Can I Borrow My Neighbor Season’s Colours?
January 26, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
Short answer: you may have to.
So remember, when you get your Personal Colour Analysis, be sure to know if you fall on the cool or warm side of the Season. That means : when we’re finally down to testing between your last 2 Seasons, are we testing your #1 BEST Season against its warmer neighbor, or against the cooler one? Perhaps THE most exciting part of the analysis. Everybody tingles at this point.
In Wrong Colours Away From the Face, I said that I don’t buy into wearing colours that are not in your #1 BEST Season, unless people will only see you sitting at a desk.
To present a unified whole, you can’t have 1 big block that’s way off. The colours want to connect together to create a force, but they can’t if one is flowing against the current.
How you combine the colours of your personal colour palette depends on the energy of your Season. The colours themselves should all work together because they are all the same in 3 respects – how Light/Dark, Warm/Cool, and Clear/Soft they are.
If you’ve been reading here, you already know what I mean by that. For anyone new, let me explain. Any colour is described by where it sits on those 3 scales, its Light/Dark , its Warm/Cool, and its Clear/Soft positions. The colour might be one the blues, reds, purples, etc. in your body, or in the world outside you.
Colour Analysis finds those precise colours in your body and replicates their precise position on those 3 scales. We then give them to you in a so-brilliant Colour Analysis Swatch book. They’re called YOUR colours for 2 reasons : A. They’re the colours to shop for. And B. They literally are YOUR colours, in your own body.
Let’s look at Dark and True Autumn colours. Neighbor seasons. Some people straddle between the 2. But the MOST important aspect of Dark Autumn’s colours is their darkness. True Autumn’s MOST important feature is the warmth. Any 2 neighbor Seasons do NOT share the MOST important dimension in their colours. You screw up the whole accord by throwing in another dimension.
You will see clearly and easily during your Personal Colour Analysis how far behind your perfect season the runner up is, even when you border closely. Some shades may be permissible, but none will be as good as any in the perfect one. So, in our Season example above, the Dark Autumn may look pretty good in True Autumn’s darker shades, because darkness in general is forgiving. It still won’t look like magic.
When the off-colour is worn on the bottom half, away from the face, it STILL disrupts the harmony of the whole body presentation. When the off-colour is way off, the flow of the appearance is distorted in favor of the more dominant colour. That’s why Light people gain 15 lbs on the bottom half in black pants.
Of course, your skin tone perfection will suffer less when the off-colour is far way. Still, the viewer will perceive disagreement.
I know it’s hard to find good colours. Winters can’t find saturated colours. Summers and Lights can’t find professional clothes. I know the fashion industry and cosmetics colour offerings are disorganized and incomplete. They are desperately unevenly weighted. As you learn to excel at colour decisions, you’ll buy your clothes when you find them, rather than by Season. I was looking at Ann Taylor’s website recently. Soft Autumn will do very well. True Summer, head over to Banana Republic. The 3 Winters, wear what you have (unless you need something black or charcoal, always available).
It helps to know whether you’re on the cool on warm side of your Season (your PCA will tell you) so that you know how to err. If you can’t find your perfect red, you’ll know whether to allow cooler or warmer shades. In a perfect world, the stores would be colour-coded, but IRL, their palettes are far more restricted. They might bring in 4 of the same style shirt, but not 8. They do NOT want you knowing anything about what suits you. They want that merchandise out the door, preferably the day it came in. You may have to be close sometimes, but you’ll learn how to do that too. We’ll talk about it a lot when we meet.
It takes months to learn to match colours precisely, even with your Book. Since we ultimately understand colour by visual comparison, not by me or anyone else talking about it, it helps to gather several similarly coloured items in the store and compare those to your Book. You’ll be better able to tell if the match is perfect, and if it isn’t, then how it differs. Is it browner? duller? darker?
It takes a month or 2 to start to enjoy the empowerment when you shop. It gets stronger and stronger as you bypass trends and disregard advice you know to be wrong. And both are everywhere.
I so understand the frustration in the beginning of feeling like nothing is right and wondering when it ever will be. But even at the start, you are better than you used to be. Then, the pieces start coming together, and your good decisions far outweigh the bad. Your eyes will get better and better at recognizing it. That will FEEL like magic.
Activewear Jackets for The Light Spring Woman
January 25, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Because the Spring Season speaks primarily of movement and animation, you look great in active wear.
As always, staying true to your personal colour palette, I like this Zella jacket at Nordstrom.
Turquoise is certainly among your perfect clothes colours. It’s being marketed as THE colour this Season, but only 3 Seasons can wear a true clear turquoise, and the Light Spring is one of them.
I appreciate the flowing lines in the stitching. In 12 Season Colour Analysis, you are a Neutral Season, blending Spring with a little bit of Summer. Those wavy lines integrate your Summer touch with the flowing water effect, while still being gently zigzagged enough to suggest motion. As a gentle Spring, this gentle zigzag is a perfect mirror to your message in colour.
By comparison, this is not a good choice.
The draping, the batwing sleeves, the heavy ribbing and neck, and the prominent zipper do not express serious commitment to motion. Fabric with a very slight shimmer, like many activewear knits, is better on you. You are not well served by heavy fabrics like velour. Light, soft knits and synthetics are better.
You will express your personality better with some colour transitions. Your Summer trace is monochromatic, but not to this degree. Repeating a colour in the print of a top with a solid bottom will do well. Since you are predominantly Spring, you can certainly mix and match colours fairly freely. The jacket above was made for another Season.
A final great choice, below, the Nike Border Long Sleeve top. The fundamental shape of the Spring Season is the triangle.
The stitching at the armpit to neck conveys the triangle. The asymmetric Nike swoosh, with its lift at the corners, is a great little detail that says movement, and so Spring.
The colour could be yellower, ideally, but if you are on the cooler side of the Season, it may be perfect.
Can Wrong Colours Make You Ill?
January 20, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 4 Comments
…or, title option, do your clothes make others feel, um, unwell?
Women and men have told me that they buy clothing colour by feel. Both have asked me to remove a drape because they felt sick, one to the point of becoming faint.
Are they exaggerating? Too theatrical?
NO! It’s VERY real. Everybody senses colour, more than we see it. We may not all feel it to the degree of physical revulsion, but we all experience a mild discomfort in the presence of wrong colours. We don’t take the colour choices in our homes lightly for that reason.
Since most people go around in wrong colour, we’ve grown used to seeing it and compensating for the feeling. But why does it happen?
The short answer is “sensory mismatch”. It means that 2 of your senses are receiving information that your brain feels cannot make sense together. The result is nausea.
Motion sickness in a car means your eyes are seeing “movement” but your brain is getting information from your ear’s balance system and your limbs saying “not movement”. The 2 don’t jive. The brain decides you’ve been poisoned and you’re hallucinating, so it expels the toxin by vomiting. At least, it’s believed to have evolved that way.
To explain it with colours, we go back to the most fundamental principle of how Personal Colour Analysis (PCA) achieves skin perfection and ideal appearance.
Every colour, in you and outside you, answers to 3 characteristics only. How Light/Dark, how Warm/Cool, how Clear/Soft (ask me in a Comment if I can clarify those concepts). Every single shade in you, every single blue and red and purple in you, fits in EXACTLY the same place on those 3 scales. Fascinating in itself, I ponder this often.
PCA finds you a group of colours that also fit in EXACTLY the same positions on those 3 scales. Your Colour Analysis swatch book is simply an exploded diagram of your own precise colours. It’s far, far too complex to do this without a true 12 Season Colour Analysis, for clothes colours or makeup. Then, when you WEAR precisely the same colours that you already ARE, the colour energies are in absolute synchrony and it is strong.
With wrong colours, the sensory mismatch isn’t between your eyes and ears. It’s between your eyes and subconscious colour associations. Your eyes are seeing one set of colour wavelengths emanating from the body’s natural colours. There’s a whole other set of waves coming off the clothes. The signals are all jammed. It feels tiring to look at, and for some, nauseating.
Most people dress in such a skelter of colour that there is no signal at all. They don’t look ON. All the wrong colours together neutralize what colour potential exists.
Is my theory scientific fact? I don’t know. I didn’t read it anywhere. It just makes sense to me.
Kathryn Kalisz, In Honor And Remembrance
January 17, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
It is with the deepest sadness that we mourn the death of Kathryn, who lost her life 3 days ago.
A horrifying act of violence took this woman, her office manager, and a police officer. Two other family members were injured but will survive.
Kathryn was founder of the Sci\ART system of colour analysis. A visionary in her understanding and use of colour, she had achieved the highly respected title of American Master Colorist. She was a teacher and mentor in the finest sense of the word.
We feel her loss as a woman as well. She is survived by three daughters and their families. Having accomplished the highest level of eminence and authority in her field, never for a moment did she behave other than with gentle kindness. She set an example for women, that we can reach positions of influence and recognition and never compromise the female traits in search of a false strength.
The world of Colour Analysis feels a widespread grief with her passing.
May she find peace in a Universe of swirling colours as we mourn her loss.
The Reason For The Season is YOU
January 11, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Among the 4 True Seasons in Personal Colour Analysis, there are 2 groups of people whose coloring has a blue-pink (or cool) undertone. They are the Summers and Winters. Their nature also tends to be less energetic and a little more reserved and slow-moving.
The Warm Seasons of the Springs and Autumns have skin with a yellow-to-gold undertone. They are lively, busy, talkative, and active.
Colour makes us feel certain feelings and think certain thoughts. A big block of why that is comes from the most primitive associations humans have made with colour. It is embedded in our genetics and the evolution of our brains from the beginnings of our consciousness.
Just as the energy of the 4 True Seasons follows the course of the year, from
the short-lived but almost frantically busy, almost reckless, activity of Spring
to
the hazy, flowing, genteel days of Summer
to
the time of yields and returns in the fields, of efficiency, and security, and responsibility in Autumn’s solid personality
to
Winter’s withheld reserve and its contrast of frozen yet shocking beauty. How can such austerity and colour severity be so beautiful? How can something so motionless be so compelling?
So does the warmth and coolness of the Seasons alternate in every 24 hour cycle.
Spring is a colour riot. It corresponds to the early morning’s optimistic business. The light is pale yellow, but there is a definite promise of heat to come.
Summer’s colours are seen between 12 – 3 PM where activity slows as the heat induces a softness and relaxed peacefulness to how we feel, as well as what we see.
Late afternoon light mellows and heats the colours of the world around us, just as it does to the coloring of people in the Autumn seasons.
Winter individuals, whose personal decoration in clothing, makeup, jewelry, and hair colour is stately, formal, and symmetrical, look best in the colours of the darker time when motion settles. This is a feeling of colour restraint worn in simple, contrasting ways.
Though there are 12 colour groups, or Seasons, among human beings, each has their special edge, their special effect. Learn what yours is and your appearance will crackle. Colour is above all a FEELING. People will keep looking for why you send sparks but they will not know.
Your thoughts project outward from you as a vibration. They are like your inner colours. You send an energy vibration by the colours of your body too. You have a wavelength all your own. Wearing wrong colours is a constant irritation because the wavelenghts don’t jive. You’re emanating too many frequencies that are all clashing.
Trying to look like what you could not be never works. Think about how you were INTENDED to look. You came here, meant to look a certain way. Are you close? You’ll feel it when it happens.
Elisa Is A True Summer
January 7, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 14 Comments
Elisa has always believed herself to be a Spring. Her freckles, warm brown hair, and natural flush in her skin caused her, and others, to conclude that the colours in her design followed Spring’s colour rules. When assessing a colour, be it in you or outside you, we ask the same 3 questions, because any colour has 3 properties.
Spring colours are all:
Lightness or Darkness? > light, or at least never very dark
Warm or Cool? > warmed, and by yellow NOT orange
Clear or Soft? > clear, or highly saturated, NOT dulled
The premise of Seasonal Colour Analysis is that every colour in your natural colour composition answers those 3 questions in the same way. Your swatch book is a group of colours that fit on those scales in those exact same positions too, thereby replicating the colours in your design. That is how the magic happens.
I can see how one might look at the light-medium warmish brown hair and see warmth, light, and clarity.
Her eyes are not warm though. They are a medium-dark blue-grey.
The dark brows could make Winter cross your mind.
But nevermind the hair and eyes. We established long ago that they are not used in defining the Season, they’ll just lead you astray. We look at skin.
Without a proper analysis, you can’t really understand skin. You have to watch how it reacts to colour. Are freckles not a sign of warmth? No! They’re another red herring, kind of like the “clear eyes” concept. You have to look beyond them, at the skin. So we’re back to Plan A, with how did the draping go?
Both Elisa’s skin and her eye patterns performed precisely as True Summer does. The moonlit, luminous translucency that only True Summer does so well was there for sure. The absolute inability to handle the slightest degree of heat, or it’s instant pasty skin, was there. This skin tone seems to look turquoise in turquoise, and melon in melon.
In fact, Elisa is a study in contrasts. She has warm hair, dark eyebrows, deep blue eyes, and freckles (which feel warm). She could be placed in any number of Seasons, but none would feel right. Once we neutralized all the variables, it was clear that she is a True Summer.
Makeup often seemed too conspicuous so became something to avoid. We looked at how to accentuate her features with the same understated elegance that is true of her entire palette. These are Grace Kelly clothes and colours. This is the skin and eye colour that was made for BlueGrey eyeliner (Annabelle makes a perfect (and perfectly inexpensive) pencil by that name). Everyone can wear makeup beautifully, but the fragility of this skin is easily overwhelmed.
Elisa has some natural shadowing around her eyes. It was least pronounced in the True Summer colours, but wasn’t obliterated altogether. That’s called Photoshop. Many women fight that (and many other “imperfections”) with too much concealer, which ends up looking caked and even more obvious. There is a little foundation here, but no concealer. I usually apply concealer or foundation, but seldom both. Those products are overdone, and take a lot of time. I want to show you how to recognize your cosmetic colours.
Cosmetics counters and makeup artists are usually good at matching foundation. If they won’t allow you to take a few samples home to try in daylight, don’t buy the product. I ask women to bring their foundation to their PCA. So far, none have been wearing the right colour but they knew that already.
In your right colours, you will see the area under the eye become as illuminated as possible. Wear a little makeup, but allow your face. Ignore our magazine-obsessed culture that has us trying to delete our individuality.
One of the biggest misconceptions about True Summer’s colours is that they are all dusty lavender and Wedgewood blue, “old” colours. In fact, the most important feature of True Summer colours is NOT their dustiness, or softness, or grayishness, all the same idea. It is the COOLNESS.
These are not at all confined to being light colours, though Summer is thought of as light. Relative to Winter, it is lighter, but they can do surprisingly dark colour.
In this graphic, the high saturation (hi sat) colours are on the left, as you can see. The lo sat colours are only softer BY COMPARISON. They’re the colour of denim and flower petals. The True Summer personal colour palette contains these same beautiful colours, at about 50% saturation or less.
The hi sat shades on the left are pigment-saturated, pigment-soaked, pigment-logged. Winter needs them and usually doesn’t wear them saturated enough, in part because they’re hard to find except in workout clothing. Few women over 25 feel safe buying these colours.
Elisa is married to the most mannerly man you’ll ever meet. Aggression and confrontation are disturbing to this personality. Hurry and pressure flusters them more than most. It is very calming to this character to be able to depend on certain things, especially decency and kindness. Courtesy is the most essential prerequisite of all.
The Right Sweater For Dark Winter Men
January 4, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Our first job is to define the principles of all Winter dress, since Seasonal Colour Analysis for clothing absolutely applies to men. This way of using colour and style probably extends to the Dark Autumn, who has enough intensity in his personal colour palette and the Winter trace that allows him to wear clothes in a Winter way.
That way is as follows. It is expensive, smooth, poised, and formal. Patterns, and prints are balanced and repeating, not random. This is an image of wealth and luxury, of tailored clothing and timeless design.
One could not necessarily call it reserved, since the colours of Bright Spring are all-out, freewheeling, highly saturated colour. (See What Are Clear And Soft Colours? for the meaning of saturation in colour).
The Dark Winter is certainly reserved, to the point of being serious. This group shares all Winters’ quiet mood, but with dark colours. There is nothing playful or youthful here.
What does the Autumn hint bring in? First, it brings in a little brown, which warms and mutes the colours. They seem less distant and cold. Autumn also allows a bit of texture, without getting into rugged cable knits that are too functional and not polished enough.
Smooth cashmere and wool work very well.
I also like a ribbed sweater, like the one above at Banana Republic, as long as it’s not too chunky. It respects the impression of the Winter style, so repeating and balanced, but introduces a little texture. The rough surface is the bridge to Autumn.
Zip-neck sweaters are great if worn in a formal way. A full-zip feels to me too much like a hoodie, too juvenile or casual, almost sloppy.
Horizontal stripes are too sailboat or rugby shirt. This group expresses “serious” best.
Argyle comes in every colour. Does it work if the colours are Winter? To my eye, the styles don’t mesh. All those zigzags in argyle are too animated, and look hectic on Winter’s quiet energy.
This is a beauty at LLBean, in the colour Mountain Red. It’s shown in the catalog with a white shirt and looks sharp. With a charcoal pant, casual or formal, this guy is getting noticed for all the right reasons.
V-neck, crewneck, and turtleneck all feel good on these men (only my opinion). The choice of shirt is important. The aim is simple drama. An iceberg has simple, quiet drama. A circus does not, it has complicated drama. A day on a sailboat has no drama.
The colours should contrast strongly (very light with very dark). Dark charcoal, eggplant, or ruby, with a crisp white shirt. An icy grey shirt and a midnight blue sweater.
Finally, A True Summer Blush
January 1, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
I searched for 5 months. I was looking for the colour of deep red-pink rose petals. The cosmetic industry adds brown or peach to almost every colour. It’s so wrong on the coolest, most fragile skin tone we see in Personal Colour Analysis.
The colours and article can be found here, in True Summer’s Cool Rose Blush, at my blog, A Greener Tea.
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