Sci\ART Analyst Directory
October 19, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 16 Comments
Hi, everyone,
I get at least one e-mail every day requesting a copy of the Directory. I thought it might save clients time if I just add the links to my sidebar.
I copied the list from the Directory on the original Sci\ART site. It may be out of date. If your name or website doesn’t appear, or has been omitted, please update me with your info at christine@12blueprints.com
Only names with a website were added to this list because the blog software wants an http:// address. There were maybe 8-10 analysts in the original directory without website addresses. If that has changed, please do send me your info and I’ll gladly add it.
Best Makeup Colours : Soft Summer
October 18, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 9 Comments
It’s a good thing Soft Summers are so wonderfully even-tempered. A certain fortitude helps for the group who have most often been assigned 2 or 3 different Seasons. The very fact that the coloring is not obvious is precisely the concept of this Season. Therefore, nothing else about the appearance should be blatant either. Dark liners, yellow highlights, or golden bronzers might be ineffective or undetectable or other Seasons. On Soft Summer, they are shrill.
At her most aligned, Soft Summer dresses for an art gallery opening. She wears her makeup the same way. Ultimately tasteful and sophisticated, she would be invited anywhere. She is never inappropriate, bold, or abrupt, and her makeup is not either.
In 12 Season Colour Analysis, Soft Summer is the Neutral Season that is basically a Summer, incorporating the earliest feeling of Autumn. Still more an intuition than a very obvious shift, True Summer’s cool/soft palette is now observed through a veil of light grey smoke. Here on the outskirts of Autumn, the light taupe that settles over the entire palette is not yet warm enough to heat these colors. What it does is dull them. (See How The 5 Springs Add Yellow for more on how heat is added to the warm Season personal colour palettes).
If you looked at True Summer’s colours through the sky in the picture above, they might look like the cosmetic colors palette below. Look at the effect the mauve-grey-taupe has on the grass and trees, relative to the colors in the foreground. A little warmer, certainly more muted and quiet.
I could have sworn those blocks were lined up when I made this. Let’s not notice that. Instead, we could notice that the entire palette seems to fogged, even a bit blurred. If I’d really been on the ball, I would have softened the edges of all those squares and put the lightest mushroom color over the background.
There are no extremes of darkness or brightness. The overall effect is cooler than warm, so no gold, warm beige, or orange. The feeling is gentle but not fragile, an oak tree rather than a crystal vase (which would be Bright Spring). Soft Summer could share their cooler makeup palette with True Summer, but not with their warmer neighbor, the Soft Autumn, whose colors are much too golden to perfect this skin tone.
The most beautiful eye appears to be coming out of a misty lake. Eyeshadows and liners are hazy tan greys and mauve greys. The eyeliner is not much darker than the eyeshadow, to avoid creating an obvious line which only looks severe. In this Season, liner can distinguish itself by being a different color than the shadow, instead of a darker color.
The tan browns can be used to fill in brows as well. Eyebrows should never be the first thing people notice on anyone, or they’re overdone. On this group especially, brows may be darker or lighter than the hair depending on the individual, but they should diffuse into the face. It’s the eye color we’re trying to energize. Brows, blush, lipcolor, and hair are there to support, heighten, and accentuate eye color. When the natural features flow so seamlessly into one another, makeup must be exceptionally undemanding to not take over.
The lip and blush colors are interesting. Soft Summer and Dark Winter share certain characteristics. Both add neutral brown to a pure cool Season, True Summer and True Winter respectively. Dark Winter’s brown is much darker as Winter imposes blackness. Both are Neutral Seasons, so have cool and warm choices. Cool for Soft Summer is dusty plum, while warm is tan rose (still definitely a cool version). Cool for Dark Winter is not dusty or greyed at all, quite the opposite, but it is a browned plum; warm is saturated coral pink, dulled a bit with a drop of dark brown.
I love Soft Summer’s red. It is not fire engine, scarlet, blood, or anything else that activates. Summer is restorative, not catalytic. We’re still in the realm of rose petals, they just live on a dusty road.
There are 2 makeup items that are truly out of place on this type of natural coloring. The first in bronzer. You might think it would work, since a light touch of it can be quite outdoor-glowy on Light Summers. The difference is that the heat is so not-obvious in Soft Summer that bronzer stands out. You can’t find taupe bronzer, and who would put a grey layer on their skin anyhow? You’re so much easier to look at in a powder that respects the coolness of the skin and is two shades darker than a match. Use it with restraint, more to contour than to add heat, or skip it altogether.
Shimmer in makeup is the second means of over-gilding this lily. A satin finish in a lip product, maybe, so much easier to find. This Season is an exception where matte choices are actually plentiful. High shine is insistent and feels too childish to fit into this supremely elegant atmosphere. Add shimmer to many Soft Summer eyeshadows, and they become Dark Winter’s.
How The 5 Springs Add Yellow
October 8, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 10 Comments
We discussed How The 5 Autumns Add Brown To Hair Colour. It only seems right that we go through Spring’s yellows.
But first. As I look at the original Autumn graphic below, I notice that I’ve combined 2 concepts. I melded the type of brown with the appearance of Winter’s red.
The original picture:
The 5 Autumn browns, subtracting Winter’s red, would look like this:
The Soft Season browns are still being influenced by Summer gray, I know, but the particular brown is right. Soft Summer = campfire smoke. Soft Autumn = peanut butter. True Autumn = amber gold.
From there, ignoring the redness of Winter, but allowing its blackness,
From there, Dark Autumn = dark neutral taupe. Dark Winter = black chocolate.
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For Spring, I’ll confine myself to the type of yellow only. In 12 Season (Tone) Colour Analysis, we include the True Spring, and its strong blends of Light Spring (blend with Summer) and Bright Spring (blend with Winter). We also include Spring’s weak blends, as the Light Summer (Summer takes precedence) and Bright Winter (Winter takes precedence).
For each of the 5 groups, the yellow being added by Spring’s influence is affected by the amount of Spring and what Season it’s being blended with.
Spring’s colors are light because of a particular property of yellow. As it increases in saturation to satisfy Spring’s pure clear colors, it gets lighter. Compare that to Winter, which gets darkened by the higher saturation of the colour blue.
Before Spring : A kitten is True Summer’s white. Their best hair highlight is silver beige. Not white or platnimum, but certainly not yellow, which causes an illusion of a red, shiny nose and center of the face.
Gradually, Spring will light up the palettes. Light Summer is marshmallows. A trace of yellow from Spring and a trace of blue-grey leftover from Summer. This woman is predominantly a Summer. She looks better in Summer’s style of wearing clothes, but brightens and lightens it. Sometimes, the lightening effect can be less obvious and need not be conveyed only by pale pastel colors. For instance, a fabric can convey “lightening” as weightlessness or floatiness. So can a print like bubbles, mist, or foam. When it’s added to hair, this watery yellow looks best as a cool beige. (See How Light Summer Goes Grey)
As we move into Light Spring, color becomes yellower and clearer. The variability in human coloring, even within a given Season, is the challenge of personal color analysis. There are many texts and websites, including this one, that may show you a human example of a Season. Trying to find those averages among your friends is another thing altogether. Your color analysis will tell you the hair color and makeup colors that look most natural on you, within a small range. The range may go from warmer to cooler, or lighter to darker, depending on your position within your Season. Louise (in Louise and Stevan Are Light Springs) is very much on the cool side of the Season, with more ash brown than warm brown hair, so her highlight will be cooler than Stevan’s beachy, sunny yellow. From a colorist’s perspective, this will be hard to fine tune with bleach alone, but they have many shades of blonde to work with to give you the right highlight – and you will know what to ask for when you walk into the salon.
For True Spring, it’s a clear strong yellow. Though this woman’s hair may not be yellow at maturity, and is probably brown, her hair highlight is yellow. The harmony with the skin is extremely spontaneous and likely. Her natural hair color is probably dark blonde, but it’s glassy, like the caramelized sugar glaze of a Crème Brulee. Autumn’s base is medium to dark brown and velvety dense (and of course, Autumn would never wear a yellow highlight).
Bright Spring’s is a clearer stronger yellow. All I did was raise the saturation. Dark hair and dark eyes are very common here. When the complexion is deeper, the person looks Mediterranean, as Spanish or Italian. Dark hair and fair skin may look Celtic. If the person has white hair and turquoise-glass eyes, she is the only person outside her family who knows her eyes are turquoise, not blue, because she dresses like a Summer. This might be the one Season where the variability between people is so high that they can’t all wear the same makeup colors. You have to use judgement to harmonize the person and the makeup on the Light>>Dark scale, and on the Warm>>Cool scale, among the colors offered in the Colours swatch Book. This coloring is very unique. No hair color from a bottle is likely to improve on what you were given. The finest tuning balances the complexion with the natural hair color, but won’t believably tolerate big creative shifts.
Out at the Spring frontier of Bright Winter, there is very little yellowness left. The difference between this and Light Summer’s yellow is the amount of gray. This yellow is icy white, lighter than the color above (icy color is hard to replicate on a screen and convey the frostiness). This person is a Winter, with very little Spring remaining. Winter’s most important rule is high contrast, so very light with very dark blocks. Therefore, to be called “icy colors”, the light colors Bright Winter chooses move very close to white. Also rare and fascinating coloring, be careful if you mess with it. If it’s quite dark, leave it alone. If it’s medium brown, almost ashy, and eyes and skin are light enough, a little blonding at the ends of the hair can give a sunkissed suggestion. Don’t go overboard. If the hair is dark, leave it be. Dark and dynamic force is uniquely Bright Winter’s radiance. Now why would you reduce that?
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