dark Winter could wear the same lipstick as a dark Bright Winter. Bite Quince is a great example.

Some Neutral Season colouring is unusual in its high sensitivy to heat level in clothing. Really, in any Season, the average appearances and rules about appearances don’t exist in the real world, certainly not among the Brights. There will always be those in any colouring than sit at the extremes of any parameter. Some Bright Winters tolerate dark colours well, but white not so well, where a little too cool is a lot too ghostly.

Is an analyst going to have 5 white drapes? No, of course not. Especially not white. It’s the hardest analysis colour to make decisions from and the most difficult colour to assign to only one Season’s drape set. How extreme can you make white to have it represent only 1 Season as Test Drapes must do? If the Test Drape white is not your perfect white, your analyst tells you what needs adjusting based on your analysis process, and you go to the store and find THAT white.

Makeup texture is crucially important in the Brights, again because of the big scale and volatile settings in all 3 colour dimensions. On all colouring whose appearance is young and angelic, sheer may be better than matte. On a more dramatic presence, an opaque texture is necessary to support a face that expresses power in the more traditional sense, to balance more imposing eyeliner and blush that in turn balance the architecture of the face.

Lips should balance eyes and hair for the whole head to look balanced. If hair colour or textures are strong and striking, as opposed to clear and gossamer, matte lips can make more sense, though it’s still brightness that really matters. On a strong, mature face with Winter level features – significant hair, arresting eyes, and notable clothing – an invisible mouth too close to skin colour, is, well, it’s old. This kind of face wears matte just fine and is too busy to reapply gloss every half hour.

Bright Winter? Clean pigment, not too warm, small yellow accents, ends very near black, red-toned gray in background (but not blue or mauve grays like pigeon or raincloud). That’s a stunning outfit. Only a Bright Winter could wear that pink in eyeshadow, blush, and gloss – but not every Bright Winter.

Q: In the last article about Bright Winter Q and A, do you think some people are in between Light Summer and Bright Winter in their Season position? Do they look pretty good in both palettes in clothing?

Short A: No. I think nobody is located between True Seasons. True Seasons don’t overlap. Colouring can be located between Neutral Seasons. Bright Winter and Light Summer share some colour properties but their clouds don’t overlap in colour space. Some great analysts might see this otherwise though. Don’t get locked down by my bossy delivery. That’s just how I talk.

Can they share clothes? Depends. Age, taste, safety, degree of fussiness about being perfect. Also how colour perceptive the audience will be.

Long A: Christie Brinkley could be between Reese and Julianna. No real reason for me pointing that out, just a similar kind of colouring and face. She might be neither Light Summer nor Bright Winter. Probably isn’t, in fact.

I said before that Winter is an extension of Summer. You know by now that I say things too broadly just to unstick something in your head that shouldn’t be there. For instance, when I said, “Any Season can have Any hair and eye colour.” It’s mostly true. You can have blue, green, or brown eyes in any Seasons. Now, it won’t be the same blue, green, or brown, but we can’t get into the details until the wrong generalization is out of your head space.

So Winter is more Summer in some ways. OTOH, Autumn and Spring are seriously different. Therefore they belong opposite a circle from each other, with Winter and Summer also opposite. Then the Neutrals can assume their correct positions, or oppositions. Then the heat levels can assume their correct positions, or oppositions.

There are colour analysis systems that go around a clock in the Spring, Winter, Summer, Autumn order. I don’t understand that. For me, I can make more sense of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. That makes the neighbours and the opposites more logical in my head. While I respect the work and vision of everyone in our industry because every one has added to our knowledge, placing warm next to warm is in contradiction with the physics of illumination. Warm and cool don’t move into each other, they move away from each other, I believe.

But there is NO Winter person who drapes equally in Summer colour, IMO. You’re one OR the other. When I say Winter is more Summer, I have no smudged line in my head. You’re still on one side or the other side.

To me, there is never a real life person who can’t be put solidly in one. Some great analysts disagree. If I’m the analyst today, a person is either Winter or Summer. There’s no blend. My students don’t leave here without proving this to themselves.

In a TEST situation, you’re either or.

However.

My more specific point was that they can use Light Summer to grow into Bright Winter. In the store, you can wear Light Summer if Bright Winter is too much, and still look a million % better than all the other choices you could have made that day. In the totality of a Light Summer outfit, a Bright Winter item could be the only thing people see under PCA lights. Or vice versa. IRL is different. Our eyes adjust and adapt and compensate all the time.

Coming around to bright colour? Great. Keep a delicate feeling about it. Keep your lights close to white if you’re Winter. Could the flower be Bright Spring? Maybe, hard to tell from photos. If there’s real red, it’s feels closer to Winter. Shocking? Maybe in a cement room.

Q: I wore a perfect Bright Winter lip colour, not too warm or cool. It swatches just right. I took good pictures. All my friends said it was wrong for me. Now you tell me I’m a Bright Winter. How can I wear lipstick that everyone thinks is off?

Short A: They were too absolute, and about a different issue.

Long A: First, if the friends are online and have not been in a room with you, they don’t know because they can’t know. Ever met anyone who was exactly what you expected online? Ever seen a cosmetic that was?

Second, what do you look like? Young woman, young features, and opaque looks like Mom’s makeup. Often much of the palette of colours, in clothing too, is too powerful for young men and women to pull off. It will happen in time. The adult will surface. Eventually, the face will shift from Spring sweet to Winter regal, even though you’re still Bright Winter at 17.

It makes sense to give a hard face a hard lipstick. Give a soft or young face SHEER lipstick, NOT SOFT. Don’t reduce saturation or you’ll move the colour to someone else’s makeup bag. Reduce opacity. Two completely different concepts.

The friends knew they crashed but couldn’t tell into what. The issue was opaqueness, which does look like Mom’s Makeup. The viewer sees that and thinks, “Whoa. Back up. I have no idea where this gun will fire. I’m not getting close and not showing much of myself.” The friends felt that and said, “Can’t be your Season if the lipstick test fails.”

They were just wrong about what’s wrong. The GummiBear version of the exact same colour could be superb. High pigment density in a transparent application is how Bright makeup looks right. Makeup makes sense and belongs on a face when it reflects light in the same way that the skin reflects light (see Best Skin Finish articles, Winter, Summer, Spring, Autumn.)

Opacity and transparency are not ways of measuring colour but they most assuredly influence how we see and feel about it. Would you put house paint on a doll’s lips? Same colour in jellybean, does it feel better? On a Bright, too sheer is ChapStick. There has to be pigment density + pigment purity + transparency of application.

We can’t look at a photo and adjust one parameter of those three and know what it would do to the face, just as we can’t look at two colours of different colour dimension, say saturation, and guess the lighter and darker. Our eyes get mixed up when one thing changes, about the other things. It guesses wrong. Which is why a correct PCA has to find a way to tease the 3 colour dimensions apart and evaluate each one separately. That means exact drape colours and a logic process that sails around these storms, not into them.

Sheer also allows more movement on the warm-cool axis. Sheer makeup is good on anyone making adjustments because our own pigmentation shows through and brings it nearer to us. It’s instant, built-in, foolproof cosmetic colour customization.

There is always part of what looks right to people that’s just taste, same as any art form. And memory, intuition, emotion, and subconscious. We have little control over any of it but they influence our decision-making. Analysts fight their personal feelings about colours all the time to keep it purely objective, part of why a PCA system that measures something is so essential.

A nice picture to break up all the print. Ridiculous how much I can talk. Also lots of Bright  Winter going on. Clarity, smoothness, high reflectivity, transparency, and some nice neutral colours for pants and a coat in the background.

Q: If I’m a Bright Winter, why do I look like a child when I wear the clothes? The colours shouldn’t wear me, should they?

Short A: You’ll grow into them and get used to them. It’s normal.

Long A: A young Bright Winter might feel the colours wear him until he’s 30, especially if he’s blonde and blue-eyed. If the family and friends have only seen the sunny rascal face, and that’s how he’s always been treated, and therefore how he sees himself when he looks in the mirror, how can anyone know that the power face is already the bigger part of him, and will get bigger with adulthood? When everyone has seen him as Dennis The Menace, how fast can the room adjust when Beckham on the GQ Cover stands up? Everyone has some catching up to do when Dennis walked in and Chris Pine will be leaving (hey, Pine looks like Hough, Witherspoon, and Brinkley too. Like they could be a family.)

How would you feel if she were your sister and your consciousness of her goes from this to this (scroll down to Out of the Desert), in an afternoon? (these are not necessarily Bright Winter; get the feeling and the lines, not the colours)

When those who always saw Lollipop Bouquet had to adjust to Candy Cane?

And what if Candy Cane suddenly became Grecian vase? Winter is a grown-up. Never underestimate the power, maturity, and seriousness inside even the youngest Winter. Many Winters seem floaty in various ways. Don’t be fooled. They’re not.

My eyes saw the person and, because the skin is quiet and the face is united, bounced immediately to the eyes. And couldn’t move away from the eyes without conscious effort. Perfect. The lips balance the hair and eyes so the whole head looks balanced.  Barbie or bubblegum would  not be better. I can’t even talk about rust. The face would not come across as it does with less lip. The image would be compromised compared to this one. The same could be said of more lip, especially in the angelic quality of the face. Burgundy would not be better, even her own sugarplum could be a lot. For now. If you’re not wondering what the lip colour in the photo is, you and I have a whole different opinion of beauty. And that’s perfectly OK and normal, probably everyone has different opinions about beauty. It’s YSL Glossy Stain #13.

More importantly, until you’re seen in real life in your true and native colours, nobody really knows what you look like.

Lines won’t assume their correct shape till we see them in their real colour and texture. We don’t know the true shape of a line till we see it in its true and real colour. Carol Tuttle of DYT really saw texture differences well, and closed the circle nicely by describing them and then applying them in apparel.

Under the PCA lights in a gray working environment, we cancel all the surrounding world’s noise, and there’s a lot of it. Then we find the right colours and textures. On every face, with every drape change, we answer questions about:

1. colours
2. lines
3. textures

ONLY THEN do we look at the face and say, “So now. What shape is THAT?”

This is part of how body line assessments get confused. If we see a jaw or nose or facial line that’s fuzzy or distorted by incorrect colour, it makes it harder to find the Kibbe or Type or whatever archetype system we ascribe to. Especially in photos where nobody has spent any time with the real you, and where our eyes must make assumptions.

This is why correct colour analysis takes priority in choosing apparel. First, you know your colours for sure, then figure out your lines, and then your own unique expression.

L. is a recent student whose background is in science. Her work demands that she peel thinking patterns and decision-making processes back to the bone. Of the rigor of the PCA process, she said, and I paraphrase,

What sounds good and feels good might be right but it might not. We need to keep all options open and examine them. As humans, we have a vested interest in an outcome whether we admit it or not. Therefore a correct analysis of anything, colouring, a drug, a patient, requires that we solve a problem in many different ways before making a conclusion that will later support a structure. It’s a cumulative gathering and building of information to arrive at the best decision.

What’s the vested interest? Proving to ourselves that we’re right about what we thought we were right about. Ego’s favourite game.

What’s the structure that will need to be supported? You at the mall, at the makeup counter, in the hair colourist’s chair, in control of your appearance.

Just beautiful. Dark green is the neutral. Love colour as neutral on anyone with Spring. Baby peach is gorgeous on Brights. Faint heat in the center. Symmetric, repeating, balanced (Winter) and out-of-this-world.

To the previous article, Susan asked:

Q: Brights who ‘look’ light, bright and clear; do you mean they look so only in their colours?

A: Depends. Sometimes, wearing muted colour can dull them down substantially. What’s a Summer colour compared to a Winter one? Warmer and duller. And that’s exactly what a Summer white drape does to a Winter face, makes it yellower and fogged in, among other things.

On some Brights in muted colour, they seem to look more bright and not attached to their clothes in some way. Like the two elements are finding the place where they most differ and force it even wider.

Back to TMIT, another broad compromise to help us think about something in a new way. Dark people look good in dark colour. It’s pretty easy, even if it’s not perfect. Dark Winter can manage Dark Autumn or dark Soft and True Summer quite ok. Bright people look normal in bright colour, while the rest of us look a little absurd and taken over by our clothes.

That’s what the colours do to us.

All colour, every idea and any conflict, is a 2-way relationship. Walk around the belief and look at it from the back side. What do we do to the colour?

We could rephrase the above to say that Dark people can take a dark colour and make IT look normal and not so dark. My lipstick is very dark among the 40 choices in that brand. It doesn’t look black on me but it would on most people.

A Bright person can take a bright fabric and make it look normal, just blue, just pink, what’s the big deal? On the rest of us, it settles somewhere along the foolish-neon-toxic spectrum, and more so, the longer it sits on us.

We could say that a Bright person takes a clear colour and makes the clearness look less exaggerated. Maybe that’s the ultimate tolerance. The best belonging. “I’ll take what’s out there and extreme about you and bring it in here with me. We can bring out the best in both of us. Neither one bigger or more the way it would be on someone else. Neither of us lost or less. Instead, and only when we’re together, we are able to make each of us found and more.” Synergy. More than the sum of the parts. Synchrony between our native wavelength and that of what we add. Harmony. The magic word. The magic feeling that colour analyzed people feel and others see.

—

Many Bright Springs have requested a similar Q&A post. For me, these are not the Q that come up for that colouring. Are they for you? If yes, I’m happy to write about it. If these are not your exact concerns, what exactly do you want to know? What problem are you having? What doesn’t make sense? What are you just putting up with or having to work around all the time? Tell me the exact issue. If one person is wondering, be sure that thousands are.

—–

A couple of things on my mind lately.

First, body lines and how they matter as much as colour (or almost :)) in a final image.

I send out a newsletter to my clients containing items from the retail world that show the colours of that Season, with talk of how it beautifies that particular group of natural colouring. With every new issue, I worry that women will see it as an endorsement of every item for every person. I feel responsible when I see a tall, stiff body dressed in draping clothes that just look floppy and clingy. I’m thinking that I need a new format. Body line is taken into big consideration when I shop for me. So should it be when I shop for you.

Second thing bugging me a bit. I wrote RTYNC 2 years ago (blue book, right column). There, I began understanding the language of the 12 Seasons (Seasons means types of colouring that humans can be organized into), and how all five senses are invoked in our perception of colour. The problem became that folks tried to fit themselves into those categories instead relying more on a complete and thorough draping process. If you’re a dramatic, intense Light Spring, then you are.

I’d hear, “I was draped as a True Winter but I’m not dramatic, so should I wear Summer colours? Maybe I’m not a Winter?” If you’re a Winter dressing as Summer, you look weak. Many Summers can take a fair bit of saturation, beyond the swatch books probably, but they are not Winters and nor are Winters Summers.

Softer True Winter

For example,

I guess my question is, how in the world can one come to terms with feeling, being and acting more like an autumn, but being draped as a True Winter??  I don’t feel like the dramatic that I am supposed to be as a winter.  I also have salt & pepper hair, so I feel like I am softer somehow and really wish there was a “soft winter” category. I do feel like with my graying hair, I have a softer look to me and am worried that I will look harsh with stronger make up.  What can you suggest for someone like me?  Is there anyway to wear softer winter colors without looking completely off?  I do wish there were more examples of gray haired winters out there.

Elizabeth Taylor (probably a Bright Winter).

Stacy London (probably True Winter).

Or Google “gray hair women” and see the many fantastic Pinterest collections, like this one.

The minute I or anyone else writes something about the Seasons, it becomes a pigeonhole that gets propagated all over the place. If you find your whole person as you know her, or as anyone else knows her, inside a book, you’re among the rare.

The drama with True Winter is a typecast. I have never seen one where it’s absent, but it’s not obvious. Some are fiercely loyal, will take the car to drive their friend to Emerg if her brother takes sick, stay up all night with the family, and create lots of conflict when you suggest that someone needed that car to get to work. They live in a body like Pink’s and wear off-the-shoulder sweaters and leggings and carry gym bags instead of purses, though they have a penchant for chandelier earrings.

Some are intensely dedicated promoters, requesting that you mail them boxes of your business cards because they’re giving them out like candy. They’re 65 and not interested in theater of any sort, prefer practical clothes and a little gloss and blush only, but they know what they like and don’t mind saying what a person might not want to hear. Winter is very brave. This one has the body of TV Mom. The face looks casual and kind, though the eyes look at things with intensity. She wears pearls and traditional femininity; nice classic suits for the office, small dangle earrings. Black, white, and red together are too bold for her taste.

Some can be very harsh except about their own needs, extreme, and a little revenge oriented. They will do a Beyonce lemon juice fast for a week and eat a whole ice cream cake on Saturday. Their drama is to exaggerate their social behaviour with friends as much as the intensity of their alone time, feeling pulled apart without both. Outward drama is expressed as No Limit eyeliner one day, and no makeup the next. Not interested in jewelry, it’s confining and fussy. Tall, lean, not a single cuddly element, they’re in running shorts or skintight jeans and muscle tanks with a black leather jacket. Wouldn’t wear pink of any sort, might consider purple (which is a type of drama in itself).

Drama gets grouped with flamboyance, exaggeration, and excess, creating fashion synonyms and crossovers that weren’t intended and will only apply to a few people. The word drama can take many forms. For many True Winters, their drama is of distance and silence. The meaning is more about the tension of extremes and absolutes. The drama is the simplicity, rather than turmoil, tragedy, tension, and crisis. Those are more hot-blooded. There may be scenes but they’re quick. When it’s over, it’s over.

Until we have some grasp of body line distinct from body colour, it is very easy to flow them into one another. A Natural True Winter and a Romantic True Winter will both feel uncomfortable with the cold, dramatic stereotype of their Season. Once they understand their best shapes in clothing and accessories quite independently of the colours, they easily accept the colours.

Many are not as dramatic looking as the Season has been made out to be. They are not very dark. True Winter is often very medium in appearance, average, regular, everyday faces. Once the drapes go on, their drama is in how absolute the skin’s reactions are to colour. For others, the drama will happen once everyone sees that strong fuchsia-violet lips and cheeks look completely at home and the face is suddenly not plain at all. It’s strong and clean. This is a hard face to describe because it won’t stand out at the mall. Liz Taylor, with the eye colour and delicacy in the face, was more likely a Bright Winter, a colouring that looks more exceptional out and about.

This is where the crossover into Autumn happens, especially in the old days. Dark eyes and hair, and you were a Winter. In both, words like strong, bold, practical, and determined, could apply, so personality quizzes got mixed up. Both can be passive-aggressive. Autumn usually has more compassion and less intensity, but not always. Too much history goes into shaping personality to figure out Season by character.

There is no Soft True Winter in the colour system that I practice. That just basically means True Summer. However, True Winter is not fully saturated. Next to Bright Winter, it looks quite soft, like True Summer in many colours. What this skin cares about more than saturation is coolness.

We need some clarity about the softness you’re looking for. Perhaps the colours are fine and we haven’t quite nailed down the problem yet. Softness can mean many things. In colour, it means dusty. That will set you back. Maybe you need True Winter colour with softer lines, textures, and prints – romance – Angora, cashmere, florals, swirls, and so on. Maybe you need to choose lighter colour and less darkness from the True Winter palette, especially once hair silvers. This is a lovely time to wear the icy lights. True Winter that’s not wearing those is not really being True Winter. They’re being a Dark Something.

Think of the drama more as colour minimalism, which your Autumn-y sensibility will appreciate. You already don’t buy pastels as a was-Autumn. You probably also like style simplicity without much decoration. That said, there are women of every Season who absolutely need high level adornment just to look normal, and so are there women who look better in sleek functionality in every Season.

With silver hair, I would think of wearing more grays than black. Aim for a lighter overall effect. Wear sheer cosmetics and the bold colours away from your face as purses and nail polish. Feel free to drop the saturation a bit but don’t wear pastels, whatever you do. Note that for many women, they wear black as well with silver hair, if not better than when the hair had colour. Iron gray looks gorgeous with black attire.

The floral cardi and pants are allover too dark. Add a light element near the face where it has more impact. Doesn’t have to be equal surface area, we still get it.

Keep distance between colours. Lights next to darks. Avoid too matchy (black shoes with berry dress feels better than all berry).

What feels safe?

Don’t make too many noises about looking great in black and white while out in public. Wear them a lot and add only one other colour. If you look at everyone else, you’ll see that this is plenty dramatic.

Wear lots of gray.

What feels unsafe?

Colour in general? Keep it small and away from the body, like a purse. We still see it as part of you.

Icy colour? Buy a pyjama.

Fuchsia? Buy the next closest colour that feels better.

Metallic and shine? Ditto colour in general (above) or bypass them altogether.

Avant-garde style? Wear traditional. If you like pearls, just be very sure they’re not creamy if they go anywhere near your teeth.

A Gentle Dark Autumn

Writing about this Season thus far has seen words like tribal, equestrian, military, strong, menswear, business. True for some body types.

Here are some more:

Delicious fire, Aztec Chocolate Truffle brown, dark cocoa dusting, melt in your mouth center,

Plush velvet curtain red, you crush it in your hands over and over because it pushes back, sumptuous feeling,

Teal satin, liquid metals dripping off curves, sensual looking,

Whites of liqueurs, Bailey’s Irish Cream,

Cognac and Benedictine yellows and browns, opulent, expensive, reserved for the few,

Dark, hot Espresso, the heart beats faster, involuntary,

Nothing you can do, once it takes hold of your senses, Dark Autumn stimulates,

Until you’re damp, you don’t know Dark Autumn, whose power lies in overwhelming arousal.

Are you panting?

In life, always move towards the heat. Maybe it’s a little scary, but this heat tastes yummy and it feels gooooood. Rich fudge syrup, liquid gold and bronze, the glorious heat of Autumn…

With a bite. Winter’s darkness is less comfy. Chartreuse gets noticed. Chili and diamonds are an uncommon match.

There is nothing dilute about our relationship with these colours. They are not a gentle caress. We love them with intention.

We are most afraid of our light.

You don’t have to be perfect.

A little Soft Autumn (ruffle blouse lower R) will do no harm. It’s still warm-neutral of the right kind of heat (Autumn’s). If people could get their heat level right, that alone makes a gigantic difference in appearance.

Below, not giving up your white pearls? Why should you? You have enough Winter to wear them. Just do the same thing as you do to black -warm it up with the other things you add.  If the pearls are creamy, antique, or chocolate, even better.

Wear red (we feel red as warm).I know I’m pushing my luck with the  mixed prints in the center. I pick clothes that would impress me all to pieces if they walked in the room.

The gray boot too cool and blue? Sure is. Wear it around the city for a few days, it’ll be fine. If you find a colour nearer to elephant or asphalt gray, excellent. The shoes the model is wearing are fine too.

These Polyvores are not body type specific. It’s not my specialty, and as with colour, even if you’re moderately closer to yourself, you are unbelievably better to look at. Compared to military or tribal, these fabrics drape more, lines are rounder, legs taper (softness and bootcut look odd together to me), and styles are more classic. Still Dark Autumn.

The point is that to create a beautiful, connected, rational, intelligent image with apparel, the lines take their shape from whatever yours are. Just like the colours.

Coming soon, by request, a more dramatic, yet still classic Soft Autumn. Autumn without texture? Summer without softness? Sure.

—–

You are about to take a personal journey with Danish author, Anne-Cathrine Riebnitzsky. I know that many readers will find familiarity in her experiences and feelings. I am  very grateful to Anne-Cathrine for discussing personal colour analysis from the one side that matters most: the client’s.

I self diagnosed as a Winter in the 90ies after reading the book “Colour Me Beautiful.” I was 15 or 16. There were only four seasons then. My internal feeling was that I was a Winter. I was a bit sorry that the beautiful strong colours of Spring couldn’t be mine as well, but in my heart I never had any real doubts. A Winter I was.

I followed the idea of Winter to the best of my ability but gradually swayed in other colour directions too. The years passed and I thought less about colours.

The mistake

One day probably about 5 years ago, I tried on a beige item and noticed how my skin was completely even. Most people who knew just a bit about colour would often comment on my “warm green eyes” and I had begun to suspect that perhaps I was an Autumn instead. The beige colour had me puzzled … now I did not know what I know today. I was unable to see the whole picture. And moreover it turned out that I am one difficult woman to analyse.

This beige colour became the beginning of a long journey hunting for my true season. Here I discovered how much had happened to the world of colour analysis since the 90ies. I discovered Christine’s wonderful blog and many other sites. I became quite absorbed with colours as a new hobby.

Lesson no. 1: Even and “perfect” skin is not the same as your face looking like the colour you are wearing. Believe me – you will be misled if you go down this road. Even and perfect skin is something entirely different. It is you glowing in a way you had not foreseen, and unless you are fortunate enough to already know your colours you may actually never have seen this face before no matter how often you stare in the mirror.

The first analysis

I tried to analyse myself. That is really difficult to do. I finally flew to another European city to have an in person analysis. I was desperately hoping to be a Bright Spring. Those were the most beautiful colours to my eye at the time. Second would be Bright Winter. The worst would be Soft Summer because I couldn’t associate with the colours – though I actually owned numerous pieces that were soft.

The analyst was Sci/ART trained – this was the system that to my rather systematic mind made the most sense. There are multitudes of colours and many that suit us, but the whole measuring process is to my mind the key to opening the door of the vast house which is your season and which you will only feel at home in if you have in fact opened a house which is your house.

From the first four drapes it was clear that black and silver were best. There was no doubt I could wear black. This was something I had questioned myself, and I was glad to get this confirmed. We moved through the many drapes. I was difficult. Provoking a bad reaction to my skin is not easy. The warm drapes are the only ones were it is really easy to see. From there it is a slow game. We slowly exhausted the possibilities – almost all of them.

We actually ran out of time. But we agreed on Bright Spring – though one of the drapes was actually too strong and there was a reflection from the skin on my chin. I was happy with the result. And also quite aware that I had actually pushed for something which might not be the accurate truth. Unfortunately I had to fly back the next day and my analyst had an appointment so we were out of time.

Lesson no. 2: Make sure you have plenty of time for an analysis. Perhaps you are really easy. But perhaps you are not. It may take five hours. How long it takes is not important. Getting it right is important.

Lesson no. 3: Do not try to force your analyst or manipulate her. They are human beings too. Be accurate about this. Try to observe what really happens in the mirror – not what you would like to happen. Difficult, but necessary.

Correction by shopping

It so happened that I wore the Bright Spring colours quite well – however eventually my mistake caught up with me, as I bought a turquoise blouse which was an exact match to the fan – but which also shone off from the skin under my chin. Exactly as the one drape had done in the test.

I was back to square one somehow.

Second analysis

I flew to another European city to have my second test. Also by a Sci/ART analyst. I told the analyst in advance of my previous history. She sat me down and looked at the first four drapes. I could still wear black and silver equally well.

Here is the hard part for you: If you were an analyst and a client walked in and said that she had discovered she wasn’t a Bright Spring after all, where would you go? What would you assume?

This analysis moved forward speedily. Very fast – faster than I could understand – I was a Soft Summer. The season whose colours felt most wrong for me. But I had promised myself not to try to sway any analyst ever again. I had promised my self that whatever the outcome I would try it, live with it, and do my best to accept it.

The worst part of this analysis was that I didn’t see nor understand what the decisions were based upon. I couldn’t in any way see how those drapes enhanced me. Only the last two drapes could I see. The pine green was actually intensifying my eyes like it is supposed to. The dark blue did something to my hair.

The whole thing took less than two hours including makeup. Off I was and the analyst went on to the numerous other clients at hand that day. I went outside into a park and sat down and cried. I know it sounds ridiculous and that this would probably not happen to you. You would have walked straight back and told her to redo the whole thing. Well, I didn’t. I flew home and lived in Soft Summer for 18 straight months. I hated the colours. The compliments stopped. I felt kind of depressed. But I am a diligent person. I am a perfectionist and I actually do not care what I have to put myself through once I have decided upon something.

It was incredibly difficult for me to make an outfit work – though it is supposed to be easy in this season where the underlying grey combine all the colours. It was a struggle for me. I had the palette lying open on my desk to try to get to know and like the colours. I could get myself to like the darker colours, but the light ones didn’t mean anything to me.

Lesson no. 4: You should not have to struggle so hard! Some may be surprised by their palette. But really – if you have tried living in a season and it still feels wrong, then there is probably something wrong. Colours are energy. If you live in the wrong house it is going to feel complicated hard and wrong and probably depressing. I am not with the people who say that this is not exact science. Well – in a way it is. Colours can be measured quite accurately. And you should look more than just “kind, relaxed, well” – you should look remarkable.

Elea Blake makeup

I bought some of the make up for soft summer from Elea Blake – here I received the first confirmation, that Soft Summer might not be true after all. The darker choices in eye makeup were fine. But the skin make up was a puzzle. None of them worked. As in NONE. They all looked like something that had been smeared on top of my skin. They would not blend.

Knowing that Dark Winter and Soft Summer can sometimes share some colours I bought some small samples of DW makeup. Those worked a lot better. This new information rumbled in my mind.

Lesson no. 5: If you really are searching for your season and you truly cannot in anyway find the means to go and have a test, then see if you can narrow your options down. Write to Elea Blake and order the small samples of skin make-up. It could give you a good hint. I believe it is more accurate than lip draping. These products are very precisely composed. My personal belief is that at least 3 or 4 of the skin colours should suit you if you are in that particular season. I may be wrong, I am no expert – this is just my own personal experience.

Sitting next to a real Soft Summer

In the summer 2013, I participated in a congress for creative writers. I remember this moment distinctly. I was sitting next to a woman with silver hair and beautiful hazel eyes – quite like my own. She was the most stunning person in the room. We all looked at her from time to time. Never had any silver haired woman in her 50ies looked so beautiful. We were many young people – but none as beautiful as her. I knew she was a Soft Summer. She wore Soft Summer. She had never been analysed but she knew her colouring and she combined them in a way that could not possibly have made me look the least bit interesting. I remember the exquisite earrings in green and purple mother of pearl, her lilac blouse, the soft pink lip. That did it for me. I was no Soft Summer no matter how hard I tried.

On line analysis

During my whole journey I had two online tests where I sent a lot of photos – one said Bright Spring, one said True Summer bordering with Soft Summer. The latter was followed by a makeover done on a photo of my face. I strongly disliked the look of it. I had no idea who the woman on the photo was – I understand that the photo to begin with was me – but I couldn’t recognize the woman as me.

Today I look at the questionnaires that were designed to help those analysts make a decision. Well … let it suffice to say I cannot recommend it.

Giving up

I gave up on the whole thing. I couldn’t work it out. It was a relief to put on a black T-shirt – both emotionally and physically. I believe most people actually can feel the effects of colours. Even hospitals use colours.

I went with what I felt, bought a Dark Winter fan and noticed a big improvement.

A small miracle

By chance I noticed that one of Christine’s newly trained analysts was a Dane. I had seen her name before and contacted her via Facebook. I warned her that I was difficult to test and that I didn’t know which way to go now. Except I probably was some kind of Winter. At least some kind of cool or cool-neutral season. Or perhaps I was something else. Probably not a warm.

We agreed on a date. Anette was eager yet admitted being a bit nervous since I would be one of her first real clients. She said I wouldn’t have to pay if we couldn’t figure it out – which was nice of her and took some pressure of, though admittedly by now my life had changed so much that the cost was less of a concern.

Third analysis 

Anette had blocked the whole day for just my analysis. She said she was looking forward to learn too.

The draping began. I was fortunate enough to not have any trace of colour in my hair (I have always found it difficult to strike anything that would look natural).

The first four drapes showed what I already knew. I could wear black and wear it remarkably well. Warm colours were not so good. I actually felt unwell wearing those colours. We made due note of what bad effects looked like in my face.

I have many different colours in my eyes. I have dark hair. I balance a lot of dark and cool colours. We moved forward slowly. I had explained that it was vital for me to understand and see with my own eyes what was a good drape and what was a bad drape. We got rid of the warm seasons quickly. The obvious ones. Then we moved on. Anette kept saying – well, this is not bad, but I believe you can look a lot better. This hope carried us on and on and on.

The biggest surprise for me was that beyond the true warm seasons, my worst colours were from Light Spring and Light Summer. There were a couple of turquoises there that were so harsh and strong and “unbelonging” on me that it took me by surprise.

So what about Soft Summer then? Well this is actually not my worst season. I completely understand that I could be put in that season though it is very far from what I really am.

Once we finally moved into the 3 Winters we knew we had it. My eyes cleared. I did not know that the white in my eyes actually can become really white. I had not seen this for so long I thought it had disappeared with age. The bit of my hair that was visible shone with a depth that was really becoming. Winter it was. We just didn’t know which one. It was very difficult. I span a lot of colours. I span a lot of coolness.

By comparing all the blues we finally discovered that it was not Dark winter. I became slightly fussy around the chin. So more colour then. More intensity. Though DWs reds were beautiful on me.

In the end we settled with True Winter, but not entirely sure. We decided I would have to come back another day. We were both exhausted. It had taken about 5 hours.

I drove home excited. After all this was actually still a huge success for me. I was now down to two beautiful seasons which I both really liked and which also made me look more stunning than I had seen in years.

Lesson no. 6: There is no such equations as “I look terrible in Soft Summer ergo I must be a Bright Winter.” You worst is not necessarily straight across the wheel of seasons. It could be only a few seasons away.

Second visit – the final result

I lived in and with True Winter. Colours that are hard to find when shopping, so I didn’t find that much new stuff – but clear white was easy to find and really good. Black was good. I dyed some old faded jeans and some old dresses. I knew enough about material from reading Christine’s many articles and from intelligent people who comment those articles, to know that cotton and soft fluffy surfaces weren’t going to hit it right with a Winter – but the black jeans work well. I never really liked cotton much anyway – it is easy to wash, but there my interest stops. Cotton fades really fast compared to plastic, satin, silk and shiny leather.

Black mascara was good. Again I had really good help from the little samples from Elea Blake. Unfortunately I had only ordered True Winter – but still this helped. The samples of skin makeup and lipstick were a great help. I noticed that some of them turned me a little pale and “deadly grey” around my mouth. A sign that these colours might be a bit too cool. Anette wrote to say she had noticed a bit of quietness in the true winter drapes which she wasn’t sure was right. But then we had a few of the Bright Winter luxury drapes that we were not entirely sure about. Were they too much? Too warm? Anette and I wrote many emails back and forth.

Anette and I had not had time to get around to makeup during the draping session. For the next visit I decided to wear mascara and my usual eyeliner which is black. I know it may sound hard but black doesn’t look hard on me. It is the only colour that doesn’t turn the lower rim of my eyes red.

The makeup actually helped in this case. It also helped a lot that we were now down to two seasons – our eyes were fresh and ready. I was a Bright Winter as I had slowly come to suspect.

There may be many more Brights out there who like me actually do not look too bad in colours that are not theirs. They just do not look as smashing as they would in their true colours. I think the reason is that Bright can take so much colour – and therefore you would have to be severely off on more than one dimension to look really bad. But I also think that these are the seasons who more often than not look a lot less beautiful than they could.

Looking back I now understand why evening gowns always have been so easy for me. 1. I would never go to a big party without makeup (and makeup greatly enhance winters). 2. Gowns are often in bright colours and often in shiny material which is a real winner on me.

I am still adjusting. I am still feeling the energy of this season. But I have come home. I got to see with my own eyes what my season really is. I understood what I saw. I love the colours. I also now know that there are colours out there in the world which are brighter than any human colouring – but 99% of the time I have to focus on getting the colours bright and clear enough. I have come home.

I remember how Bright Spring always made me feel a bit exhausted – like the energy was a bit too high for me. I felt a bit serious and stern in True Winter. Bright Winter is wonderful. It is enhancing, asking me to be what I am and to not shrink back in fear. Bright Winter is asking me to be bold, to be me, to be all of me – and in doing so allowing others to be all of who they are.

Sometimes I am wearing an outfit that is not quite enough. Not enough sharpness of colour, not enough contrast. It feels a bit boring, a bit like “come on you can hit the mark, so be your best” – so I make adjustments. It is not at all difficult for me to combine these colours. Not at all. It comes naturally. Black pants and a blouse in a strong colour – easy! Lipstick, black mascara – easy.

I use the advice from the article about the makeup for Winters. I don’t fade or remove anything till eyes, lips, and blush are all there. I do my shopping carefully. I make a list of what I need and I do not compromise – not in colours, not in lines. It is not that hard really. It just takes a bit more patience than what is natural for me – but the effort is well worth it.

The lighter and brighter colours for Dark Winter are presented today.

Why call the Season Dark? It’s a source of confusion because it so easily gives rise to misinterpretation, almost forcing the idea of a certain appearance.

I’m certainly guilty of using formulas in writing to try to come up with word pictures. Most industries have those “It looks like…”  and “Most…” analogies to help students understand and to share experience.

“Dramatic body types look like a statue.” (my invention)

“Most dogs with slipped discs that can still wag their tail will walk again.”

Yes, of course, some don’t. What’s a teacher to do? People want the learning from real life stories, pictures, and questions, but not theirs, even though theirs are far better than anything I can come up with. We find ourselves speaking in terms of bell curves. There will always be those who fall outside them.

What Really Matters: Do not let stereotypes, formulas, or “You look like a…” anywhere near the analysis process itself.

For the Dark Season colouring, the idea exists that the person has to look dark. Not so. I don’t. I could never get those belief systems to work when I tried to apply them to real people.

That they have to wear all dark colours. No. They could and look better than other types of colouring but who’s going to do that every day and be the best version of themselves? After a week of it, people will start ignoring your clothes for always being the same.

So why call them Dark?

It has to be called something. Dark, Bright, Light, etc, are historical terms in the PCA industry, dating back to I know not when or whom.

Should we change the word? No, I propose that we change the definition instead. Take the word Season. One could say that it’s outdated and not self-explanatory. Maybe, but it is recognizable in the natural world, short, spell-able, search-able, familiar, understandable (which does the public understand more correctly about a colour, ‘value’ or ‘darkness’?) and lots of other good things. We just need to take its meaning as ‘group of  natural colouring’. There won’t be one single perfect in every way terminology. Much more needs doing than re-inventing a wheel.

For Dark, Bright, etc., I make an argument in this way: I am of the belief that we cannot know which of the 3 dimensions of colour (light/dark, warm/cool, soft/bright) will matter the most on a person’s colouring merely by looking at them. There is no medium-medium-medium person. There will be 2 dimensions that are medium, or close, and 1 that will be more High/Low. Because we cannot judge the heat level or saturation of other people, we over-emphasize the importance of their darkness. Or else, we merge darkness level with saturation, since, when we imagine a saturated colour, we also tend to darken it. All persons must be draped, but even with excellent drapes, it can be difficult.

All of our faces are in perfect colour equilibrium by Nature. We see this perfectly tuned balance in every person and since nothing looks out of place, we assume that everything is medium. This is why folks are mystified when they’ve been analyzed as a Soft Summer and a Bright Winter. How could that be? Aren’t they opposites? Just because they lie opposite one another on a colour clock graphic doesn’t mean that they’re opposite. Those clocks are like a map.  Are Vancouver and Montreal opposite? Yes and no. Depends what the question is asking. Both cities are the same for being Canadian. Soft Summer and Bright Winter faces are the same for being as perfectly balanced as every face is.

Even speaking theoretically, they’re not opposite. In fact, they have some dimensions in opposition and some very similar when the colours are measured. Both are cool neutrals and both are medium-dark. That’s a big amount of similarity. Where they differ is saturation, the hardest one to judge. But you must know how to measure, and how to measure the 3 dimensions independently because that’s how they are set in our colouring. The 3 don’t go up or down together.

On a Dark Season, the High/Low is value of colour. On the Low value side, when a colour is darker, whether its warmth and brightness drift a little up and down doesn’t matter too much. The harmonic correlation remains quite agreeable as long as colour is dark. Value is the thing about them that is not medium.  In True Summer drapes, a Dark Winter can be truly weak until the colour becomes darker. Then the skin gets along. It finds a little muting that it likes, a trace of warmth (compared to True Winter) that feels right, and its beloved darkness. We see this again as we progress through the darkness levels of the Red Drapes. They never get too dark.

The opposite is true too. On the High value side, when a colour is light, it’s either right or the person is a washout.  It can be hard to read the lightest level of Red Drapes because the skin says, “Meh, meh, and meh.” since none of the colours belongs to Dark Winter in that set of drapes.  An analyst who knows how to read the Red Drapes, which are very different in their interpretation than the other drapes, gets along just fine.

Could a person be medium-high-high on the 3 colour scales? I’ve seen fabric would be close. Humans are not coloured with the same pigments as textiles so I don’t know if the same rules apply. Nature is a chemistry set of unlimited possibility and I’m certain that these people exist. I also do not  know if human pigment genetics must follow the rules of Munsell (or any) colour space, which are human constructs – but they’re human constructs about colour relationships where certain rules always apply. Blue does get darker as it gets more saturated.

Anyhow, I do know that in science and in PCA, how it looks is not data. If it were, the Earth would still be flat. We must measure something and know how to read our rulers.

A Dark Autumn asked,

I seem to always wear the colours from the light to center sections of  my fan. I don’t understand why the darkest of the Dark Autumn colors, especially the purples, seem to drain me.

Some suggestions:

If the dark colours being chosen are a bit too blue, which happens easily with purple, this will make shadows darker. We all have a native, normal shadow colour. If it’s distorted, as by making it too blue, the effect will not be flattering.

If the dark colours being chosen are less saturated than the lighter colours being worn, the darks might not be preferred, despite being a Dark Season. Depending on the person, Dark Autumn will not have the best quality of complexion in True Autumn saturation. With 2 dimensions (value and saturation) that can be on or off, the mix and match possibilities of what’s really the problem are bigger.

Lightness and clarity can appear to add some lift in many women, which is why so many of them get put into Spring. An untrained eye might see this and forget to take into account all the other factors.

Most of us tend to wear colours from the center of the fan. They’re easiest to be aware of. If your eyes are used to seeing you in these, they may have trouble making an objective assessment of darker colours.

If pre-PCA, you believed yourself to be a lighter Season, it may take time to become accustomed to the power of the darkness (no puns of any sort). Darkness resonates strongly here. It sends a special  message on this colouring more than any other. Amazing how long it takes to fully step into and claim our own power. We find all sorts of reasons why it shouldn’t be so.

A Dark Winter asked,

I would love to see a post on using the cool, heavy, regal colors in a climate that’s melting with heat and humidity.

Dark Winter is like True Winter but a little warmer and duller, but not as much as if it were done in newsprint. To me, it looks more warmer than duller, but I’m no better at judging these little increments than anyone else.

There are a lot of neutrals in these Polyvores, because I like them on this colouring. I find them great in summer and to offset the ‘colour colours’, and far more interesting against summer backgrounds than winter backgrounds. The contrast between summertime and the “heavy and regal” is even more pronounced, which feels a little exciting.

Remember that we haven’t accessorized anything yet. Shoes, bags, jewelry can all add as much or as little colour as you like.

Many skirts and dresses. Colours and prints feel better here than in pants. I’m not a purple pants person, though anybody could be, especially a Gamine. White pants, ditto. Jacqueline Kennedy had white Capris that were good with her black T-shirt, huge glasses, and scarf.

The overall darkness level is up to you. My eyes prefer an overall medium to dark totality over an all light one. The coral dress in 4 below is as light as I’d go for an head to toe level (picture it on a B&W TV). The light pants and colour-blocked gray top in the bottom left of 4 is too light. The  model wears it well enough but I doubt that her native darkness level is that of Dark Winter. Nor do I think her inherent heat level is of the same type, level, or both, as Dark Winter.

When we train a colour analyst, the student learns to look at the image in the mirror in terms of 3 distinct dimensions. You could try this too. Don’t compare an person and their clothing and think in terms of Seasons. It’s way too convoluted. Think, “Would I adjust the darkness?”, “Does the warmth level feel like a match?”, and “How do I feel about the clarity?” as 3 separate questions.

The navy and dark brown in the 12-Tone palette are near black, fine colours but not a first choice in high humidity. I’m very partial to the dark tobacco colour as a neutral, even in hot weather, maybe because it’s jungly. Love it with yellow as the dress and the skort/tank set in 4 below.

How much colour?

Up to you.

The blue/yellow/pink dress at the bottom left of 5 feels pretty good. I’m not sure it would be DW but it could be.

The strapless blue dress on the left side may be True Winter. Some Dark Winters are a little cooler. The graying and darkness of the skirt section help, compared to the entire dress being made of the bodice fabric.

At the center top of 5, the sleeveless top with tie might be Soft Summer. It’s dark enough, but dark and dusty, whereas a Winter is dark and saturated. Won’t matter. Dark Winter skin has a lot in common with Soft Summer. The contrast in the skort is Winter or close enough, and the top will balance Winter accessories. Some Dark Winters are a little softer.

For The Office

Below, a few work outfits. In warm climates, people can’t possibly wear all black to work to work, can they? If I lived in a warm place, I bet I’d wear more shine in fabric.

The flowered skirt is interesting. It shows how similar Dark Winter and True Summer are, but when an item goes to black, the True Summer person will lose energy. I pondered whether it was True Summer, in which case the black would be too strong next to the other colours, but I find it pretty well balanced. The black is in smaller areas – a nice way for the Darks and Brights to get black in their wardrobe without being overtaken by it.

—–

Colour is what humans use to tell the energy of light. The chemical reaction connects up in our brain and creates certain mood chemicals. We all have a version of this gorgeous happy colour that looks gorgeous and happy next to the colours in our skin. More should wear it more often. Most have a love-hate relationship with it.

*Joan asked:

Yellow is my favorite color, but I’m a True Summer and I’ve never found a shade that didn’t make me look ill.  It would be great if your website could show a photo of a True Summer person wearing the right shade of yellow.

A photo of someone looking great in their yellow is a tall order. It doesn’t happen often on most of our visual resources. I would have to post a picture of a private individual who has been draped, but people prefer to maintain their privacy.

True Summers are hard to find and public ones are all highlighted blonde. Kelli Williams of Lie To Me might be. I pinned her picture on the Season and Style Pinterest board. I also pinned some pictures of British royal women wearing various yellows. Duchess Kate is probably a Soft Summer (Summer colours with a bit of Autumn). The Queen may be a True Summer (certainly has the personality to go with it, the good of the many and so on). Diana was probably a Light Summer (mostly Summer colours in her pigmentation, influenced by some Spring effects).

A couple of things before finding some yellows. Be open-minded and keep looking, as Joan is. People often have categorical feelings about yellow. With that mindset, they might not be open to the perfect one when they have it on. If it really harmonized with your palette, wear it for a few days. Ask objective people. Start with small elements in prints or accessories. For some reason, many people are very sensitive to this colour.

Second, even inside our Season, yellow can be fussy. Some people wear many versions well, definitely including True Summers. Others are more particular where if the yellow is not their own, they take on a sallow look.

Third, get good at harmonizing your clothes to the entire palette, not matching single swatches. The database contains lots of info on how to do that but if you are not sure, write and ask. Your whole face has to wear the yellow, or any colour, so you need to match the whole palette to it. If there are particular colours in your fan that you feel best in, match the yellow to those. Try many in the stores. Only by knowing how OFF looks and feels will you get good at recognizing ON.

Hue and Stripe Catalogs

Do you remember The Dress Spot? You can still find their link in the right column of this website. This was the first online tool that could actually help women find dresses in their palette colours. It really worked.

And then it went to the next level, called Hue and Stripe. Now by membership subscription for image and colour consultants (and still by invitation only during the testing stages), H&S enables us to build virtual closets for individual clients. Using fantastic search filters for many wardrobe items, scanning across 12 retailers and more being added all the time, not only can we educate our clients, we can shop for them. The consultant can emails the client with an item or a whole closet, complete with commentary. Items link directly to the retailers, both US and UK. The only searching the client does is to find her size.

Hue and Stripe offers a second way for us to help you in the virtual blackboards called Catalogs that we will see today. In this post, I want to show you some yellows. The picture below is a screenshot of a section of the catalog at H&S.

This link (also just below this paragraph) takes you to the live Catalog on the H&S site. You can travel from those images directly to the retailer. Should an item be sold out, the image will be gray. Hovering over it will clear the fog. If you are reading this post a year from now, no worry, the image will remain.

http://hueandstripe.com/catalog/112H&S1N86

I’m doing this for the first time myself. If anyone is having trouble with some part of the technology, please post a comment or email me (christine@12blueprints.com)

Despite the care that Hue and Stripe take to only show items against white backgrounds in neutral lighting, shopping online imposes certain limitations on everybody including me. You only need one workaround: Do not buy anything that you cannot return.

Yellows

You will see my thinking out loud comments as I reason the items into a Season. Feel free to offer another opinion. I would love that. With pictures, everybody takes their best guess.

What I hope to show you is an idea of what I would be looking for if I were shopping for these Seasons. As with draping a human being, I think first about which of the 4 True Seasons the item probably fits into. Settling it into one of the Neutrals comes after.

When I shop, I repeat certain phrases in my mind. Shopping goes much faster when you know what to ignore, almost shockingly so once you are determined to ignore black.

Winter yellow is

• either nearly white, icy frosty
• or very yellow, lemon
• may be slightly greenish, feels acidic

 Summer yellow is

• further from white than Winter icy yellow, but can be quite light if muted because Summer colouring likes lightness
• dusty, so it feels soft, not sharp
• can be greenish because it’s cooled with blue, but the softness makes the green less obvious than Winter unless you hold it next to a warmer yellow

Spring yellow is

• buttery, apricoty, peachy
• orange-ish but not earthy (which is Autumn orange + muted)
• lightweight and floaty in feeling, like it might be sheer
• nice with tropical fruit, sunrise colours

Autumn yellow is

• strong, rich, heavy, thick
• can be greener in the Neutral Seasons, more orange in the True Autumn
• a vase you might use for dried grasses or a basket of squash and pumpkins, would disappear on a table with Indian food, sunset colours

Neutral Beige

Along the way, the question has been asked about a universal colour that looks good on every colouring type. I believe that colour is more theoretical than real. Even the neutral gray that we use as a surround for draping seems to flatter some colourings and not others. As long as it doesn’t distort or change any native colours and is mostly blank in our awareness, it works fine.

Neutral beige would be similar. Neutral beige means it doesn’t pull red, blue, orange. It would neither drain or add colours to any colouring type.

Since I looked at about 3000 tops to find this, the better option is to know your beige. There is no universal colour but the fact that these light beiges are awfully hard to place in one single Season supports the conclusion that they could work nicely in several wardrobes. They might be a bridge more than anything.

The link is here and below:

http://hueandstripe.com/catalog/112H&SUHkQ

A screen capture portion of it:

—–

 Announcements:

1. A new Facebook group.

For clients of all colour analysts trained by me at 12 Blueprints or Terry at Your Natural Design, the Your Natural Blueprint Color Forum meets on facebook as a Secret Group. Therefore, new members are added by invitation by existing members.

From the intro prepared by Cate Linden (Kentucky),

The purpose of this group is to provide a gathering place for people who have been draped by a 12 Blueprints/Your Natural Design analyst. All 12 seasons will coexist in this group, which is intended as a private resource for our clients.  We learn so much from our clients; we know you will learn from each other.

Please share your thoughts, tips and questions. Our aim is to cultivate an atmosphere of mutual learning and respect, and above all to share the beauty and joy of color with you as you grow into your season.

You now have structured and unfiltered access to other PCA practitioners. The group is secret so you can share your emotions and experiences safely, ask questions, find group solutions, and get answers for your own situation.

I can’t link to a Secret Group since it can’t be searched. Connect with Cate Linden by email for an invitation. Just tell her your Season and which analyst you saw. She is at catelinden@gmail.com

Don’t worry about your language skills. Facebook is well translated and there is much to be learned. The beauty of the internet is that it wipes out class systems. Like a beach, it comes very close to an ultimate democracy. Enjoy all the good this space has to offer.

2. Travel dates.

Analysts are traveling once again…maybe just those that live in the sunny South. Have a look at the schedule. It has been updated.

3. Colour Analyst Training Course dates.

I expect to post weeks in which the course will be held later this month. Following last year’s plan gives us the final weeks of March, April, May, September, and October. If you have particular dates in mind, please contact me so we can plan around your preferences.

(Featured Image: Quebec City for New Year’s.)

—–

The days might be gettin’ longer but the snow’s a’gettin higher. Updating you on the ongoing saga of the recliners on the lawn:

My world looks like the surface of the next planet out. A good time to write about Winter.

Fair Warning

Not one word on this website, about personality or anything else, applies to every member of any group. Not even half, and character least of all.

As we know, I have tremendous respect for Bernice Kentner, founder of Color Me a Season. Back in the 80s, this is the person who I think had colour analysis well figured out, given the colour technology of the age. In her writing, she has apologized for sounding hard on Autumn personalities. Allow me to channel a hero and apologize for how I portray Winter.

Dark Season does not mean dark everything. If it snowed last night, it is probably not Autumn.

A Winter Overview

Let me tell you something about us Winters: We are more fragile than we look. Everyone else is as fragile as they look, or less. That’s the difference, you see.

The strategy that I learned from Summers about managing Winters and coming through intact: Let’em win. They calm right down.

Another thing I learned from Summers. How to smile patiently and politely despite not believing a word you are hearing. A little glaze in the eyes helps put the scene behind a screen, in a box. How worked up can you get over what is on a TV? So when you let the Winter win, plant a Summer smile on your face and invoke what my kids say, at once meaningful and meaningless: “I dunno. It’s like whatever, right?”

Who cares who wins, except the Winter? And they do care. At least the conversation will be over and you get to move on. Winters lack the contentment of Summers, the short attention span of Springs, and the ability to get busy of Autumns, none of whom are hauling Winter’s Worry Buggy behind them. Winter women worry. The men, not so much.

Careful though, when you wear that Summer smile, or get bored with drama and wander away like a Spring, or go back to your To Do list like an Autumn. A Winter is a clever creature. They can feel when you’re playing games or not engaging.

Some beautiful neutral colours in this image.

I have at times wondered if the Neutral Seasons align more closely with their neighbour Neutral but cannot see it that way. The strong Neutral blends of a True Season are closer in almost every way to the parent Season than the other Neutral. Dark Winter is nearer True Winter than it is to Dark Autumn, even the warm or muted ones.

About the Winter colouring in general,

Even the most neighbourly Winter (does that even happen?) can block a part of themselves off and never let you near it. Cozy and casual never seem to apply. Some of this person is remote and not easily reached. They will let you see what they want under their control.

We are all a balance of positive and negative. We need our vulnerabilities as much as our strengths. Our constructive emotions are the flip side of our destructive ones. They are of equal importance. Winter just happens to draw from the far ends of the branches.

Red-violet is the core and undertone colour of this person. Red wavelengths are way at the bottom of the spectral range of human vision. Red feels hot, heavy, dense, and solid, the Root Chakra, our connection with Earth. Violet is way at the high end, our connection to pure energy, the Crown Chakra. Violet is near weightless, the cosmic colour of spirituality that can be our link to the divine.

Winter’s gray scale reaches fully, or microns away, from pitch and pure, black and white at the extremes of human light and dark vision. The archetypical associations with colours – the Mystery, Chaos, and Death of black together with the Purity, Peace, and Rebirth of white.

Now, I ask you. What hope does this soul have of being balanced?

The little bit of heat is very important in any cool-neutral Season. The image loses power if the beak is lemon or ice yellow. Beautiful browns and whites. Still not playing games.

Winter is a Season of extreme opposition. I can appear motionless on the outside, frozen equanimity. The inside is being scrubbed with a bottlebrush. Ask my significant other.

As steady as they might appear, the inside is on the way up or on the way down at warp speed.

I love you, I hate you.

I am so mad that it is perfectly reasonable for me to gut you and leave you bleeding. Five minutes pass. Wanna go shopping?

Rabid anger and the depths of despair. Either your suggestion is perfect or nothing about it is right, not one single thing. I’m gonna make you pay. If I’m going down, I’m taking you with me.

Drama. You are 100% on my side and support every word I say or you are letting me down, you said you were behind me, now what am I supposed to do???????

What, you still like me? The relief! The joy! Wanna go shopping?

Reactive? One comment and we’re off the handle, the emails are flying. Have you seen the T-shirt? Anxiety Girl! Able to jump to the worst conclusion in a single bound. Winter is calmer when they have (imaginary, of course) control over the future.

The deepest thinkers and the biggest babies.

They say Winters have natural glamour. I disagree that they start with more than anybody else. Unless colouring or lines are piercing in darkness or sharpness, Winter gets out of bed with an everyday face, moving to a shocking level of contrast, colour, and intensity once the makeup is on. The biggest transformations. The more they wear (in their own colours of course, is that not why we’re here?), the better they look.

Every single Winter is this way? No!! Some are so soft spoken, you can barely hear them. Some joke and laugh, love everybody and everyone loves them, able to get along with anybody. These are often married to Seasons other than Winter.

A touch of rustic matters to Dark Winter, not to the point that water melts. That scarf could be one heck of a lipstick, warm side.

Winter is said to be analytic and dissecting because that’s how it comes out of their mouth. Where it begins is usually more intuitive. They are internally guided. As analytically painful and scrutinizing as they can be, this person runs on instinct, which is why they don’t believe anybody as much as themselves. Their gut tells them not to.

They can be self-important, preferring a moment in the spotlight to discretion or the annoying distraction of what it feels like to be the other guy. Consequences? Who cares? Whether their behaviour causes others to get along with them, to go away, push back in exhaustion, or push back in anger, it doesn’t really matter. Take your pick. Flip a coin.

Summers are concerned with making the world better. They will listen and adapt in as many gray zones as it takes, if it means peace all around. You can say something negative and they say, “Oh, how interesting, let me think about that.”

Critique a Winter. Watch the sound and lights. The world is Right and Wrong. Good and Evil. They attack because they feel they’ve been attacked.

Summer is usually calming to be around. They can be ornery or prickly, especially the Softs, and even that is not common at all. Spring will follow negativity with a joke. Autumn is biking or baking. They never feel fierce. You don’t feel a need to protect yourself.

Among my more exciting emails are the ones that tear me to shreds, sent by a woman insisting that she is a Summer. It would be rare as a hornless unicorn for a Summer to ever send such a letter. I hear about the big stirs in the colour groups. Will you all send me a dollar if I guess the main Season of the mastermind?

When one thing means everything, you have entered the Winter realm. One colour. One shape. One reaction. One emotion. Still a natural picture, this is One Tree, not One Ferris Wheel.

Warmer and busier. More Autumn. The repetitive element of marching along and visual near/far feels like Autumn energy to me. The solid vertical lines feel like Winter, not by any logical process. The  image is about the many, not The One. 

Structured around a reader’s Q&A to keep me on track:

How does a Dark Winter energy differ from a Dark Autumn?

Dark Autumn is more relaxing to be with. Even the Yangest Gamine will be inviting you into her home, feeding you, baking cookies while she visits. She might have some mighty snappy comments, which she will balance with funny faces and voices.

Autumns are not intentionally cruel. Like Doberman dogs, they are smart, sensible, and calm. Armed, yes, dangerous, yes, and willing to deploy, but only with fair provocation. As the Seasons add red (Winter), the oppositions become more extreme. Red signifies both love and rage, bleeding and healing.

Winter can be intentionally cruel. Not in the name of cruelty, more like “I’ll show them how it feels.” What drives them is fairness. You did this to me, I will do it to you. It’s only fair. The knife goes in and gets an extra twist and you know it and I know it. I have spent 55 years being it.

And yet, they live the Golden Rule. That whole Do Unto Others, it’s kind of meaningless except for the big stuff, you know? Best to unlearn it. If I treated others the way I want to be treated, I would get hate mail. Except for the big stuff, as I said. Took me a long time to stop assuming that others want what I want.

Rich red and warm black. As good as it gets on this colouring.

Bonus tip for Getting Along With Winter: Flatter them. Winter is a proud entity. Start every conversation in this way. It will be heard as respect. They will be on your side from the start. The outcome will bias in your favour. Others will wonder how you did it.

How does Dark Winter differ from what applies to every Winter?

Every Neutral Season is a mix of seemingly impossible opposites. The Light Seasons combine the energetic forward movement of Spring (yellow) with the introspective, receding contemplation of Summer (blue). Light Summer is in the world to share the indescribable sparkle of life in its most delicate earthly form. Light Spring somehow elevates the sparkle of life to a place of transcendence, and yet the colours move towards us even more as the yellow infusion rises.

Dark Winter is a mixture of earth and history (Autumn) and candy and the future (Winter). Not only is the person complicated, so is dyeing clothes in the colours apparently. Finding truly Dark Winter clothing besides black and burgundy is not so easy. She is dressing as a True Winter much of the time. Cosmetics are pretty easy for her so she can balance things out.

Dark Winter develops Autumn’s productivity gene to Ruthless Productivity. She is getting it done, whatever it takes. Some are more caught up in their looks than others but when there’s a job they want done, it moves up to #1, never mind about the lipstick.

How would you feel in the presence of a Dark Winter? 

Me myself? Kind of like when people from the same town meet in faraway airports. There’s recognition for sure. I get where their head is, what is likely to motivate them, and what I don’t have to pretend to be. The conversation starts up as between people who have met a few times. The groundwork has been laid. I can be who I am without feeling that I need to soften anything or make space for anything. I like working with Dark Winter because our level of focus, intensity, and speed are about the same.

How do others feel in the presence of Dark Winter? I couldn’t say :)

Imposing sometimes. A woman I know, E, is around 65. Swirling, thick, shoulder-length, iron gray hair pinned back, striking facial geometry, cherry chocolate lips, the most refined character. Even silent, she might as well be the only person in the room so magnetic is her personal power. Hand her a scepter, balance a big crown on her head, and the picture is ready to take. In the past, I compared Dark Winter to the Tzarina with E. in my mind’s eye.

Easy and undemanding at times. Another woman I love, L. An optimistic Winter, she doesn’t think of every reason why something won’t work. She loves to laugh, is socially relaxed, and is not married to a Winter.

Kindness personified in some people. M. is a Winter who acts like a Summer. Her soul radiates faith, love, patience, and empathy.

Is there an energetic difference between a Dark Winter who leans toward Dark Autumn and a Dark Winter who leans toward True Winter?

Yes. Getting subtle now. The Autumn one goes better with the flow. As even as Winter looks on the surface, there is a storm beneath. Stuff gets to them. They worry, they store it, they obsess, they can make molehills into mountains. The more Winter, the less “Meh.”

Autumn has a high level of physical energy. She can live in her own world as Winter does, but without all the intensity, though Dark Autumn can be getting up there. As a dear and respected colleague said of Autumn, “They sure do get shit done.”

What kind of careers would put a Dark Winter in their element?

I’m not able to answer this because of much variability not related to colouring. With the capacity to lead and produce coupled to the unparalleled ability to get in their own way that Winter has, she can do absolutely anything or absolutely nothing.

Are there certain facial features unique to, or commonly seen in Dark Winters?

With every colouring, there are two or three that are seen often. The Sandra Bullock/Jackie Onassis/Ellen Page/Selena Gomez/Bianca Jagger pattern of strong jaws and a dark overall look is very common, but there are many others.

There is a certain face of a dialed-up Autumn with a sharper intensity in a background that feels medium. IDK any celebrities. Maybe she looks like me in certain ways.

Sometimes long faces, perky or baby faces…the same variability as in other Seasons.

Is there a song or kind of music that captures the essence of Dark Winter energy?

In the spirit of being to opposite to what we are trying so hard to prove about ourselves, perhaps the song speaks of learning to release, to neither force nor struggle, of an abandon she can only dream of.

Nobody is an island though Dark Winter thinks she might be happier that way. A little Autumn grit in a song about the humanity we all share. Put your money down. You bet she can get shit done. Just not alone.

What kind of dance captures the essence of how a Dark Winter moves through life?

For the life of me, I am not seeing anything. Could it be that they don’t dance? Workaholic that I am, all my dancing happens at my computer. I meditate about releasing and relaxing but am not capable of it.

Does Dark Winter come at the beginning of the winter season or the end?

At the beginning. It is the transition from Autumn. Seasons don’t flow from Winter to Autumn in Nature.

If we detach the symbolic associations, which I can hardly deny are strong for me,  the illumination of objects by light and the portion of colour space occupied by Dark Winter are continuums that flow in both directions.

Colour is simply a relationship. No, colour is a wavelength. Our perception of the wavelength is via relationships. Our perception of anything visual is simply a relationship called contrast. Humans do not see white writing on white backgrounds.

What is Dark Winter’s gift? What is it here to contribute to the world?

Focus. Once she locks on to a target, spacetime folds a little tighter.

A Soft Autumn can have a strength of purpose that beats anybody. What Dark Winter tends to have more is the ability to exclude everything else from her radar. It’s like asking any member of the staff at Sephora to match a lipstick colour for you. Off they go, like heat-seeking missiles, till they have it. Don’t interrupt them while they search. Their aim is not to nurture, it is to achieve.

Is a Dark Winter just darkness personified or is that darkness a safe place to nurture and bring forth the light within others, within the self and from within the earth?

Wow, now that’s my kind of question.

Defining what darkness is in the first place is not so easy. Media, folklore, and even art, have attached all sorts of myths to darkness, as has the history of PCA. Children instinctively seem to make the bad guy dark – or is that learned? Is fear of the dark learned? Seems it would be instinctive at least in part. Take one look at the wolf and the moon image higher up.

All that the Dark Seasons do at the end of the day is make darkness visually normal, appearing as it really is, not blacker or duller. The associations that made darkness into something more fall away. Darkness is just darkness, a normal variant of pigment on this planet, of light and life on Earth.

Small shifts towards darkness are absorbed, not amplified, with no particular upper limit. The reverse is true of the Light Seasons, where small shifts towards darkness are magnified into something that needs managing. With a Soft, small shifts towards higher saturation looks bigger than they would on anybody else, which is why their muted colour can appear so full of life and energy on them. With a True cool colouring, the smallest movement towards more heat and they appear totally altered, distorted, and slightly insane. True cool colouring deals with warmth differently.

What kind of clothing does a Dark Winter tend to favor? I know there could be any variety of archetypes within the season, but for instance, you mentioned that True Autumns prefer simple, practical clothing so they can focus on what needs to be done. Is there a similar generality about Dark Winters?

Simplicity is true of many Winters. They hate to be wrong with a capital H. Since they can be sure of black, it becomes the uniform.

As I learn more about Image Archetype (IA), I see people drawing as much authentic self-expression from that inner knowledge as colour. If she knows her IA, she will dress accordingly. Those who are magnificent in a lot of decoration are still that way.

Certain Season adjustments probably apply to all IAs, for instance the use of more graphic, abstract florals and symmetry than a Spring of the same IA would be most attractive in.

If she is not aware of her innate shapes and lines, Dark Winter is no different from anyone else. Her clothing choices will be influenced by what is in her life.

What kind of jewelry captures the essence of a Dark Winter, regardless of archetype?

Strong, rich colour of a deep reflectivity. When other colour systems called this colouring Deep Winter, it wasn’t an accident. Autumn has a richness of colour that is greatly defined by being profound. When you see an Autumn eye in correct colour, the impression is of a kaleidoscopic tunnel that you could travel down forever.

Winter cools the stones, cools the setting more, and adds shine.

In which jewelry box does it live?

What kind of flower, bird, animal, tree has Dark Winter energy?

Flower flower flower…it is red. Dark Winter is outstanding in red. Not roses entirely, needs more substance. Some aspects of poinsettia but not quite, maybe if the pot is in a silver and gold wrapper. Quite possibly a lily of some sort, dark red with a golden throat. Single and strong without the lushness of Amaryllis. That sort of hedonism lives on the Spring side. Maybe like this.

The eagle or hawk. Locked on to a target.

The wolf. The panther. Is there such a thing as a friendly Grim? From my veterinary days, people are far more afraid of black dogs than any other, even taking precedence over breed (except perhaps Newfoundland dogs that are judged by all to be much more friendly than they necessarily are). The mythology of black.

A tree. Never thought about a tree. Wait, yes, I have. A Christmas tree. Sticking with that. An evergreen, nighttime, jeweled ornaments, a resinous scent.

A log cabin that definitely has electricity, coloured foil, and plastic-wrapped candy.

While other Dark Winters are going this way, less tree, more candy.

I don’t know if you did a post on the Dark Winter child or not, but if not I’d also like to know how that child differs from children of other seasons.

It varies enormously with the child, the strength of the family imprint, the siblings, and so on. Children are not defined enough, even if they have settled into their colouring early. Mine were their Seasons when they were 5 years old but the characters were still changing a lot till they were about 14.

My guess is that this is about average. Winters change enormously in colouring and character in adolescence, and even sometimes in early adulthood.

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My thanks to J. whose question inspired this post.

J: I appreciate your blog a lot and would love to see you do a post on “uniform” ideas for the different seasons.  “Uniform dressing” is pretty popular right now (see for example http://www.racked.com/2014/11/20/7567861/uniform-dressing

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a10441/why-i-wear-the-same-thing-to-work-everday/) but it seems that most people’s ideas about uniforms are black and white (good for winters, but not for a cool summer like me).  I’d love to read your take on something like this!

C: Is this idea is to create each Season’s consistent, best neutral background, and change the accessories as desired? The background might be what reads as B&W on each colouring, or might be something else if that looks better? Or do we stick with the B&W equivalent as the background, for this post to have most value to women’s understanding of ‘uniform dressing’?

J’s reply, in which I am now fully on board:

J: I think that the idea behind uniform dressing (especially since it is usually done for work) is to create a versatile outfit (meaning that it is appropriate for almost any work-related situation) that conveys authority.   Authority is especially important for women, more so than for men.  Also, a certain lack of fussiness with clothing while still maintaining a sense of what is appropriate hits that sweet spot of “I know how to dress for my job, but I’m so busy doing great work I don’t have time to pay a lot of attention to creating a new outfit every day.”  These are the reasons that I think black and white are usually appealing for this kind of uniform dressing– black, especially, is thought to be always appropriate and authoritative but somehow still creative and artistic (read: entrepreneurial)!  It is interesting to note that people in caring professions (nurses, counselors– note: traditionally feminine kind of roles) don’t often develop their own personal uniform.  For these folks, either a uniform is given (and pastels are understood to be not only completely okay but preferred!) or not thought of.  I really think that a lot of this comes down to managing gendered expectations and thinking through what it means to be “feminine” or “masculine”.  Uniforms in themselves, especially personal uniforms, communicate a certain “male” approach to dressing– this can be strategic for women to use sometimes in certain settings.

C: Brilliant explanation. This is getting more and more attractive as a post, your words placing it suddenly among my top translation interests for dressing: the story we tell others.

I asked a man what he thought of women wearing the same clothing, or clothing theme, to work every day. He said,

“Finally, someone got onto it.”

He has a point. It is not our responsibility to produce a fashion parade at work.

Women would notice and judge. Great work wear gets brownie points with women because that’s who sees it and cares. Men might notice but won’t judge because they dress this way anyhow. Is there a man alive who would say, I think she wore that skirt to last year’s annual meeting? Therefore, they also don’t hand over any authority or admiration for how organized we are.

Otoh, Uniform Dressing could devolve into an escape hatch that spells visual boredom for the rest of us. Boredom reads as unimaginative, not a good signal to send anywhere. I admit that if I worked with a woman who showed up in the same outfit every day, I would think,

“You have no idea what to wear and you’re tired of trying to figure it out. I know some super good shortcuts. I can connect you with some really good people. I’m here for the asking.”

In a web Search of Uniform Dressing, I kept running into the phrase “staring at my closet wondering what to wear”. Why? Two years after PCA&PIA, you have so much good stuff, the choice is only hard because you look great in any of it. I keep entire outfits in Ziplocs, accessories and all, flip them in and out of suitcases like Frisbees. Speed and organization are everything with me. The “Staring at my closet…” line would put in my head,

“You have no clean clothes. You haven’t done laundry in a week and don’t plan on doing any for another week.”

After the Search, my overall take on Uniform Dressing was,

“You’re walking by the chance to tell me so much more about yourself (and give me reasons to give you more money).”

Not giving up yet. There is definite merit to the idea.

Despite its apparent simplicity, successful uniform dressing is not a decision to take lightly. For both men and women, the uniform should have a great deal of planning assigned to it, much more so than if the outfit changed every day, which would be less of a declaration. In the reverse psychology of humans, a uniform actually draws more attention to itself.

Colours were once necessary for our survival and still influence every human able to see them. Warm and sweet to look at, a Spring coloured person dressed in Autumn colours look like she’s wearing furniture. She looks either child-like or conflicted. In many cases, close enough is still 1000% better than we used to look. Arriving into your main Season palette is a huge wardrobe step forward. Even with similar colours, Spring wearing Autumn khaki can look like she’s going paintballing – which could work on certain Natural archetypes in certain job situations.

Warm and strong to look at, Autumn coloured people wearing Spring coloured clothes look dressed from the kids’ department, and more mannish. The clothing is a tilt-a-whirl that reads ditzy or frivolous, the absolute last thing you want to express at work. When I analyze colouring, I’m looking for the colours that allow the face to be calm and steady. I can’t think of any job where one would choose a different expression.

Work clothes do what we wish our business card would. Your appearance is telling me what you’re selling me. None of us have any choice about this. Until I decide if I’m buying your story or your product, I’m looking for visual backup. Personal opinion, Casual Fridays are a mistake, or an opportunity few seem to take.

Have we not all been on websites that sounded interesting till we spotted the person? Leveraging that first five seconds impression is a bigger deal-breaker than a business card, a logo, a business name, and all sorts of other things that are glanced at, put in a contact file, and generally forgotten.

White seems the most obvious choice for daily wear, to minimize reaction to clothing. I can’t talk about all-black. It is too uninspiring to consider on anyone. All-black is a clothing cop-out, the equivalent of clothing for camouflage. All-black is as dated as Generic Corporate Formula wear, which I do not believe any workplace requires. We look like bulky, frazzled women under the control of outside influences. Never compromise your You-ness, it’s the best thing you got.

I like looking at alpha-female clothes, not that this style is necessary in every job situation. If you’ve made it, who cares? Nana Mouskouri can wear any glasses she wants, giant beetles if she feels like it. The minute she opens her mouth, she transports the room to wherever she chooses. For those of us still striving, don’t give anybody a reason to eye roll when you’re not there.

I’ll be sticking with separates, though many would prefer a dress, perfectly fine. Pants or skirts need not be shown with white tops because let’s be honest, Winter will buy black, Autumn will be in dark brown, Summer in gray, and Spring…Spring neutrals are not so easily found but they do exist. Yellow-green grays are Spring’s, in comparison to Autumn’s which have less obvious clear yellow content. Let me show you some grays, as approximately as this medium permits.

Not sure about Season with neutral colours? Scrunch up the fabric and look down in the folds, in daylight if possible. Lighting makes an enormous difference because it’s light that makes colour in the first place. If too much yellow is going in, too much yellow is coming out, amplified if the fabric is shiny. The feeling of a strong yellow (not necessarily a lot of it though), along with shine of fabric, moves many colours into the 5 Winter groups, for instance the bottom right blouse.

Winning Uniform Dressing is a new challenge. You’ve decided to go for it. OK, I’m with you. We are not at work to be Friended or Liked, agreed with, supported, or loved. Shared maybe. With my usual emphasis on clarity of purpose, we are there to be hired, re-hired, and referred. Those are the reasons, the only reasons, for the wardrobe.

Once hired, then we can do good in the world. Being hired is the playing field by which we have opportunity to share our gifts, enrich the lives of others, and give back more than we take. Being hired is the ticket to the training ground on which we grow inside and innovate outside.

Knowing your white might be the biggest payoff to having your colouring analyzed if you happen to be an Autumn, on whom wearing white every day is a series of unfortunate events – therefore the absence of white-white in the Warm Whites panel below. Want a good way to tell Dark Autumn from Dark Winter colouring? White. Pick beige or gray instead. In stores, that’s 7 beiges in 10. When Autumn gets her colours right, no colouring conveys capable strength better. She looks like she can take on anything, gorgeous and fearless.

PCA is a big payoff for Springs. Life is so much better when she knows her ivory and cream because she will put down money for a lot of it. Spring manages the lightness of white better than Autumn but she is certainly not at her best. She is not given many beiges and grays by stores. She could wear a small number of Autumn beiges, like the turtleneck marked *1 in the Warm Whites group, but why? Ivory quite literally illuminates her from within. Her pores go away, the skin is smooth as cream, the eyes sparkle.  It is easy to find. If you scrunch up her whites and look in the folds, imagining what colour the fabric would be if you concentrated it more, you would see versions of peach and egg yolk, as the blouse top row centre.

See the *2 shirt in the Warm Whites board? Might be fine in either row.  It has a very slight pink tinge that puts Soft Summer thoughts in my head too. I couldn’t place this one without having it in hand.

Then you decide you’ve had it to here with your dry cleaning bill, collars now tattooed with permanent makeup, and the steady stream of packages containing your-white shirts arriving at your door.

Here is what I would do. Keep changing the story. Pick a theme and develop it over 2 years. Co-workers would be looking at the door every morning to see what you’re wearing today. Keep people engaged. Among the top 3, the only 3, things I care about if I’m hiring is imagination – tell that story too.

Clearly, the uniform theme is getting shaky, but the colours are still neutral-based. I’ve grouped Neutral Seasons with their True Seasons throughout this post, where each Neutral Season could choose a colour scheme to repeat every day. Dark Autumn might go with gray/rust/teal or caramel/brown/black, having it in different garments and designs. How tight you want it is your choice. You can tell that I’m dressing different body types. For yourself, image archetype would remain consistent in every style.

Why more colour in the Warms compared to the Cool Prints coming later? Because the heat of the colouring looks so good with a lot of colour activity, the whole Circle of Life thing, ‘The sun rolling high through the sapphire sky…’ The music heats up, ‘Far too much to take in here…more to do than can ever be done.” Warm colouring is not a Zen Garden (Summer) or a Fjord (Winter) to look at.

Can we move away from white? High maintenance and a waiter feel. If I had to pick one colour family that is spectacular on every colouring when it’s right, I’d choose blue-green. Green can be gross, oh boy, yes it can, but its greatness can be hard to beat.

Green is the complement to the colour of blood. When we choose the right green for our own reds, others’ awareness of our human presence is sharp, heightened, sounding the “I am here.” signal. Plentiful in stores for all Seasons, blue-green is also hard to beat in professional situations as the colours of Nature and money. It is appropriate and civilized. Below, with the odd could-not-resist, like periwinkle for Spring.

Patience was my magic word for the first 6 months of this year. It switched to Perspective back around May. Some general ideas about what the rest of us will tire of seeing each day:

1. The same print, design, or picture. Like a screen that’s frozen, anyone under 70 will open a new window in 5 seconds or less. Unless it’s black, in which case the eye is desperate for something to do.

If you insist on black, transform it to be interesting. Eyes like something fun to do. When eyes are happily busy, their person is receptive and ready to listen. When the appearance just gets better the longer you look, as colour-analyzed appearances do, there’s no incentive to stop looking. If anything, the viewer thinks, “I see that investing time in you is rewarding. What else you got?”

Once again, the changing story, this time in cool colours.

2. Take care with lace or ruffles, however Yin you are or which designer is on the label. Grownup ruffles or lace could be ok, but nothing that says, “I can wear this because I’m a girl.” Sounds too much like, “I can wear this because I’m having a hormone day.” As if we need help from ourselves to be written off as emotionally loose, besides which nobody knows or cares. If you only ever see women clients, managed bows and decorations are fine. If you’re a grief counselor, different decisions are needed. We want, “I know what suits me. If I can make good decisions for me, I can make them for you. Let’s get to work.”
3. Statement anything. If you need a signature item, keep it contained, like a bracelet or ring. Don’t let it anywhere near your face, especially as eyeglasses where we have no choice but to keep negotiating with them when we are trying to reach you, unless eccentricity is part of the game plan. Signature pieces often overshoot or undershoot. Frankly, I think Jackie O. could have done much more with her pearls. Don’t give people a reason to giggle. Getting taken seriously is hard enough and been a long time coming.
4. Logos, however Bright you are, even if it’s Prada. They take attention away from the job. The viewer goes off task and on outfit. Women might notice, men won’t care, and labels don’t get us hired more.
5. What looks cute on you, however Gamine you are. The client walking in, seeing a woman sitting behind the desk, doesn’t know or care how she looked a year ago or anything about archetypes and colours. She wants a problem solved, right now, today. Clients can only compare us to the world at large in that moment they decide to hand over trust and responsibility. Every archetype has great work outfits to look like competent adults.
6. No tight. Fitted is fine, but no clingy. Naturals, wear your size so the rest of us can breathe.
7. No cleavage, however Romantic or YinDramatic you are, never ever, not 1 mm, nevermind what somebody said in a fashion book. Cleavage is for the bar, the beach, the stage, or, like the ultimate graphic T, maybe a picnic or shopping day if you’re under 25. An inverse relationship exists between skin and power. I’m just here to keep it real so here I go: Men are hard wired in what might be Nature’s built-in self-destruct button. As it says so nicely in SuperFreakonomics, [Men want more sex than they can get for free, since the beginning of time, everywhere in the world.] This will not change. Even women are distracted. Take the bull’s eye off your body. Let’s get to work.
8. Caution about yellow. Many people have a high awareness of it, even disturbance from it.

Work is self control as much as crowd control. In that sense, Uniform Dressing fits the bill.

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Announcements

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The ever-expanding cosmetic collection has brought in Cheeky, a fantastic coral pink blush for Soft Summer, and Liaison, a lovely warm burgundy for True and Soft Summer.

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Stunning Colours 2015

Version 1.0, the 3 Great Colours post from 2011,  is linked here.

The sequence in which the colour journey has unfolded is intriguing. Today I understand why it had to be this way, but I have not always.

People of the same colouring type can have very different natural appearances or pigmentation. The palette, or Season, is the paintbox. You are a Bright Spring who got the yellow and blue in your eyes, your son is a Bright Spring who got the strong caramel and green in his eyes, your sister… It doesn’t matter where each colour went in each person in the group, only that they were all painted from that paintbox. They will all react to testing colours in the same way from a technical perspective. They might not all wear their palette identically to express their most authentic self.

I was 2 years into PCA when I wrote RTYNC (the blue book in the left column). If most books are obsolete about 6 months after they’re written and that one is 4 years old, how much of its content would I agree with today? All of it actually, the difference between then and now being the complexity of the landscape that surrounds the words.

For one important thing, the essential other half of appearance, image and archetype analysis, had not crossed my path yet. Winter and Dramatic are not partners, nor are Summer and Classic, Autumn + Natural, or Spring with whatever it was. The Signature/STYLE  newsletter (info at top of the right column) subscriber lists contain Winter Naturals, followed by Winter Classics, in the vast majority.

Be sure to use your  imagination. This palette, any palette, is where you begin. What you can conceive with it is where you end.  Some of these colours are incredible even as broadcloth. Shine is never hard on a Winter, Dark Winter wearing a more brushed finish than the smoother Bright Winter. Dark Winter’s dark green-brown is magnificent as coat or cashmere.  I find icy mint superb on any Bright  Winter, whether the colour lives in the eye or not. We have learned that True Winter red is hard to find. Thankfully, the colouring accommodates red well. That darker of the two reds in the palettes? I still don’t know how that translates in fabric, but I almost do.

Of course, PCA is a magnet for Winters. With their love of dissection, classification, and perfectionism, to say nothing of being into their looks and living inside their own head, and realizing that cosmetics can turn them into someone nobody ever guessed, the force field is too strong to resist.

Are there more Winters in the world? Yes, probably so. Maybe one day with mixing of races, there will be only Winters and then we’ll have to subdivide those 3 Seasons in some way, but that’s a long way off. Summer, Spring, and Autumn colouring are plentiful, welcome variety to the landscape of this planet. Winter scenery, everywhere all the time, a little scary to think about.

The more we are exposed to anything, the more accessible and obvious the small things become. What we struggled to see as beginning analysts now comes out to find us. Harmony, the basis of it all, is a later step. It does not mean ‘looks pretty together’. It does not mean ‘looks even’, which is misinterpreted to end up as ‘looks drab, bloated, flat, vanishing, boring, lifeless”. Harmony means very literally “having the same vibration”.

Abstract concepts are not easy to define. My computer’s dictionary says vibration is “a component frequency of an oscillation or wave”. Since humans can’t interpret whether two wavelengths have the same distance between their peaks, we need other tests.

‘The same energy’, ‘do not distort one another’, ‘brings into focus’, and all sorts of other concepts that you have to see to understand can be used to describe the look and feel of harmony. If I wore this shirt with those pants, would you be looking at the two equally? I can put a high saturation Summer colour with a Winter palette and they balance decently but the colours are just weirdly wrong together. What neutral colour will she wear with it? Where is the lipstick that makes sense?

Even in the controlled environment of a PCA, the decision is made in the 0-4 seconds after the drapes change. Staring longer is not only useless, it is dangerous as our eyes accommodate to inform us that the image is normal. Once a person sees the energetic connection that is made, then they understand. In time, one learns to recognize it immediately.

True Autumn colouring wearing Fire Opal Red is quite something to behold. Their navy is also outstanding, top of the scale when it has a little shine and texture, like raw silk.  I am still very on board with yellow for Soft Autumn from Best Colours V1.0, qualifying that by saying that if the hair colour is neither natural or correct, the prettiness will not happen. For today, periwinkle and a green that recognizes their important coolness are added. You might be looking at the last square thinking, “??” Picture a flowing but not floppy fabric with a brushed sheen and a suggestion of tone-on-tone camouflage pattern.  Dark Autumn brown is more muted and green than Dark Winter’s. This colouring also has an important coolness too, necessary for the person to appear in focus. To say that they look good in purple and candlelight white is an understatement of the truth.

The power of colour analysis (PCA) to change lives for the better has humbled me so often that it became a permanent state of being. Sure, we have problems to examine, so does Lululemon, and we will do that with the usual pain and opportunity that can only be found in truth. The seesaw is more than balanced when we look at how many people look better, feel stronger, are healing, and continue to step through their own doors. As a client we love said,

Right now I’m in the wonderful position that everything works so well together and enhances each other, from the lipstick to the jewelry, the hair, the clothing, and on and on.  The synergistic effect has taken me by surprise in the most welcome way!! I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate this but it really has a snowball effect.  Even my nail poilish now goes with everything too.  :-)  Everything reinforces the message of who I am – nothing takes away from it. Fewer items, of everything including makeup, because everything works.  And easier to see if something new fits because you now have the totality to compare it too, not just your swatch book.

 

True Summer, Liaison lipstick mentioned up top, is the first colour. Fairly saturated green, where the sat tolerance ends and Winter starts. Can only know this about a person by draping them. Give that blue-grey the sheen and texture of hammered silk and oh, boy, do good things happen. Soft Summer, incredible red and blue that look like plenty of bright colour under that face, and dark brown, my latest exploration.  Light Summer in their muted coral is beautiful. The Season’s heat is important. Their particular blue, tipping between pinkish and greenish, stops all the talk in the room. And Come Dancing lipstick, of course.

3 Best Colours for one Season? No such thing. Every human is a little different even inside a Season. A Season is a template, a springboard to help you ignore all the other stuff you would have bought last week. Inside your own room in the house of your Season, you decorate according who you are. Your individual pigmentation, breathtaking colours, tolerances in your 3 colour dimensions, colour history, and many other factors, decide what your room looks like. Only your colour analyst knows those because she watched colours react with your own.

My very best white? No such thing. We all have 2 to 5 perfectly functional choices, even the True Seasons. Depends on the person, the fabric, the particular white of the eyes, and what it will be worn with, and so on. The fact that everyday lighting and our eyes’ ability to adapt and understand “Oh, it’s white.” widens the span. In the featured picture that wraps around the title of this article, it is unlikely that an artist would use pure white on its own anywhere. Your analyst can coach you on what matters, what doesn’t.

Don’t decide, “I can only wear warm red.” unless you have seen all the cool ones, which will never be in any analyst’s drapes sets. Don’t decide, “I wear cool colours best.”, if you only saw yourself in 2 or 3 warm ones of any given hue. You are probably not correct and you will certainly look boring-er than you need to. Everyone can wear their entire palette. The questions are where you place the colours and how big are the blocks, not a big negotiation on whether you buy them in the first place.

My very best heat level? Not if you’re a Neutral Season. You might do great in warmer blues and cooler yellows. You might wear clothing in any heat, but cosmetics with more restriction depending on the exact overtone of your face.

True Spring in her wedding white, the sun is literally beaming out of her face. Gentle orange is easy and she is more visible than a big block of yellow if the hair is light. Light Spring has a particular neutral colour that is easy to overlook in the palette. Too brown to be peach, worn with their white and nut brown, in a fabric that would drift down like a magician’s scarf if you tossed it up in the air, it is fantastic. And Posie Pink, prettiest thing ever.  Bright Spring’s first colour has come to be known as Ksenia Pink, after our analyst in Moscow who wears it and stops traffic. Beautiful in their darker green-blue and very professional, and baby pink that is too pigmented to be icy and too pure to be pastel.

From where I stand today, these are the colours that I expect to be beautiful on most everyone of these colouring types, or Seasons. To make these graphics, I walked over to the drape inventory and pulled out those where I have to expend energy to keep a blank face when a student is working through a PCA. I see the colour coming in the drape sequence and I make my face a mask of neutrality Inside, small explosions are happening.

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The post 3 Beauty Colours for 12 Seasons V2.0 appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Without the 12 colour harmonies created for the Seasons by Kathryn Kalisz, founder of Sci\ART, I would never have seen and felt the unique language of each Season. Would have missed it completely. I know this for sure.

Some of the colours are provocative and unexpected, but your reaction is, “For goodness sake, would you look at that? How did she know?”

Palettes in which colours are random or leave you with reactions of, “Give me a break, that would never belong here.” are not able to capture the spiritual beauty of each Season.

True Winter’s Voice

True Winter’s spirit might be especially elusive, perhaps why it defies verbal descriptions and has become the subject of so many attempts to define it. The unique radiance of True Winter speaks to me as space and solitude on the most majestic, mysterious scale. It is the silence of the ice cave, the rising of a blue white moon over a frozen lake, the jewel that resembles a planet, the yellow flower that could be the sun.

The earthly images always seem to be metaphors for another immensity, the power of a quiet that cannot be confined. The drapes feel the same way. They hold reserve and dignity, as does True Summer, but with seclusion that sets them apart from the empathic, emotional, approachable quality of Summer.

Something about their ultimate nobility makes them as private and isolated as royalty. They are so apart, so elevated from everyday life around them, dismissing the busy fun of Spring and work ethic of Autumn, that they appear concerned with a higher ideal. If there were one Season for which I am happy to see people own their Luxury Drapes, it would be True Winter, a group of colours that seems less willing to compromise what they stand for. No other Season continues to surprise me as much.

True Winter Appearance Variations 

Few people guess themselves correctly to be True Winter in their natural colouring, or Season.

If eyes and hair are dark, they tend to guess Dark Winter. We have seen the photos of Sandra Bullock and Kim Kardashian. I’m not convinced about Kim. If you like to guess from photos, get past the colouring of the face where, let’s face it, you’re looking at eyes and hair, and imagine the person wearing the palette. The entire palette – lips, cheek, jewelry, hair, not just clothing. Do you think the Dark Winter lipstick might look like smeared food on Kim? I do.

I will add a Pin of Teri Hatcher to the Pinterest Makeup board today. Whatever kind of Winter she is, while true that the lip colour is way the heck better than some nude or brown colour, it seems to me a little flat and smoky relative to the eyes. Lips are not supposed to look smoky. Dark Winter lipstick might do so compared the other Winter lipsticks, but it won’t be that way on a Dark Winter face. It will be vibrant, exciting, healthy, and normal.

If eyes and hair are grey or blue, the person has been 2 or 3 Seasons. The overall appearance seems milder than the very dark eyes and hair person. One doesn’t expect it to balance the True Winter palette. Hair might be black brown or silver. Summer drifts through your mind.

If hair is blond (very rare in adults if we are talking about yellow blonde, I can think of one), light brown, or red-tinged, or if eyes look warm (think of Catherine Zeta-Jones, not saying she is a True Winter), Spring or Autumn pop up in the backstory.

Here are 3 types of human manifestations of the True Winter colour group. There are probably about 6. Doubtless, I would find many others if I lived in a more racially diverse place.

The Dark Hair, Dark Eyes True Winter

This is Elaine DeFehr, our analyst in Winnipeg, Canada.

Elaine can wear very high colour saturation. The architecture of the face loses when colour contains the wrong kind of yellow. The face flattens and the features smear.

I could have said, “The architecture of the face loses when colour contains the wrong amount of yellow” but I didn’t.  Saying True Winter contains no warmth or no yellow seems wrong. Every human being contains yellow. If yellow is how we define colour warmth, then everyone is warm, that’s not right either. The right question is, Which yellow does the skin contain?

Warmth of colour is relative. We only know it depending on what is next to it. The yellow in Elaine is cooler (bluer, which gives it a greenish cast) than the neighbour Seasons’ yellow. Her skin won’t compromise about that, meaning that placing another Season’s yellow next to her face reduces her presence and beauty in various ways. This is still consistent with the definition of a True cool Season.

Foundation has to match overtone and undertone. How cosmetic companies label and pigment their foundations vary widely. You want the colour that disappears. Elaine’s foundation looks fairly dark and might be labeled warm, to match the olive-yellow skin tones. In this photo, she wears very little foundation.  Face, neck, and ears are all the same colour.

Elaine sent me samples of her favourite red lipsticks, knowing that I am searching for one for the Blueprints cosmetics line.

This type of True Winter looks better in red makeup than fuchsia. Elaine’s favourite is the second one, Ultima II Rampage. I liked the Smashbox colour a lot also. I wonder about the NYX Lip Pencil moving close to Bright Winter, as the purple gets stronger and the yellow becomes less obvious.

You’d think Bright Winter red would be yellower, but with red, the yellow of True Winter is more perceptible. This is not true of pink, purple, or fuchsia though. I often wonder why Kathryn placed the red swatches far from the fuchsia ones in her swatch books, at least in the version I own. Something about these colours behaves differently. In my palettes, the reds are on the same strip as the yellows.

You can contact Elaine by email at elaine@yourcolourharmony.com

 The Lower Contrast True Winter

or

The Is-She-A-Summer True Winter

A woman arrives to model for our recent analyst training course in Vancouver. Let’s say her name is Emma. No, it would never be Emma.

We scatter so many funny clues about our Season around us. Email fonts, names.  Marion is a total Autumn name. Colleen, an Autumn name. Many Soft Summers are called Barbara.

This woman’s stature is arresting. She is about 5’10”, maybe taller. Half First Nation, half Irish/Scottish. The skin colour is Caucasian but unusual, without much colour, as if you had to describe the colour of window glass. The skin is opaque, not transparent or fragile at all. Hair is dark brown. Eyes are medium gray-green.

Though her appearance had plenty of impact in the power of the body, the colours might have slipped into the Medium column. A hair product with a wet-look finish made the hair seem darker than it was. Afterwards, the students and I asked ourselves what Seasons we considered before the colour analysis: True and Soft Summer, True and Dark Winter.

While guessing at Season by appearance is very seldom correct, the value of it is to be sure that those drapes get evaluated before the person leaves. Whatever Season they look like they are, or the facebook group or the visiting aunt will say they are, has to go across them.

Her name could be Linda or Lauren. Maybe Maureen.

Funny to me that I can’t recall if her top was purple or black. I’m not certain how much she knew of PCA, but she was sure she knew her Season. Well now, we see this person all the time. They are right 1 time in 40. There she sat, watching the whole process, perfectly undisturbed with our many Season trials, quite secure that she would be right. Dang if she was.

I doubt we could have convinced her out of True Winter, but she was right so our job was easy. She was very amenable to appearance suggestions as long as we stayed inside TW. For eg, as a probable YangNatural in image archetype (great article here at Best Dressed explains IAs), we suggested replacing the wet finish of her present hair product with a matte or natural finish product.

Hers were among the most interesting colour reactions I have seen. The most pronounced variable, meaning what changed the most, was the texture of her skin. We could not eliminate True Summer in the early stages, the appearance being ok but not shockingly great in pure black.

Isn’t ‘perfect in black’ the rule for True Winter? Nothing applies to every face. That’s why the system cross-checks results from 112 colours in about 20-30 comparisons. Besides, early in the PCA process, the analyst does not know the face well enough to make big decisions unless she is 1000% certain.

At the Red Test stage, the picture began crystallizing. She was clearly of true cool colouring. Only at this stage did her eyes begin reacting – or did I understand her face well enough to see and interpret it. Fascinating.

This True Winter can be, if not monochromatic, then not very colour-animated to look at. The skin can be beige gray with little natural blush. The eyes and hair colours would not look much different on a B&W TV.

It takes Winter colours for the person to appear, let alone clean up and sparkle up. You don’t know till you try it. Nobody can think the way to a Season. Put the colour on, then compare with another colour, then decide. Humans make decisions by comparing.

Luxury drapes are very helpful to customize the Season for this person. Matte and textured fabrics were excellent. Next to shiny, smooth, slinky fabrics, even in her Season, the skin appeared more textured. B&W felt too sharp for her soft, steady character. The combination said things about her that were not true. Black-brown was striking, a moment when the Feeling folks in the room wipe away tears. She was fabulous in all purples, easily tolerating any amount of red and darkness level.
Every person in a Season is encouraged to wear all the colours. Narrowing down the palette gets a little repetitive and unnecessary. The person often narrows themselves right out of the Season, breaking up the  magic. The question is where and how much of the various colours will be worn, in which shapes, textures, and prints.

 The Odd True Winter

or

You’re Wrong, She’s an Autumn!! She’s a Spring!! True Winter

My daughter, Alexandra. You met her before in a post about PCA and Teens. I’ll introduce her once more.

Dark brown eyes, quite orange-red headed as a child, now light-medium brown with a definite red (not so much orange) cast. If I could come up with an analogy…been trying for 20 years.

Many Winters have purple tones in the hair and yellow in the eyes, mostly True and Brights. Our analyst, Rachel in Philadelphia, is an excellent example. I love these faces in a purple-black-brown eyeliner because the eyes look even yellower. The eyeliner seems very natural on the face because it is an extension of the hair colour. With the clothing and jewelry, the whole thing is just so amazing. Rachel, if you read this, would you leave a comment about the name of that MAC liner we bought? Raisin something? MAC makes a similar colour in another type of liner.

I can be surprised to see eyes that go to black and a person being placed in Seasons without something close to black in the palette. What exactly are they going to wear to give them head to toe balance, with clothing an extension of how they are coloured? I appreciate that eyes are supposed to be the focal point but we don’t get there by fading away the rest of painting. A few recent pins of Richard Gere in the Men’s Pinterest board show you what I mean.

Alexandra’s skin is very pale. She doesn’t look it. Colour is never what we think we see, remember, or predict. Doesn’t work that way. Colour is a reaction in present time. We didn’t evolve to see colour exactly. We evolved to see well enough to eat until we mate. Our visual system compares. It compares colours, contrasts, edges, movement, something, and then it decides. So put the two colours together and decide. Not 3, not 5. 2.

To give you foundation colour context, Clinique Alabaster foundation goes on dark and gets more yellow by the second on her face. MUFE’s lightest colours also turn into heavy gold streaks, giving her a yellow face on a white-gray neck. Their very white 205 blended into the neck but would have been too white as a full face. Bottle after bottle, however cool the product in the bottle, it applied yellow and went more so by the minute.

Thanks to Aislin and the great staff at the Sephora in Windsor, Ontario, we happen upon NARS Sheer Glow in Mont Blanc. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Light enough, with the correct type of yellow and no colour shifting. Face and neck in perfect unison. If we ever shop together and I say, “There is nothing about that that I don’t like.”, buy the thing. We bought this bottle. The coverage isn’t all that sheer and might need mixing to create a less pancake effect.

Here is a nice post showing you the colour with a few others.

Alexandra is best in fuchsia-purple cosmetics. They find the same tones in her hair and eyes. Red can look heavy, partly due to her age, and not as good an extension of the face. Bijou is her beautiful best gloss in the Blueprints makeup line. The eyeshadow palette creates a lovely pearly taupe grey, not as red as MAC’s pretty good Satin Taupe for True Winter.

 What’s the lesson?

Season is where you start. Within a Season, the people all share more in their colour reactions and essential aspects of their colour dimensions than they differ. Having this information, when you shop, you know what to look right through, it’s not for you. Inside your Season, the person is an individual. The 12 Blueprints analyst will coach each client in using the palette and cosmetics to best effect for her.

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The post 3 Types of True Winter appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

I was asked to talk about gray since writing Choosing the Best Gray.  Wow, it’s been 7 years now!

We all reserve the right to get smarter as we get older, smarter even than we were last week. That 2011 post content still applies quite well. I have not much to add except for two points, neither of which are news to you but I’d emphasize them more:

1. Summer has a version of green-gray. It is bluer than Autumn and Spring who have this type of gray as well.
2. Winter gray can be red, and it will look red, not pink. It can also have a strong yellow component. When I compared Winter and Summer gray fabric, the Winter was actually yellower. Summer’s pastel yellow has less impact in the final colour.

Rather than talk about gray where everyone gets a different picture and usually far more extreme than we had in mind, the boards below show you where I am in my understanding of gray at this time.

Reading about gray only gets you so far. We can’t remember it and it’s harder to guess at than any colour including white. The shopping breakthrough is taking fabric to the store. I’m not a fan of textile swatches for learning a Season or working with the palette but with gray, a tough colour to harmonize, it is so easy to just compare the fabrics under the same lighting. Shopping is fast and effective.

The Neutrals Collections (NCs) are IMO the most useful resource I have to offer you once you know your Season. You can see a purse and a top harmonized with the fabrics on Instagram (linked at the bottom of the right column).

You might look at the colours below and think, “They’re the same.”  Not true. It’s just the monitors. With the fabric in hand, you’d say, “Oooooh. Gotcha.”

You might look at the colours below and think, “They’re so close. What diff can it possibly make?”  In a 1×1″ square, granted, they look very similar. Multiply that by 3000 or 7000 squares for pants or a coat and the differences, and reasons for the differences, become more evident.

Try to define the big picture differences of the 12-colour groupings with analogies that spring to your mind.

Autumn and Spring grays are quite green.  Autumn is like a beefed up, heavier version of Spring. Swatch by swatch if you compare the closest equivalents in the palette, Autumn is overall darker, more muted, and is less yellow and more red than Spring.

Winter gray doesn’t have an obvious colour really, though it has trends towards red, yellow, and blue. The yellow component is strong, Winter yellow being bright, and has more presence in the final colour. Summer’s yellow presence is barely felt in its grays. Winter and Summer gray can be similar until you try describing the difference between pussy willows and clouds compared to the various colours in steel wool. It’s in how the textile plays with light, Summer’s being feathery in feeling.

Generalizing about the grays of one Season versus another is confusing, theoretical, and nearly useless in stores. Honestly, buy your NC and get on with your life.

As a Dark Winter, I would wear any Winter gray in matte form except Bright Winter’s warm beige-tray. If the textile has sheen, I stay with Dark Winter. I do not buy any Summer, Spring, or Autumn grays, not even of related Seasons, for instance Soft Summer or Dark Autumn.  Scaled up to the size of pants, a coat, or a jacket, they do not interact well with Dark Winter ‘colour colours’.

If you have any questions or want to link items from stores in the comment section, I would be happy to answer or discuss them together.

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The post 3 Medium Grays for 12 Seasons appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

The last in the Please No Posts.

I was asked, “Don’t you just wear whatever you want?” Such a good question.

We could eat whatever we want, decorate our house however we choose, and invest our money however we want. We know that those will not be our best choices.

We look to other sources for help and guidance. To choose our best colours, the source is a colour analyst.

Please keep in mind that these are my opinions. They represent what my eye finds elegant and flattering,  or unbecoming. Everyone can and should have their opinion when it comes to taste.

The previous posts:

Please No, Springs  is here.

Please No, Summers is here.

Please No, Autumns is here.

Should the video below not play, you can watch it here on YouTube.

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The Colours

Bright Winter

1. Light Summer aqua. Eyes and no face. Not even much eyes come to think of it. Not much of anything relative to what is there.
2. Soft Autumn rose. Truly fuzzed up face.
3. Generic burgundy. Functional.

Beauty colour: Blue periwinkle.

True Winter

1. Some kind of Soft and True Autumn fusion peach beige. The ultimate in go back upstairs.
2. True Summer green on True Winter. Better on some True Winters than others. Also, True Summer green only gets a bit lighter than this. Give a Winter green that is much more something – light, dark, saturated.
3. Faded denim. On any of the 5 Winter blends. It looks too weird to classify as casual.

Beauty colour: Pomegranate juice.

Dark Winter

1. Soft Summer cool soft rose. How can it be so gorgeous on them and such a washout on Dark Winter. Aren’t they similar Seasons? Technical similarities with some crossover in the darker colours may be a better way to think of it.
2. True Autumn beige. I once thought I was an Autumn who knew what suited her. Mmmm-hmmmm.
3. Light Spring pink. Considering the presence this person can emanate, why doll clothes?

Beauty colour: Dark green. The colour and the person are one and the same, like a walking magic show.

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The post Please No Colours for Winters appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Thank you to my dear friends Linda for the topic and Susan for the beautiful tulips that look like the Canadian maple leaf.

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In the sequence of the 12 Seasons, Dark Winter is the colouring group that is mostly Winter with a smaller influence from Autumn.

With Winter, the Season shares:

– a white white, that most people would call white without qualifiers,

– a black black, and many other very dark colours

– pure colour in jewel tones, that gives certain colours a candy or plastic/synthetic quality

– extremes of lightness in icy light colours, meaning colour that is almost white with a drop of pure pigment

With Autumn, Dark Winter shares:

– muted colour, which gives some colours a feeling of weight, like velvet

– optical agreement when colours meet a certain darkness level

– a log cabin quality so that certain colours may feel a bit rustic or military, especially in matte textiles

Matching and Harmonizing

When looking for any colour in any Season, begin by looking for colours in the palette. That’s a fine place to start, and to stay if it feels right to you. Many colours could fit into various palettes very well. The other colours in the outfit will find what they have in common and allow you and the colour to shine.

For those who enjoy more detail or precision as they apply their Season to their shopping choices, the fact that many colours interact with various palettes feels unsatisfying. They ask, “Can’t every colour fit best into one single Season?”

The answer is, “Yes, it can.” To choose that best palette, the colour agreement between all the colours in the palette is evaluated, in addition to the best apparent match. After all, every colour in you will be wearing your clothing. We don’t see only your greens when you wear a green blouse. We see all your colours.

With the palette spread out, a lot of information is coming your way. If the overall looks pleasing but you are not sure about the decision, look at one colour family, such as blue, or one strip, at a time.

For Dark Winter, the garment colour should work well with the rustic and the candy sides of the Season. The strip with white should look about how it does on a neutral gray background, not divided or distorted. The entire strip from lightest to darkest should be equally energized.

If the lightest colours disappear or look muted, this will happen to the facial colours too. People share with me the most inspired analogies. A recent student whom I loved welcoming into our community recently described this as the arms of the palette suddenly looking shorter.

Five Tableaux

1. Warm Greens

In the row across the top:

1 is too muted and warm. It loses ground next to the candy colours of the palette.

2 is getting there but I would prefer something more jungle or palm green, like the darker colours that Bright Spring might wear. I would hope it is at least this saturated IRL, or a bit more.

3 looks right, on the high side depending on how much your monitor saturates colour.

4 may be too pigmented because the palette colours lose energy next to it, and may be better for Bright Spring.

If you expand 5, the yellow reflection is strong, and maybe a little wrong, making little sense with the purples. Not the worst choice, since Dark Winter contains Winter yellow, which is quite pigmented. I might buy it if I loved the top otherwise.

6: Between two Seasons, a game to help you decide is, “Which is worse?” It hinges on the concept that they will be separated by their differences. If I place or imagine it next to the warm mustards of Dark Autumn or the icy colours of Dark Winter, I prefer it with Dark Autumn. But the colour is dark and appears to be of neutral warmth, which Dark Winter can work with. Wear it with the warmer colours of the Season. If these colours exist in the eyes or in a print worn in the same outfit, even better. I would buy this if I love the item and the price.

The notes for 9 are similar to those for 6, though I find it more Autumn. If the person is very saturated or Winter-like (near black hair and eyes) in natural colouring, it might appear too muted. What’s good is that next to the palette colours, the attention remains about even between them, the energy remains good in each, and neither is changing the other.

10 is a colour that appears, or seems to appear, in many palettes. Another technique for deciding is to hide the strip that has the apparently matching colour. How well does the garment work now? It doesn’t. Nothing in the palette, ie: person, improves next to this colour.

11 appears to contain the same colour as 10 but is different enough to flatter the person better. I like this item.

12 is like 5 but more so. The yellow reflection is too bright. The colour is just too happy to stay calm under a Dark Winter face. The appearance doesn’t settle. The eye keeps going back to the dress. Wouldn’t buy it.

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2. Cool Greens

1 is fine.

2 may be too saturated, meaning that it is greener than the palette greens are green or blues are blue. Combine that with the sense of a strong yellow component and we may be getting into True or Bright Winter. The same could apply to 5.

3 is a little cool and soft but Dark Winter shines in these dark blue-greens. At this saturation (or pigment concentration), I would have to love the item to buy it. A little more feeling of ink would be good.  It could work for True Summer as well. The quality of the yellow or the reflection seems too light compared to the Dark Winter palette. The garment and the warmer neutral tone strip of the Dark Winter palette seem to be pushing each other apart. OTOH, they are not changing one another, which is always a good sign.

4 and 9 are close enough colours.  The quality of the yellow is not continuous with the palette colours but they still share a lot. Dark Winter would not wear a colour much lighter, except in the icy colours. The reflectivity of 4 seems a little light in weight.

6 is the marker in this group to which I compare the others. It’s too cool and probably too clear (bright) for Dark Winter. If the woman tests very near True Winter, and with the item being dark, and this colour being one that Dark Winter adapts the way Summer adapts blue, it will work fine for some Dark Winters. As we try things in our Season, we learn ourselves better and better until we are very fine tuned in our understanding of our own colouring.

8 is great.

10 seems fine.

—–

3. Prints with Green

The lime green in 1 is challenging to find on its own, and because the colour is bright, it can be more noticed when the colour is not quite right. Here, the other greens make sense of the lime, and it won’t matter if it is slightly out of Season. Love that blouse.

The cool, dark olive for this Season is important. Cooler than dark tobacco, it is excellent with the eye colours. 2 and 3 are examples of how it might look.

4 has a lot of warmth. Depending on the palette and interpretation, and the pigmentation of the woman, the black, the ability of the textile to saturate, and its shine all help Dark Winter.

5 may be technically a Dark Autumn blouse.  The pale pinks in the flowers, the corals in the flowers, the cool-associated colours of green and blue, and the darkness improve its potential for Dark Winter.

The white in 6 is warm for Dark Winter but it looks good with the lipsticks and the other colours. Love this sweater.

The white in 7 has a pinkish quality that I associate with Dark Autumn white. With the whites away from the face and a green this good, if the dress were a great fit and price, I would still buy it.

The metallic quality of 8 is great. An industrial look that looks terrific next this colouring.

9 may be too bright and candy but it’s a nice accessory.

10 is bright but it’s an emerald green that Winters can work with. Jewel tones make sense. The mesh-mosaic texture, animal print, beiges, and darkness level are all great.

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4. Blue Purple

1 is one of those peculiar colours that I am still learning. Although this one has enough muscle for Winter and a dullness one might associate with Autumn influence, it also contains a lot of red. I considered it for True Winter but I think it’s too heavy and smoky for True Winter’s lighter, clearer look.

2 is great. I seriously love this on Dark Winter.

3 is a more wearable version of 1. Colour is entirely what you do with it. We have all seen a colour we might overlook in a palette become the most breathtaking garment.

4 is good.

5 is in the ballpark but it hard to read in the image. If the blouse were whiter and the model’s hair less clashing with the sweater, it might be quite workable.

6 is on the candy side but I like candy accessories sometimes. It will still work with the wardrobe without requiring any change in the outfit or cosmetics.

7 is kind of fascinating. One gets a sense of lilac and softly curved lines but the associations between those and Summer are in the past, or in my past.  It is as light as Dark Winter would get in a head to toe colour.

8, 9, and 10 are quite ok.

11 may be True Winter, but shoes, like purses, are some distance from the face. These will still cooperate with Dark Winter because they share so much.

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5. Medium Purple

It doesn’t take much before red-purple lands you in True Winter. 1 may be too red but it is not dulling the palette colours. 4 does seem to drain energy from the palette colours. The other suggestion that these are not right is that it’s hard to find a great lipstick. The warm lip colours in the palette go from great red rusts to absolute spaghetti sauce…and sadly, that is exactly what they will do on the face if they are worn next to this dress. With a cooler lipstick, might work fine but honestly, I’m doubtful.

Love 2. True and Dark Winter would be fine. They make sense of dark purple.

3 is fine.

The stones in the straps of 5 are a little lightweight for the gravitas of Dark Winter, but they are small in size, the chain is good, and they convey a jewel tone to some degree. Shells would be less than ideal.

6 may be cool and saturated but it would look great on many Dark Winter, particularly the dark of hair, eye, or skin, and those who enjoy cosmetics.

7 is a fun accessory colour. Winters look good in purple, adapt it easily, and should wear a lot of it. The handle and belt are fine. Nobody’s Season changes in the summer months, tanned or not, but many of us enjoy brighter and lighter colour choices during the warm, sunny months, and perhaps more whimsical choices than we might otherwise wear. With a white top and dark jeans or casual lower half of ensemble, very nice.

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6. Red Purple

What happens, as shown in 4, is that the red gets high, the candy level increases, and tips the item into True Winter.  The T-shirt fabric helps mute the colour. It’s not nearly as bright as it would be if the fabric were smooth and shiny. Dark Winters should try this on and then decide. With white or iron grey hair, or a cool bandanna, or great earrings, absolutely.

7 is similar in that the suede helps but the colour is probably too red and better for True Winter. However, on the feet, with a black dress, I would gladly stare at them all evening.

1, 2, 5, and 8 are a little browner, more plum and less grape. Excellent colours. For a larger area near the face, or on a woman who looks Autumn, or a woman who prefers natural or less saturated looks, this colour will be better. For the Dark Winter who tests so close to True Winter that it took 15 minutes to decide on the Season, and whose eyes are crisp and black-brown (rather than full of lovely warm rusty browns and mossy greens), any of these colours will be fine and so much more amazing than what she might have bought pre-PCA.

3 is an example of a cooler white compared to item 6 in tableau 3. The texture gives it a little dullness but anyone would call it white. True Winter would wear this just as well (if not better) because the white looks almost blue.

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The post Green and Purple for Dark Winter appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Continuing with our series showing Pantone’s Color of the Year 2017 for the 12 Seasons.

Previous posts are here for the 3 Autumns, and here for the 3 Summers.

The three panels below show Greenery in the swatch card in the lower right corner, in the third row-far right sample, along with other colours for 2017. The colour appears to be bright and warm, with some Spring influence. How will a person coloured with Winter pigments use it?

Every item shown might not fit into the Season exactly. I hope it doesn’t, actually, because that might feed a beastie that thinks everything has to be perfect to work. It totally doesn’t. Colour is for everybody and everybody can do this. What I want for you is to learn how to use fashion retail to your advantage with Every. Single. Purchase. Your colour analyst can show you tips and techniques to help make that much easier.

A personal colour analysis (PCA) palette is like a source of renewable energy. Whatever the fashion climate or era, you pull it out of your purse or pocket and it goes to work for your wardrobe. Although every swatch is the same size in a palette, it doesn’t have to be that way in your closet. In your colour territory, wear as much or as little of any colour as you like.

True Winter

In some ways, True Winter is a very yellow Season, but just because it’s yellow doesn’t mean it’s warm. All human colouring contains yellow. The important question is, which yellow?

True Winter’s is very cool and very saturated, so you can see it in many colours and neutrals. Summer yellow is softer and doesn’t register as much. As all non-native yellows can, True Winter yellow can make people with other colouring look yellow in an unhealthy way. Only True Winter looks entirely normal and present, neither over- nor under-defined, not overheated or jaundiced or sallow, just sitting there wondering what everyone is staring at and how they could possibly make use of this colour.

In the panels, you may see a strong yellow in some items and I’ve included various darkness levels to give you a better idea of how it might look. On your screen, it could look different and hopefully the comparisons give you a general idea.

Greenery out of the box contains someone else’s yellow. True Winter will be more magnificent in emerald, if they migrate over to the image of the bamboo stalks for their colours.

Blue-green has overlaps with True Summer. The handbag under and to the left of the word True could be great for them, in part because the yellow is less obvious (on my screen) than in the earrings below it.

Dark Winter

This Season has a jungle green that we looked at in this post, about Green and Purple for Dark Winter.

The bracelet at the lower left is more jade and could be part of an Autumn wardrobe; the one at the middle right is glassier and appears in the Bright Winter panel. For a Dark Winter woman wearing either one, I’d think, “Great!”

They share more than they differ, are small in area, and  are not right next to her face (colour proximity raises the effect of colour interactions (aka, simultaneous contrast)). Both pieces could participate in ensembles, and better if she removed or replaced the light gold medallion on the jade bracelet with something deeper and shinier.

I’m a big believer in everyone in a Season wearing the entire palette, though how much they wear of each colour and where they use it can have as many interpretations as there are people in the Season. Some have cool-looking skin and warm-looking eyes. Some (like me, depending on who you ask) are the opposite. Whether that is due to undertone or it just is, I don’t know. They all react to colour in the same way.

Cosmetics are applied right on the face, in immediate contact and the closest proximity with natural pigments, so they have to be individualized a bit more. They also interact with skin chemistry. Once you know your Season, this part is easy. You know what not to bother with. You try a few colours with your colour analyst and narrow down to a good place.

The drop earrings and one-shoulder top above it will appear in the post for Springs, which will complete this series. If we asked ourselves about the earrings, “Are they based in yellow or gold?”, they may look more yellow, though somehow they don’t seem candy enough for Spring and have enough of a deep opacity to do interesting things next to yellow green in eyes, which Dark Winters often have.

The top might be also be based in yellow. You might see gold. It’s a little candy and a little jungle. I might see the top better with Dark Winter lipstick, you might love it with Bright Spring neutrals. There are many ways of being right, and when it comes to personal taste, they all count. The other colours in the outfit will find all that they have in common and make sense of them.

Bright Winter

With the Bright Seasons, Greenery is becoming recognizable in its native state. The warm and cool greens in the curled leaf image look about right.

As ever with Winter yellow, it has a sharp quality that makes it hard to call it warm. There is nothing cozy or buttery about it, though in Bright Winter, it is getting slightly sweeter. In the items below, the type of yellow looks more clear and daffodil (Spring, for Bright Winter whose colouring is blend of Winter and Spring) than velvety and gold (an Autumn ingredient, for Dark Winter above, who is coloured with a lot of Winter and a little Autumn).

Neon is neon on everybody. Humans are not made of these kinds of pigments, but the Brights can balance them so that the person and their clothing still appear united. The colour might be used more for accents and accessories than coats and pants. Bright Winter emerald is beautiful on this colouring so I included a few items down the left side. The  multi strand bracelet near the centre has both yellow-green and emerald. I love warm and cool colours together on colouring that has influence from both. The person looks intuitive or tuned-in to themselves in a very cool way.

The green, blue, and white tunic is interesting. It might be Dark Winter but I didn’t care for it with the lipsticks. It might be Bright Spring but those colours faded a bit, though they could certainly use it since the white areas are small. I’ll add it to the Bright Spring panel and we can see what happens.

And it might be Bright Winter; I like it with the white pants.  I always wonder how many of these they sell and to whom. More items might have moved more out the door if the white and periwinkle had been the largest areas, but high five for getting out the box and looking great. PCA is all about that and looking like the original work of art that you are.

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The post Pantone Greenery for the 3 Winters appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Many have said,

“I was draped as a True Winter but I’m not dramatic, so should I wear Summer colours? Maybe I’m not a Winter?”

If you’re a Winter dressing as Summer, you look weak. Many Summers can take a fair bit of saturation, depending on their natural pigmentation, but they are not Winters, and nor are Winters Summers.

The answer to the question may be in three parts:

1. Winter colours viewed together can seem bold and intense, but they are not worn that way. The showcase that looks terrific is large areas of neutral colours with one or two bold accents. The more pigment in the colours, the less in the neutrals. This type of opposition balances and excites at the same time.
2. Winter, and every Season, has a range of brightnesses. For Winters and Springs, the saturation is in the high ranges. For Summers and Autumn, it is in the lower ranges.
3. In your mind, keep your colours and lines separate. There are dramatic, statuesque, angular body types in every Season, just as there are athletic, curvy, small scale, and every other type.

Drama Expressions in True Winter

For example,

I guess my question is, how in the world can one come to terms with feeling, being and acting more like an autumn, but being draped as a True Winter??  I don’t feel like the dramatic that I am supposed to be as a winter.  I also have salt & pepper hair, so I feel like I am softer somehow and really wish there was a “soft winter” category. I do feel like with my graying hair, I have a softer look to me and am worried that I will look harsh with stronger make up.  What can you suggest for someone like me?  Is there anyway to wear softer winter colors without looking completely off?  I do wish there were more examples of gray haired winters out there.

Elizabeth Taylor (probably a Bright Winter).

Stacy London (probably True Winter).

Or Google “gray hair women” and see the many fantastic Pinterest collections, like this one.

The minute I or anyone else writes something about the Seasons, it becomes a pigeonhole that gets propagated all over the place. If you find your entire person inside a single system, you’re among the rare, unless that system allows and educates for the flexibility (as our colour analysts do).

The drama with True Winter is a typecast. I have never seen one where it’s absent, but it’s not obvious in body type. Some are fiercely loyal, jump in the car and stay up all night with the family in crisis, and create lots of conflict when someone suggests that the car was needed to get to work. They live in a body like Pink’s, wear off-the-shoulder sweaters and leggings, and carry gym bags instead of purses, though they have a penchant for chandelier earrings.

Some are intensely dedicated promoters, requesting that you mail them boxes of your business cards because they’re giving them out like candy. They’re 65 and not interested in theater of any sort, prefer practical clothes and a little gloss and blush only, but they know what they like and don’t mind saying what a person might not want to hear. She has the body of TV Mom and a face that looks casual and kind, though the eyes observe with intensity. She wears pearls and traditional femininity; nice classic suits for the office, small dangle earrings. Black, white, and red together are too bold for her taste.

Some can be very harsh except about their own needs, extreme, and a little revenge oriented. They will do a Beyonce lemon juice fast for a week and eat a whole ice cream cake on Saturday. Their drama is to exaggerate their social behaviour with friends as much as the intensity of their alone time, feeling pulled apart without both. Outward drama is expressed as No Limit eyeliner one day, and no makeup the next. Not interested in jewelry, it’s confining and fussy. Tall, lean, not a single cuddly element, they’re in running shorts or skintight jeans and muscle tanks with a black leather jacket. Wouldn’t wear pink of any sort, might consider purple (which is a type of drama in itself).

Drama gets grouped with flamboyance, exaggeration, and excess, creating fashion synonyms and crossovers that weren’t intended and will only apply to a few people.  The single items and composition above don’t feel like any of those descriptions.

The word drama can take many forms. For many True Winters, their drama is of distance and silence. The meaning is more about the tension of extremes and absolutes. The drama is the simplicity, rather than turmoil or tragedy. There may be scenes but they’re quick. When it’s over, it’s over.

Softer True Winter

Softer as in softer lines, shapes, fabrics, and perhaps colours too.

Until we have some grasp of body line distinct from body colour, it is very easy to flow them into one another. Once we understand their best shapes in clothing and accessories independent of colour, the colours become easy to accept.

Many are not as dramatic looking as the Season has been made out to be. They are not very dark. True Winter is often very medium in appearance, average, regular, everyday faces. Once the drapes go on, their drama is in how absolute the skin’s reactions are to colour. For others, the drama will happen once everyone sees that strong fuchsia-violet lips and cheeks look completely at home and the face is suddenly not plain at all. It’s strong and clean.

This is where the crossover into Autumn happens, especially in the old days. Dark eyes and hair, and you were a Winter. In both, words like strong, bold, practical, and determined, could apply, so personality quizzes got mixed up. Both can be passive-aggressive. Autumn usually has more compassion and less intensity, but not always. Too much history goes into shaping personality to figure out Season by character.

There is no Soft True Winter in the colour system that I practice. That just basically means True Summer. However, True Winter is not fully saturated. Next to Bright Winter, it is softer. What this skin cares about more than saturation is coolness.

Softness can mean many things.

• Soft colour means visible gray, or dusty. Don’t make this choice.
• Softer lines, textures, and prints, such as Angora, cashmere, florals, swirls, and so on.
• Softer impressions, choosing more neutrals or a lighter overall effect.

Drama might simply be colour (or style) minimalism. Women exist in every Season who benefit from intricate adornment just to look normal, and so are there women who look better in sleek functionality in every Season.

Black is not automatic on Winter at any age. You might replace it with black-brown, navy blue, or black-purple.

With silver hair, try wearing more grays than black, and cosmetics to avoid a gray circle effect.

Feel free to drop the saturation a bit but don’t wear pastels. Note that for many women, they wear black as well with silver hair, if not better than when the hair had colour. Iron gray looks gorgeous with black attire.

Keep distance between colours. Lights next to darks. Avoid too matchy (black shoes with purple dress feels better than all purple).

A Gentle Dark Autumn

Writing about this Season thus far has seen words like tribal, equestrian, military, strong, menswear, business. True for some body types.

Here are other ideas:

Delicious fire, Aztec Chocolate Truffle, dark cocoa dusting, melt in your mouth center,

Plush red velvet curtains, you crush it in your hands over and over because it pushes back, a sumptuous feeling,

Teal satin, liquid metals dripping off curves, sensual looking,

Whites of liqueurs, Bailey’s Irish Cream,

Cognac and Benedictine yellows and browns, opulent, expensive, reserved for the few,

Dark, hot Espresso, the heart beats faster, involuntary,

Nothing you can do, once it takes hold of your senses, Dark Autumn stimulates,

Until you’re damp, you don’t know Dark Autumn, whose power lies in overwhelming arousal.

There is nothing dilute about our relationship with these colours. They are not a gentle caress. We love them with intention.

We are most afraid of our light.

You don’t have to be perfect.

A little Soft Autumn (ruffle blouse lower R) will do no harm. It’s still warm-neutral of the right kind of heat (Autumn’s). If people could get their heat level right, that alone makes a gigantic difference in appearance.

Below, not giving up your white pearls? Why should you? You have enough Winter to wear them. Just do the same thing as you do to black, warm it up with the other things you add.  If the pearls are creamy, antique, or chocolate, even better.

A couple of thoughts about white that is cooler than yours, worn near the face:

• teeth may look yellow
• how well white looks next to your other colours is open to opinion, mine being that I’d switch to creamier pearls if possible

Wear red (we feel red as warm).I know I’m pushing my luck with the  mixed prints in the center. I pick clothes that would impress me all to pieces if they walked in the room.

The gray boot too cool and blue? Sure is. Wear it around the city for a few days, it’ll be fine. If you find a colour nearer to elephant or asphalt gray, excellent. The shoes the model is wearing are fine too.

These panels are not body type specific. It’s not my specialty, and as with colour, even if you’re moderately closer to yourself, you are unbelievably better to look at. Compared to military or tribal, these fabrics drape more, lines are rounder, legs taper (softness and bootcut look odd together to me), and styles are more classic. Still Dark Autumn.

The point is that to create a beautiful, connected, rational, intelligent image with apparel, the lines take their shape from whatever yours are. Just like the colours.

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The post True Winter Sans Drama and A Gentle Dark Autumn appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

You are about to take a personal journey with Danish author, Anne-Cathrine Riebnitzsky. I know that many readers will find familiarity in her experiences and feelings. I am  very grateful to Anne-Cathrine for discussing personal colour analysis from the one side that matters most: the client’s.

I self diagnosed as a Winter in the 90ies after reading the book “Colour Me Beautiful.” I was 15 or 16. There were only four seasons then. My internal feeling was that I was a Winter. I was a bit sorry that the beautiful strong colours of Spring couldn’t be mine as well, but in my heart I never had any real doubts. A Winter I was.

I followed the idea of Winter to the best of my ability but gradually swayed in other colour directions too. The years passed and I thought less about colours.

The mistake

One day probably about 5 years ago, I tried on a beige item and noticed how my skin was completely even. Most people who knew just a bit about colour would often comment on my “warm green eyes” and I had begun to suspect that perhaps I was an Autumn instead. The beige colour had me puzzled … now I did not know what I know today. I was unable to see the whole picture. And moreover it turned out that I am one difficult woman to analyse.

This beige colour became the beginning of a long journey hunting for my true season. Here I discovered how much had happened to the world of colour analysis since the 90ies. I discovered Christine’s wonderful blog and many other sites. I became quite absorbed with colours as a new hobby.

Lesson no. 1: Even and “perfect” skin is not the same as your face looking like the colour you are wearing. Believe me – you will be misled if you go down this road. Even and perfect skin is something entirely different. It is you glowing in a way you had not foreseen, and unless you are fortunate enough to already know your colours you may actually never have seen this face before no matter how often you stare in the mirror.

The first analysis

I tried to analyse myself. That is really difficult to do. I finally flew to another European city to have an in person analysis. I was desperately hoping to be a Bright Spring. Those were the most beautiful colours to my eye at the time. Second would be Bright Winter. The worst would be Soft Summer because I couldn’t associate with the colours – though I actually owned numerous pieces that were soft.

The analyst was Sci/ART trained – this was the system that to my rather systematic mind made the most sense. There are multitudes of colours and many that suit us, but the whole measuring process is to my mind the key to opening the door of the vast house which is your season and which you will only feel at home in if you have in fact opened a house which is your house.

From the first four drapes it was clear that black and silver were best. There was no doubt I could wear black. This was something I had questioned myself, and I was glad to get this confirmed. We moved through the many drapes. I was difficult. Provoking a bad reaction to my skin is not easy. The warm drapes are the only ones were it is really easy to see. From there it is a slow game. We slowly exhausted the possibilities – almost all of them.

We actually ran out of time. But we agreed on Bright Spring – though one of the drapes was actually too strong and there was a reflection from the skin on my chin. I was happy with the result. And also quite aware that I had actually pushed for something which might not be the accurate truth. Unfortunately I had to fly back the next day and my analyst had an appointment so we were out of time.

Lesson no. 2: Make sure you have plenty of time for an analysis. Perhaps you are really easy. But perhaps you are not. It may take five hours. How long it takes is not important. Getting it right is important.

Lesson no. 3: Do not try to force your analyst or manipulate her. They are human beings too. Be accurate about this. Try to observe what really happens in the mirror – not what you would like to happen. Difficult, but necessary.

Correction by shopping

It so happened that I wore the Bright Spring colours quite well – however eventually my mistake caught up with me, as I bought a turquoise blouse which was an exact match to the fan – but which also shone off from the skin under my chin. Exactly as the one drape had done in the test.

I was back to square one somehow.

Second analysis

I flew to another European city to have my second test. Also by a Sci/ART analyst. I told the analyst in advance of my previous history. She sat me down and looked at the first four drapes. I could still wear black and silver equally well.

Here is the hard part for you: If you were an analyst and a client walked in and said that she had discovered she wasn’t a Bright Spring after all, where would you go? What would you assume?

This analysis moved forward speedily. Very fast – faster than I could understand – I was a Soft Summer. The season whose colours felt most wrong for me. But I had promised myself not to try to sway any analyst ever again. I had promised my self that whatever the outcome I would try it, live with it, and do my best to accept it.

The worst part of this analysis was that I didn’t see nor understand what the decisions were based upon. I couldn’t in any way see how those drapes enhanced me. Only the last two drapes could I see. The pine green was actually intensifying my eyes like it is supposed to. The dark blue did something to my hair.

The whole thing took less than two hours including makeup. Off I was and the analyst went on to the numerous other clients at hand that day. I went outside into a park and sat down and cried. I know it sounds ridiculous and that this would probably not happen to you. You would have walked straight back and told her to redo the whole thing. Well, I didn’t. I flew home and lived in Soft Summer for 18 straight months. I hated the colours. The compliments stopped. I felt kind of depressed. But I am a diligent person. I am a perfectionist and I actually do not care what I have to put myself through once I have decided upon something.

It was incredibly difficult for me to make an outfit work – though it is supposed to be easy in this season where the underlying grey combine all the colours. It was a struggle for me. I had the palette lying open on my desk to try to get to know and like the colours. I could get myself to like the darker colours, but the light ones didn’t mean anything to me.

Lesson no. 4: You should not have to struggle so hard! Some may be surprised by their palette. But really – if you have tried living in a season and it still feels wrong, then there is probably something wrong. Colours are energy. If you live in the wrong house it is going to feel complicated hard and wrong and probably depressing. I am not with the people who say that this is not exact science. Well – in a way it is. Colours can be measured quite accurately. And you should look more than just “kind, relaxed, well” – you should look remarkable.

Elea Blake makeup

I bought some of the make up for soft summer from Elea Blake – here I received the first confirmation, that Soft Summer might not be true after all. The darker choices in eye makeup were fine. But the skin make up was a puzzle. None of them worked. As in NONE. They all looked like something that had been smeared on top of my skin. They would not blend.

Knowing that Dark Winter and Soft Summer can sometimes share some colours I bought some small samples of DW makeup. Those worked a lot better. This new information rumbled in my mind.

Lesson no. 5: If you really are searching for your season and you truly cannot in anyway find the means to go and have a test, then see if you can narrow your options down. Write to Elea Blake and order the small samples of skin make-up. It could give you a good hint. I believe it is more accurate than lip draping. These products are very precisely composed. My personal belief is that at least 3 or 4 of the skin colours should suit you if you are in that particular season. I may be wrong, I am no expert – this is just my own personal experience.

Sitting next to a real Soft Summer

In the summer 2013, I participated in a congress for creative writers. I remember this moment distinctly. I was sitting next to a woman with silver hair and beautiful hazel eyes – quite like my own. She was the most stunning person in the room. We all looked at her from time to time. Never had any silver haired woman in her 50ies looked so beautiful. We were many young people – but none as beautiful as her. I knew she was a Soft Summer. She wore Soft Summer. She had never been analysed but she knew her colouring and she combined them in a way that could not possibly have made me look the least bit interesting. I remember the exquisite earrings in green and purple mother of pearl, her lilac blouse, the soft pink lip. That did it for me. I was no Soft Summer no matter how hard I tried.

On line analysis

During my whole journey I had two online tests where I sent a lot of photos – one said Bright Spring, one said True Summer bordering with Soft Summer. The latter was followed by a makeover done on a photo of my face. I strongly disliked the look of it. I had no idea who the woman on the photo was – I understand that the photo to begin with was me – but I couldn’t recognize the woman as me.

Today I look at the questionnaires that were designed to help those analysts make a decision. Well … let it suffice to say I cannot recommend it.

Giving up

I gave up on the whole thing. I couldn’t work it out. It was a relief to put on a black T-shirt – both emotionally and physically. I believe most people actually can feel the effects of colours. Even hospitals use colours.

I went with what I felt, bought a Dark Winter fan and noticed a big improvement.

A small miracle

By chance I noticed that one of Christine’s newly trained analysts was a Dane. I had seen her name before and contacted her via Facebook. I warned her that I was difficult to test and that I didn’t know which way to go now. Except I probably was some kind of Winter. At least some kind of cool or cool-neutral season. Or perhaps I was something else. Probably not a warm.

We agreed on a date. Anette was eager yet admitted being a bit nervous since I would be one of her first real clients. She said I wouldn’t have to pay if we couldn’t figure it out – which was nice of her and took some pressure of, though admittedly by now my life had changed so much that the cost was less of a concern.

Third analysis 

Anette had blocked the whole day for just my analysis. She said she was looking forward to learn too.

The draping began. I was fortunate enough to not have any trace of colour in my hair (I have always found it difficult to strike anything that would look natural).

The first four drapes showed what I already knew. I could wear black and wear it remarkably well. Warm colours were not so good. I actually felt unwell wearing those colours. We made due note of what bad effects looked like in my face.

I have many different colours in my eyes. I have dark hair. I balance a lot of dark and cool colours. We moved forward slowly. I had explained that it was vital for me to understand and see with my own eyes what was a good drape and what was a bad drape. We got rid of the warm seasons quickly. The obvious ones. Then we moved on. Anette kept saying – well, this is not bad, but I believe you can look a lot better. This hope carried us on and on and on.

The biggest surprise for me was that beyond the true warm seasons, my worst colours were from Light Spring and Light Summer. There were a couple of turquoises there that were so harsh and strong and “unbelonging” on me that it took me by surprise.

So what about Soft Summer then? Well this is actually not my worst season. I completely understand that I could be put in that season though it is very far from what I really am.

Once we finally moved into the 3 Winters we knew we had it. My eyes cleared. I did not know that the white in my eyes actually can become really white. I had not seen this for so long I thought it had disappeared with age. The bit of my hair that was visible shone with a depth that was really becoming. Winter it was. We just didn’t know which one. It was very difficult. I span a lot of colours. I span a lot of coolness.

By comparing all the blues we finally discovered that it was not Dark winter. I became slightly fussy around the chin. So more colour then. More intensity. Though DWs reds were beautiful on me.

In the end we settled with True Winter, but not entirely sure. We decided I would have to come back another day. We were both exhausted. It had taken about 5 hours.

I drove home excited. After all this was actually still a huge success for me. I was now down to two beautiful seasons which I both really liked and which also made me look more stunning than I had seen in years.

Lesson no. 6: There is no such equations as “I look terrible in Soft Summer ergo I must be a Bright Winter.” You worst is not necessarily straight across the wheel of seasons. It could be only a few seasons away.

Second visit – the final result

I lived in and with True Winter. Colours that are hard to find when shopping, so I didn’t find that much new stuff – but clear white was easy to find and really good. Black was good. I dyed some old faded jeans and some old dresses. I knew enough about material from reading Christine’s many articles and from intelligent people who comment those articles, to know that cotton and soft fluffy surfaces weren’t going to hit it right with a Winter – but the black jeans work well. I never really liked cotton much anyway – it is easy to wash, but there my interest stops. Cotton fades really fast compared to plastic, satin, silk and shiny leather.

Black mascara was good. Again I had really good help from the little samples from Elea Blake. Unfortunately I had only ordered True Winter – but still this helped. The samples of skin makeup and lipstick were a great help. I noticed that some of them turned me a little pale and “deadly grey” around my mouth. A sign that these colours might be a bit too cool. Anette wrote to say she had noticed a bit of quietness in the true winter drapes which she wasn’t sure was right. But then we had a few of the Bright Winter luxury drapes that we were not entirely sure about. Were they too much? Too warm? Anette and I wrote many emails back and forth.

Anette and I had not had time to get around to makeup during the draping session. For the next visit I decided to wear mascara and my usual eyeliner which is black. I know it may sound hard but black doesn’t look hard on me. It is the only colour that doesn’t turn the lower rim of my eyes red.

The makeup actually helped in this case. It also helped a lot that we were now down to two seasons – our eyes were fresh and ready. I was a Bright Winter as I had slowly come to suspect.

There may be many more Brights out there who like me actually do not look too bad in colours that are not theirs. They just do not look as smashing as they would in their true colours. I think the reason is that Bright can take so much colour – and therefore you would have to be severely off on more than one dimension to look really bad. But I also think that these are the seasons who more often than not look a lot less beautiful than they could.

Looking back I now understand why evening gowns always have been so easy for me. 1. I would never go to a big party without makeup (and makeup greatly enhance winters). 2. Gowns are often in bright colours and often in shiny material which is a real winner on me.

I am still adjusting. I am still feeling the energy of this season. But I have come home. I got to see with my own eyes what my season really is. I understood what I saw. I love the colours. I also now know that there are colours out there in the world which are brighter than any human colouring – but 99% of the time I have to focus on getting the colours bright and clear enough. I have come home.

I remember how Bright Spring always made me feel a bit exhausted – like the energy was a bit too high for me. I felt a bit serious and stern in True Winter. Bright Winter is wonderful. It is enhancing, asking me to be what I am and to not shrink back in fear. Bright Winter is asking me to be bold, to be me, to be all of me – and in doing so allowing others to be all of who they are.

Sometimes I am wearing an outfit that is not quite enough. Not enough sharpness of colour, not enough contrast. It feels a bit boring, a bit like “come on you can hit the mark, so be your best” – so I make adjustments. It is not at all difficult for me to combine these colours. Not at all. It comes naturally. Black pants and a blouse in a strong colour – easy! Lipstick, black mascara – easy.

I use the advice from the article about the makeup for Winters. I don’t fade or remove anything till eyes, lips, and blush are all there. I do my shopping carefully. I make a list of what I need and I do not compromise – not in colours, not in lines. It is not that hard really. It just takes a bit more patience than what is natural for me – but the effort is well worth it.

The post Sharing A Colour Journey appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

We are each given a set of natural colours in perfect harmony.

Colour analysis is the key to making the absolute most of them. The fullest colour, the cleanest shine.

Women often focus on their hair, understandable since it’s the biggest colour block.

The problem is that when hair is more, as chemical dyes often are, something has to become less to maintain balance. What takes a back seat are the eyes.

That’s a mistake. We don’t communicate with our hair. Sure, it’s part of the final picture, a big part, but not at the expense of the eyes.

Nothing should drop the energy in our eyes. Eyes stay powerful and magical throughout our lives. Here is a 94 year old man’s Dark Autumn eye. So much colour, so much geometry.

Warm Seasons

In the new edition of the book (Return to Your Natural Colours), there’s a section that describes various ways that people in those Seasons can look. Those sections could be 20 pages long.

Although I say that any eye colours is possible in any Season, the truth may be a little more restricted or need a few more details, more clarity between what we think we see and what is real.

A true blue True Autumn eye may be possible, as might a brown Light Summer or True Summer eye, but I have not seen these. More often, an eye that looked blue was really just light. Or maybe we saw it next to yellow hair and assumed it was blue.

Or the foundation or blush made the eye seem bluer. We may love the idea of our eyes looking blue, but for that to happen, other aspects of appearance may pay a price. Your colour analysis will show you the sweet spot where eye colour is best and it’s all rewards for your complexion, apparel, silhouette, everything.

The eye that looked blue or blue-ish is actually turquoise or teal in warm colouring, especially in Dark Autumn, or warm green, either lighter as warm willow or darker as avocado, in True Autumn.

True Seasons may have eyes of a single colour, as dark brown in True Winter or pure blue in True Summer. This happens in about half the True Season people, and is sometimes seen in Neutral Seasons (blends of two True Seasons).

Many Autumn eyes have a gathering of rusty orange round the pupil, but this is a True Autumn in whom that feature is present without being prominent. Any Season containing Autumn may have it, including Soft Summer and Dark Winter.

The eye colours in this picture live in a True Autumn woman. Her skin is the ultimate in coppered tawny freckles.

In Neutral Seasons, colouring often has warm and cool components together. The Dark Autumn eye in the first picture is a good example. A Soft Autumn eye that looks blue may be a tapestry of warm and cool greens.

With silvery pewter hair, this woman’s skin takes on a golden shimmer.  Apparent silver and gold together is visually so rich and unique that she looks the epitome of successful aging. Hair dye has nothing on this. Let it go, watch it float away, shake your hands off, and let yourself breathe.

The blue-appearing True Spring eye is often turquoise, but we won’t see the greens develop unless they wear Spring colours. Or, True Spring eyes may be light yellow-green that can range to an almost sharp golden green in some.

Cool Seasons

The eye below belongs to a Bright Winter.

Did you see the second video in the previous post, Preparing for Your Colour Analysis?

We have 3 colour settings.

One is set a max high or max low. The other two settle around the medium ranges. For our colour choices to be great, we need to know.

Is this individual darker than warm?

Lighter over warmer?

Brighter over cooler?

If you know at a glance, I won’t be convinced :)

How to sort out the possible combinations?

Colour analysis. Takes an hour or two.

However warm his eyes or cool or dark his lashes might be, however bright the iris colours or warm or cool the white of the eye might look, whatever. Notice use of the word might.

Measure it and know. Brightness of pigment is what his colouring wants most.

As many men do, he started paying attention when he saw True Spring yellow-green-gold pouring out his eyes when he wore that colour, a sneak peek at what his colours would be capable of achieving. This, he did not see coming.

But True Spring couldn’t make his other features the best possible. Plus, he blended off into his clothes; you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Adding a little Winter helped him be visible.

We don’t want to over-define him. The balance point is between 3 positions, not 2: not enough, just right, too much. Darkest and coolest in Bright Winter was too much at this time in his life, but that’s an extreme he may not wear till he’s 30.

For now, his most breathtaking colour is Bright Winter’s brightest, buttery yellow. It’s easy on him, a gorgeous, exciting, delicious yellow, and even he, who was perfectly accepting of the climb from his current wardrobe, was intrigued as he took it in.

This is a Winter who would wear a large block of yellow. The Bright Winter who tests near Bright Spring often does. At this age, he will shop for it with intention. In a decade, it may be a stripe in a tie, but will always be part of his most magnificent appearance.

Today, he is 13 and three degrees out of Bright Spring. Already, he is darkening so quickly that his family can barely keep up. He can. He did his entire analysis basically on his own once I explained what to look for and how to decide.

Young people often have the best comments. Readers ask, “What would a wrong combination look like?” He put into words what colour analysts see all the time. In True Autumn khaki, he said, “I look like this really passive-aggressive guy. Or my grandma with green hair.”

He is the grandson of our first and second eyes, above (who are related by the marriage of their children). For colour analysts reading this, bring your eye lens to family parties. They will be amazed and upgrade your cleverness rating, you’ll bond with your relatives, your children will be all, “Yeah, that’s my mom.”, and you can reflect on how much you love your job.

This eye appears to have a gathering of orange around the pupil, as we described for Autumn eyes. The take-home message: You can’t tell Season from eyes, pictures, stereotypes, or any other assumption. Sit yourself down in your colour analyst’s chair and find your answer the right way.

Here is his eye when he was 5 years old.

He’s learning a lifetime of productive shopping. His colour analysis showed him how his current clothing colours are almost always less than his, with a gap between him and what he wears, or unrelated to him in the first place.

Today, he knows how to fix that. He has understood how to create his appearance with equal energy and perfect transition. His life will be different. Those looking at him will see and sense an expensive watch keeping perfect time.

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The post Eye colours and Warm and Cool Seasons appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

When you know your colours, you step into a themed world, decorated with all the things you wear, from eyeliner to boots.

The theme is Your Natural Colours, the colours that are in you right now.

Group your colours into a palette and they’re called Your Season.

In an earlier post, we talked about choosing pink/red/wine for hair colours. We compared it to wearing your reds (or lipstick shades) as hair colour. Those are the reds that will look great next to your skin because they’re already in your skin.  Your Season always has your back.

A question that colour analysts hear often is:

Can’t I just wear what I Iike?

It’s like asking: “Can’t I just eat what I like?”

Well, sure you can, but many agree that curating their diet is the smarter option.  

Your colours are a curated menu of what looks great next to you.

Imagine you want to paint your front door. Does anybody go to the store and pick whatever colour they like that day?

Decorating ourselves is the same. Our colours may not seem obviously different from those of others, but they totally are. Human perception is wildly sensitive to the colours of humans. People notice people. Evolution made it into a survival skill, embedded deep in our brains. Colour is among our strongest reactions, those over which we have the least control. Think of a mother protecting her child.

When colours are placed next to ours, the good, the bad, and the other are not subtle at all. A recent model for a training course picked it up with the first drapes. Within 10 minutes, she said,

 The only drape that gave my eye any colour was True Winter.

Picture you’re back at the paint store and there’s a decorator standing next to you. She might say, “I like your idea of a red but that one is so blue. Next to the cream of the house, the door will look like a bruise. How about this soft coral over here?” 

Knowing your colours is like having that decorator standing next to you, feeding you tips about what to buy and what to leave at the store.

Today, let’s put PCA to work and choose eyeglass frames.

Earrings and Eyeglasses

Be wise about eyes. They are THE focal point. Our entire communication centres around eyes. Others look to them to see if we believe what we’re saying, and if they should.

Eyes are the front door of our being, the access point to who we are. We want our eyeglasses to look great, fresh, elegant, and hip on our face without taking the total impression off balance.

Eyeglasses are like earrings in that the viewer sees us and them at the same time. We enjoy being the viewer best when the feeling is smooth and belonging.

In your themed world, the same colours apply to every choice. Wander over to the Shop on this website and have a look at the earrings and other accessories. If you form impressions of what the items have in common, apply them to your eyeglasses. A practical way of doing this is to insert your choice of frames into the gallery for your Season. If they slide in and look terrific, not at all awkward or distracting, you’re doing great.

A favourite way I have of choosing earrings (or eyeglass frames): Place an enlarged photo of the eye on one side of the screen. As I scan products, I think about how they look together. You might notice a sense of connecting or bridging across, as if they share something or that they light one another up. You may feel a tug of relationship, like when you see people who are biologically related.

The goal is always the same: to look better together in an even relationship. One way to sense an equal relationship among colours when shopping is that the viewer’s attention would be divided evenly if they were part of the same outfit.

When you choose a colour, stay within your Season palette. Colour is too complex to match colours to what we (think we) see. Your Season palette knows what’s really there.

In the earring galleries, choices don’t apply equally to everyone.  Eyeglasses are the same. We are all individuals within our Season. That said, colour-wise, people in the same Season have tons in common. Your 12 BLUEPRINTS colour analyst can help you navigate particular choices because they observed your individual colouring and your colour reactions (what happened when colours were placed next to yours).

A couple of divergences between earrings and eyeglasses:

Whereas jewelry might be fine to be a little bright or experimental, eyeglasses that compete or distract may speak for us in a conversation. That’s fine if you planned for others to interact with the eyeglasses as a fashion statement, with readers (cheaters), for example. If you want to draw attention to your eyes, best to keeps the glasses quieter. If the viewer is a human, they can only see colours and shapes relatively. If one is more, the other is less. No choice about that.

Fan out your colour palette and pretend that’s you. Lay the glasses right on top. Is it comfortable to look at both at the same time? If one takes over and you’re ignoring the other, it might be good to try some more frames. Sitting in front of and around the eyes, if one is a little more visible, I’d rather it be the palette (person) than the glasses. There are examples of eyeglass frames in the Pinterest galleries for the 12 Seasons as well.

Earrings are worn off to the side and may be quite small in size, giving more latitude than glasses, a larger item framing the front door. Accessories, including earrings, are the better place to play with brightness and experimental shape. Humans are not coloured with gemstone pigments, but every Season has places to play in their version of colour edges. Ask your colour analyst or read your Season chapter in the e-book library.

Spring

Shine is fine and easy. Most important is that the feeling stay warm. True and Light Spring are never hard (read rigid or tough), and even Bright Spring is only barely sharp. Even in the highest shine, the effect is sunny beach to sunny resort. Notice the difference between bright and severe. For one thing, in the context of Spring, bright feels happy.

In attire, Spring-coloured people look great wearing lively colour, with two or more colours together at the same time. In cosmetics, colours are radiant and glowing. For glasses, colour done in plastic can step in front of us, and several colours even more so. If you want a bright colour, consider a neutral or single colour for the front and brighter multicolours for the bars, or save the brightest colours for your accessories.

Transparency is attractive on any colouring with Spring’s influence, in jewelry and makeup. A matte finish can help soften a brighter colour, still staying bright enough to balance the palette, as in the image above.

Stay within the light to dark range of your palette. Don’t go too dark. Lightness is a colour dimension of the 3 Springs and Light Summer, who also have a little Spring. For the Light Seasons, ‘Light’ doesn’t mean near-white. You could look at it as, the dark colours are still pretty light.

Don’t go too light or the look may be sharp or the frames be separate from the face. By separate from the face, what I mean is this: we want the colours we wear to enhance us in several ways, as many as possible, come to think of it. One is to look healthy and belonging with the colours in our face. Another is to balance our colours. If the clothes are weaker than the face, the clothing looks lifeless when we wear it and our head seems to have separated from the rest of the body, the definition of not grounded. Glasses that are weak don’t seem quite anchored either and can look like they’re floating around. Stay inside your colour palette and you will be fine. The medium ranges are safe bets.

For True Spring, consider blonde tortoiseshell, which comes to mind as one of the best frame-person matches I know. This is usually an Autumn-associated style, but True Spring and True Autumn have certain similarities, which gives them occasional crossover for the colours that serve well in their wardrobe.

Summer

This is delicate colour, like adding water to syrup. Consider Crystal frames.

Rimless frames often look terrific, better on Summer than anyone by taking weight off the impression and it feels good. Summer colours won’t argue back, they’ll just walk away peacefully and let the item think it won. This may be one of the strategies by which they maintain their emotional baseline so well.

A chalky look is also great, chalk being an opaque material that is light in weight. No application to glasses, but cork would be the warmer version for the Soft Seasons, people coloured with Summer and Autumn together.

Rather than try to match the eye colour, which can look a little planned, choose analogous colours. These are the next-door neighbour colours on a colour wheel, which look fabulous and amazing when Summer-coloured people wear them. If eyes are blue, choose violet or turquoise, and eyes look even bluer. If eyes seem green, choose blue and the green gets greener.

Get to know gray. In the Summer groups, neutral colours are similar to colour colours, like continuations of each other. Blued gray slips into soft blue. Use either one. The neutral colours have a fair bit of colour pigment and Summers and Soft Seasons have the magical talent of making soft colour look colourful, alive, and energetic.

Patterns with colour flows are beautiful. Watercolours, swirls, the feeling of serenity.

The Spring part of Light Summer means these colours look a touch bouncy, but keep in mind, this is Summer and colours are still softened.  Brushed metal and translucent plastic are great. If you’re going to do colour, and aqua blue is beautiful, don’t crowd the eyes with the shape.

Autumn

Autumns are glorious in earth tones. They’re more glorious than they realize anytime, but earth tones done right hit a new high. Matching eyeglass frames to eye or hair colours can work well, since Autumns are naturally coloured that way. Hair colour can often be found in the eyes, and oppositely, colours in the eyes can be a great guide for choosing highlights. Not so much for other Seasons, where eyes are blue, gray, turquoise, or a version of brown that is not as warm as it looks (think of Meghan Markle).

Tortoiseshell. Like black for Winters, it comes in every style. Also like black for Winters, choose something that looks expensive so the item doesn’t become too much part of the background.

Get to know olive, a beautiful and underused neutral for Autumn that comes in a wide light to dark range.

A metallic element in earth toned colours like copper, gold, or bronze is entirely at home with the natural coppery quality of the skin, as it is in lipstick or gloss. A vein of gold turns eyeglasses into jewelry. (Want to see coppery skin and eyes? Watch Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. When he’s on the screen with other people, compare their skin colours. Hard to believe, but I could do this for hours.)

Brushed textures are as good as shine, and perhaps better surrounding the eyes. With their Winter influence, Dark Autumn balances the sharper reflections of shine fairly well, but white is no Autumn’s happy place, which happens when shine is too sharp. All Autumns are great in slightly dulled surfaces. Let your eyes be the shiny thing.

Darkness matters for Autumn to slim the facial contours. Without it, the person looks a bit like they slept on their face. The way we said for the Light colours above that dark colours are light, here, and especially for Dark Autumn, we might say that the light colours are dark relative to the other groups. Even gold has a darker feel. Compare the True Spring and True Autumn earrings.

Winter

Full frames often balance the face better than rimless, which may seem flimsy. Spring and Summer colours don’t compete; they don’t bother. Winter loves it, will try, and will often win. What they wear has to meet them where they walk, or the attire can look weak and the person, tough. All relative, right?  In a futuristic design, with or without a metallic component, rimless can be great for that kind of person, especially a Bright Winter, an overall lighter group.

Here’s the thing about coloured frames: Winter colours are bright. In plastic, the brightness can step in front of human colouring, so now folks are talking to your glasses. Purple may be one the best colour options, with its tendency to be disappear yet remain effective for enhancing Winter faces. Add dark brown to this category, a dark colour with purple influence for all three Winters. (The particular version for each Season may be found in the Neutrals Sets).

The other thing about coloured frames: Winters wearing many colours at once can reduce the meaning of each colour. Sure, there are multicolour prints and how many colours at once depends on the busy-ness of the person and their natural colouring, but a lot of colour starts getting frivolous. The magic and wealth of the look relies on being fairly colour-quiet, like winter scenery. In a black, white, and gray background, the single bright colour packs the punch. Adding two bright colours, the berry on the branch plus a green leaf or two, halves the impact of each one.

In this era of custom colouring, an interesting way of adding interest to all-black frames is to add an area of colour only in the lower edge. Dark green or blue-purple are often great choices. A recent (brown-eyed) client has a beautiful icy fuchsia colour in her natural blush, not too light and slightly silvery. Since she wears little cosmetics, this is a nice way of enhancing the natural cheek colour without adding too much colour to the overall impression.

Sharper shine is absorbed into the appearance. Add a silver element. I often prefer silver for metals that will be seen with the teeth, even for the slightly warm Winters of Dark and Bright Winter, and again if hair is silver, but it’s not a rule. Whiter or pale yellow gold is fine too. Depends on the person, just a point to keep in mind.

Get to know your navy blue. There is usually navy blue within the blue-ish eyes of all Winters. Or, it looks great with the emerald of many Bright Winter eyes, and makes a fabulous complement (read, eye colour intensifier) for the yellow, orange, and brown tones in the eyes of the 3 Winter groups. Next to Winter, blue will read as a colour but navy is also neutral enough to allow colour in lipstick and clothes without looking too colourful.

An excellent black or gray is a good choice, leaving space for a bright colour in cosmetics or attire. Only next to Winter colouring can black be balanced. Keep the style chic, whatever that means relative to your face, for the frames to be a lot more than functional.

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The post Eyeglass Frames for Your Natural Colouring appeared first on 12 Blueprints.