True Autumn’s Best Hair Colour

January 30, 2011 by · 16 Comments 

Really, I adore the company of True Autumn women. Something about their naturalness is very relaxing. They have a take-it-or-leave-it-but-this-is-me attitude that I love.

I don’t see many True Season clients, with the exception of True Summers who outnumber all other Seasons combined by 1:3… and I practice 12 Season Colour Analysis! Very complicated coloring, True Summer, and all too easy to misplace into another Season.

Like all the True Seasons, because they’ve been around longer, wrong ideas about the palette and the style are more entrenched and more outdated. True Autumn is thought to be all khaki and pumpkin. So not. Think more of an evening sky dripping liquid orange gold into a molten ocean. True Autumn is every color of coffee, spice, chocolate, a golden home-baked loaf, a glorious pie crust.  Envision Bollywood colors.

Shying away from heat is a natural reflex.  Before their personal color analysis, a True Autumn woman often arrives with flat, beige hair that doesn’t enhance her. She’s gotten used to light hair or believed the someone who told her that women need to lighten hair as they age. Meanwhile this woman’s face, clothing, jewelry, and energy could say everything. Beige hair color is aging.

In other cases, the woman placed herself among the Winter Seasons and the hair is too cool and too red, which looks crisp and severe, like the pie crust burned round the edges.

Aim for Bambi eyes and melting milk chocolate hair. True Autumn emanates a warmth that is comfortable, a darkness that is medium, and a sultriness that is extreme. When I see them a few weeks after their color analysis, I can barely take my eyes off them and I can tell that they are getting used to that reaction.True Autumn doesn’t strive to get noticed, but these women have no choice once their colors are right.

When I plan outfits or makeup for this gorgeous group, I always remind myself that they are not well suited to very darks or very lights. Colours can go to warm creamy buff and as dark as 70% chocolate, but would not reach all the way to black and white. The extreme of lightness and darkness, so-called high contrast, is way too sharp. The overall effect to the viewer when they see the woman head to toe should be medium to medium-dark. The colors in this chair offer a good range of base hair colours.

Every person in every Season has to make a darkness adjustment with her color analyzed palette. Some women will look or feel better in lighter colors than others. The hair right color is some shade of brown, not beige, or apricot, or butterscotch, or really not yellow blond. Think of Susan Sarandon and Russell Crowe. Would lighter hair enhance their strength and presence? I don’t see that it would.

Autumns are often thought to be red-haired, and it is possible but not common. They can certainly wear a dark copper highlight if they chose, but the natural color is not often red. The red would not be carrot; it would be squash. Carrot’s clear yellow-orange, as Rupert Grint’s, belongs to a Spring. The colors in the chair below are the right highlight range. The wicker basket is Soft Autumn’s. The dried flowers are too light as a highlight for any Autumn I know. The silver lanterns on the left side would be pretty on a Light Summer/Spring.

On this chart, I like golden chestnut and henna red. For a highlight, I would choose copper blonde. Obvious redness in the hair of Soft Autumn beyond muted apricot is too much. This Season can manage it far better.

I didn’t choose Light Copper Blonde because it would make obvious stripes, and break up the molten metal heat that works so amazingly well.

Filed under: Autumn Colours, More Topics For The 12 Seasons
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Rimmel Lip Gloss for 12 Seasons

January 15, 2011 by · 20 Comments 

Some folks take exception to my swatching makeup on white paper. They say you can’t tell how the colour would look on your face. They’re going to love the way I swatch lip gloss.

I find I can see the subtleties of the colours way better on paper. On paper, you can be more detached about the colour. It’s still far enough from you to be perceived as separate from you, and only on its own merits. Once it enters your Personal Zone, all kinds of meta impressions start happening.

The hot second you try to evaluate a colour on your own face, you’ve lost objectivity. Your imagination alters your face, and everything on it. We have no idea what we look like to others. The only thing we decide when we look at a new makeup colour on our face is whether it could be consistent with how we’re used to seeing ourselves.

The Sci\ART Colours Book is outstanding for matching makeup colours, the trickiest part of working with your Season. Good thing there’s lots of help to get you started once you get your Season ID. The swatches in the Book are on white canvas. At the store, I can smear the makeup on a white page. Back home and decide, in daylight, if the colours are the same.  Any client who has done this with me during a PCA appt knows that she can look from the makeup palette we create on paper to her Colours Book, and find every swatch in her Book immediately. Her eye just goes to it, and she is right every time. This system works.

These Rimmel Stay Glossy lipglosses impressed me because of the good colour selection – or was it that I found Winter colours, usually so hard to do? So often, a line will have 3 good colours, and you stand there looking at the rest of them, thinking “I have no idea who would wear these colours.” In this line, the fairest and darkest have a choice, the most muted and clearest, and the Winter colours are actually wearable.

The gloss is supposed to last 6 hours, or 8 hours, or some big, impressive number.

Critical Thinking : the ability to discern what is probably right and what is probably wrong. A 6 hour lip gloss? You didn’t even expect that to be true. There’s no 2 hour lip gloss out there, unless you’re a mannequin, the plastic kind. Forget 6.

The product is plenty nice, and reasonably priced, whatever that means in cosmetics. Heavens, I’m being snarky today, but there is too much undeserved cosmetic raving going on out there. Every week brings a new rave. That’s how you came to have a used-it-once drawer. I’m just trying to keep the reality glasses in place so you never add one more item to that drawer. I am nice enough to say that there was nothing about the application that I didn’t like, besides the sinking ship of 6 hour expectations. This is also a nice product to apply over a lipstick, long wear or otherwise to keep it going till lunchtime without needing a mirror.

I swatch lip gloss between 2 pieces of tape to avoid having gunk all over my purse. I can spread it around and look at the nuances of the colour when I get home to daylight. I can see the colour next to other tones, because colour is all about comparison.

Once you see a colour you like on paper, and it seems to match your Book, I absolutely suggest you put it on your face. There’s more to a makeup buy decision than its colour. Also, no two women in the same Season look quite the same or will interpret their Season in the same way, or have the same comfort level with colour on the face.

I match the color analyzed swatches from the middle darkness colours, or the lighter ones for the Light Seasons. The darker swatches work fine in clothing but most light-medium complected women find them dark. The Sci\ART system is 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, because 12 is enough without being too much, but you’ll refine your position within your Season with time.

The pictures are a bit randomly organized, and seem a bit sloppy (that’s part of the reality theme), but they cover all the colours, with some opportunity to compare. In Canada, we did not have Endless Night, Unlimited Gold, or Endless Summer, unless they are here with a different name. I haven’t adjusted any settings. Photos were taken at 11AM on an overcast day, on a sheet of white paper.

True Winter : Yours Forever

Dark Winter : All Night Long

Bright Winter : Timeless Allure, Fuchsia Fever

Finding a clean red-violet that has that purple pivot that True Winter hovers around is challenging, especially in a cheaper product. I like this one.

For many darker Season women, they don’t always want a dark lip. I’ll never (or not soon) be convinced that Sandra Bullock (probably Dark Winter), Liza Minelli (True?), or Audrey Hepburn (Bright W?) look their best in browned, flesh toned lips. Dark W wears a browned deep rose as a disappearing lip (NARS Dolce Vita), but it has little impact. A very good option to nude lips for Winters, which the intensity of the person’s coloring can still dominate too easily, is a sheer lip.

I hope you can see that Dark Winter’s colour is browner. Bright W’s is lighter and clear.

As a Dark Winter,  I tried All Night Long. It’s quite similar to the Dark Winter always-in-your-purse anchor of Merle Norman Stolen Kisses.

Light Summer : All Day Seduction, Stay My Rose, Dare To Say, Eternal Flirt

True Summer : Captivate Me, Dare To Say

Soft Summer :  My Eternity, Stay My Rose, Captivate Me

With the sheerness of a gloss, several of these colours will work across categories. Your own lip colour will come through and help adapt the shade to your face.

All Day Seduction has a gold glimmer in it, it felt best for Light Summer. Soft Summer can do gold shimmer sometimes, as in MAC Plumfoolery blush, but the base colour is deeper in that blush than this light pink gloss. Soft Summers are much cooler than they are warm and not especially light.

Light Spring : Non Stop Glamour, Always Lovely,  All Day Seduction

True Spring: Here To Say? , Non Stop Glamour

Bright Spring: Fuchsia Fever, Timeless Allure, All Day Seduction

True Spring gave me some trouble. Here To Say may be one those colours that is too browned for a Spring and not browned enough for an Autumn. It is orange and yellow enough that it may work well, with just enough brown to make it more nude/flesh coloured. I try to picture it on Wayne Gretzky…not sure. I was hoping it might look like this.( I think Uma may be a Light Spring because pale lips look so good on her. True Spring does better with a shot of real color).

The beauty of a gloss is that it tempers brightness (as in Fuchsia Fever) and darkness (as Timeless Allure), allowing Bright Spring to wear both. They could also do All Day Seduction, because it’s a clean pink with a gold shimmer. Light Summer  had this colour too, because there are similarities between it and Bright Spring (both can do well in medium-darkness colours, both have a trace of Spring yellow).

So Fabulous is a slightly yellow caramel beige. It is not orange, nor is it as heavy as butterscotch sundae sauce. It is a Spring colour, perhaps a good flesh-toned lip for Light Spring, a Season that is exemplary in the various beiges of nuts and their shells.

Soft Autumn: Here To Say?

True Autumn: Immortal Charm

Dark Autumn : Everlasting Crush, Still Gorgeous

A Soft Autumn will probably find Here To Say too orange. I’m usually looking for a color like the pink in a flowerpot, and this is not it, but they do have a warm side, especially when the hair has an apricot highlight, and they do look great in nude/flesh lips, a la J.Lo. This is a line where the Autumn colours are less plentiful, while the pinks are over-represented.

Still Gorgeous could be lovely on Dark Autumn, and very natural on women of deeper complexion.

Black Diva, well, y’know. Oh, I forgot that one.

Filed under: Autumn Colours, For All Seasons, More Topics For The 12 Seasons, Spring Colours, Summer Colours, Winter Colours
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