Colour Analyzed Home Decor
February 20, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 30 Comments
It is my belief that the colours we project for others to see are a continuation of our inner selves. When the colours that we add to our bodies repeat the energy of who we already are, our beauty feels the most real and right, both to us and to those looking at us. The colours with which we surround ourselves may be even more important to our well being because we see them more than we see our own appearance. Huge thanks to Sci\ART Colour Analyst MarySteele Lawler in Mississippi for contributing this article and the colour layouts. They illustrate so beautifully one of the lesser-known, very fascinating applications of Personal Colour Analysis.CS.
Ambiance, light, color. Nothing is more important in a room. Like The Princess and the Pea and her stack of mattresses, I’m extremely sensitive to colored spaces and have never understood how hospital designers expect people to improve in rooms painted in sad colors. With my Sci/art training I have come to understand the underlying reason why there are comfortable or uncomfortable color choices for each person. Thanks to Kathryn Kalisz, I know why the effect of the same color can be either unhappy or brilliant for different persons.
A warm-toned person naturally will be ill at ease in rooms painted with cool shades and vice-versa. One might not be able to put a finger on the source of discomfort, but this distraction is because the room essentially was painted for someone else.
My increasing fascination with light and interior color prompted me to notice that successful designers are picky about the colors they choose for projects even if the color is just a particular shade of white. I began trolling through decorating magazines and web sites looking for popular paint references. That there must be room colors best suited to blondes or to brunettes logically followed the precepts of seasonal color analysis.
Since I am not a decorator, I leave the paint color selection to professionals. They have experienced that some colors more than others do well in any light in any part of the country. These popular hues that interior designers go back to time and again are the ones that I match from my Benjamin Moore swatch books to my Sci/Art color book. The result is a log of hundreds of tried-and-true designer paint favorites divided into the twelve tonal categories.
Such luminous beauties, these batches of whites, grays, violets, greens, and blues held together by a common chroma and temperature. Although there is some overlapping of paint colors between the seasons, each season’s entire collection of shades is distinct from all the other seasons. Each collection stands on its own in the loveliness of this distinction
Here are photographs of four ambient possibilities. There is an icy cool set of colors for True Winter including mountain peak white, crystal blue, topeka taupe, celery ice, and forty nine others. The list for Soft Summer comprises cool, velvety tones such as patriotic white, soft chinchilla, and mountain ridge, a favorite misty brownish- purple. Light Spring’s hues range from cameo white interior room to windmill wings blue and florida pink, a delicious pinky-red. Dark Autumn conveys its stylish warmth with rosy apple red, glowing apricot, pink corsage, and black satin.
True Winter palette
Soft Summer palette
Light Spring palette
Dark Autumn palette
My clients come to me already convinced of the power of color. I tuck a paint collection list into each information packet included in my consultation. This way, when it is time to redecorate, a client can experience the wonder of living inside a color that reflects her particular color harmony. I say, “I want you to look beautiful in your rooms. I want you to feel cozy and to shine within your colors, not only in what you are wearing, but also amidst your surroundings. I want you to glow in your home!”
My color business is called Luminosity. I operate from Oxford, Mississippi, but I pack up my drapes and travel if I have a group in another city that wants to be analyzed. The cosmetics updates that I glean from the contributors to the 12 Blueprints discussion board have been a wildly popular part of my consultation. Learning about one’s season for the first time can seem overwhelming, like sitting under an avalanche of compelling new information. I give clients handouts on everything from hair color to the types of wood and metal best suited to their homes. The more ways you can get at the uniqueness of your season, the better you can understand it.
If you know your season and wish to expand your harmony, save yourself legwork and choice overload by ordering your seasonal list of Benjamin Moore paint numbers. When you pull swatches from your local paint store you will automatically love the paint chips because they will match you.
One seasonal paint selection list costs forty dollars. There are sixty to eighty color numbers on each list. I am a Light Summer. I live in a pink house that is on my chart and I believe that everyone should be so fortunate! Checks should be made to Luminosity and sent to 307 Bramlette Boulevard, Apartment 21, Oxford, MS, 38655. Include your mailing address and expect your lovely collection in two weeks.
The Brown-Eyed Spring
February 9, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 78 Comments
Or Never Give Up On Your Colouring
This post is special for a few reasons.
First, I get more questions asking how this colouring looks than all the other groups.
Is this the rarest Season of them all? I think it depends where you live. I have never analyzed a True Spring, but I have seen what they look like: Wayne Gretzky. I give up a bit on female examples because they are so altered, usually for the worse, that a natural original is almost impossible to find.
Bright Spring is not really rare. It is unpredictable. This colouring always seems to look like something else. To confuse matters, the opposite is true as well, where many other Seasons can look like Bright Spring. When hair is dark, this person can resemble Dark Autumn or Dark Winter when eyes are dark. If eyes are light, the similarity to True Summer can be startling.
Secondly, this beautiful model, whom we’ll call Audrey, has brown eyes. Those are rare in the Spring and Summer groups, but where human genetics are concerned, nothing is impossible.
The Bright Seasons are those that combine Winter and Spring colouring. If Winter is stronger, the Season is called Bright Winter. If Spring influence is larger, the person contains the colours of the Bright Spring palette in their natural colouring. Both are Neutral Seasons in the Sci\ART 12 Tone system, meaning that this skin has some warmer and some cooler colours. This is important information for buying the right foundation.
Asian features often belong to people whose colouring is perfected by the Bright Seasons. Here is one of Audrey’s pre-PCA pictures.
Nothing wrong with that picture at all, but would you think of a Spring person? Maybe, but I didn’t. Bright crosses my mind when I see Asian features, but I couldn’t picture the bright coral pink lip colours on that skin tone. When you look at the PCA pictures, do you find that Audrey doesn’t even look like the same woman? I was blown away by the difference. In her most beautiful colours, her skin tone is light, bright, evenly coloured, illuminated and brilliant. Bright Spring takes their Winter influence and turns it into pure sparkle.
This illustrates what worries me about doing Personal Colour Analysis from photographs, even good ones. They just give you one static shot, but colour analysis is anything except static. It is a very dynamic process, of ever-changing drapes, colours, and better-than decisions, through many sets of drapes. We compare and compare and compare again.
***Thank you to the wonderful Maytee Garza at Reveal Style Consultancy in New Jersey for this analysis. Maytee has shared photographs of PCA sessions with several clients on her Shutterfly page.***
During the draping, we see right away that black works pretty well, but seems too serious and hard at the same time. Something is off, not always easy to put your finger on what. In True Autumn brown, nothing happens. It just sits there. And the longer it sits, the worse things get, which happens with all wrong colours on everyone. Some Bright Springs look physically small, old, and weak in Autumn colours.
Then True Spring’s yellow goes on. Wow. The person turns yellowish, because that drape is too warm, but the eye goes from generic blue or brown to something amazing. The face becomes perfectly evenly coloured. If you could just erase the yellow, the face would already be wearing custom-coloured foundation and concealer. Ten years come off the face of older women. Everyone in the room stares speechless.
In the photo below, compare Audrey’s coloring to Maytee’s. Maytee is a Dark Winter. The clarity and lightness of Audrey’s skin compared to the much darker, muted tones of Maytee’s are so much more evident. Notice too that black works, but a small black block with a big light,bright block is spectacular.
Audrey’s descriptions are far better than mine could be. She said,
I love that it’s mostly about the skin tone in Sci/Art, but it really is about the eyes and hair too – not in the way that the eye/hair color is part of the final judgment call about a person’s season, but in the way that one can see changes in the hair and eye color too. When I wore the wrong colors, my eyes darkened and you couldn’t get the full effect of the topazy/hazel/interesting lightness (comparatively to other brownish eyes). When I wear my best colors, my eyes lighten to a shade I never even knew they could be, and even my hair changes – I notice the warmth in it, the interesting chestnut/red/orange undertones.
This is the best part. When the hair is covered, it is easier to believe what your eyes are telling you. In Audrey’s words,
The Bright drapes, both Bright Winter and Bright Spring, worked, but the Bright Winter drapes were a bit too blue/too cool, and they didn’t light me up as well as the Bright Spring drapes did. Interestingly enough, some of the Summer drapes worked on me but in general, the Summer palette greyed me and I REALLY could see it. So finally, it was between Warm (True Spring) or Neutral (Bright Spring).
Can you believe it – me, a dark-haired, “dark”-eyed gal (who actually has topaz-ish clear hazel eyes in the Sci/Art lighting which is a duplicate of natural lighting), was actually being considered for TRUE SPRING! I almost couldn’t believe it but funnily enough, it took a little while to figure out which worked better – warm or neutral. They both looked great but the Warm drapes yellowed me a bit. Also, between True Spring and Bright Spring, there was no contest – True Spring did not incorporate my natural darkness, which Bright Spring does.
One of the most interesting changes that we noticed aside from a greying of the skin or a dulling of the skin was the fact that my eyes darkened when I wore colors that weren’t bright/clear enough. This is also something that I noticed before this draping session, especially when trying different blush colors. When I’m not wearing the right colors, my eyes darken and you can’t get the full effect of how topaz/hazel-colored they are, and now I know that it wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks on me!
The more you’re willing to release, the bigger the prize.
Hair and Eye Colour and Season
February 5, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 24 Comments
By way of documenting information, since this website serves as a content management system as well as a blog, this is an update in my thinking on this important topic.
In the wonderful discussions in our Facebook Fan Club, my belief that hair color is useless in determining Seasons surfaced in a thread about the unique Season of Bright Spring. Women often ask which celebrity might embody that coloring, and I can never think of one. This is the one group for which no average appearance exists. I think of Mrs. Laura Bush, with her turquoise eyes that tilt upwards. The French actress Audrey Tautou might serve as a dark-eyed example, but she has such sharp darkness and opacity of skin that she is probably more weighted towards Winter, with a smaller fraction of Spring.
Please, if anyone is finding the jargon confusing, do ask in the comments. And if you’re a Fb member, please pardon the reiteration.
While some PCA systems only recognize members of this Season as having clear blue or green eyes, but never brown eyes, I believe that brown-eyes Springs exist, and are usually mixed with a little Winter (thereby making them Bright Springs). Since the 1980s, when 4 Season systems were more prevalent, many very experienced and skilled color analysts believe that hair color and eye color remain important factors in determining your Season. I don’t.
I am not here to say that I am right and anyone else is wrong. Our philosophies may diverge a little. The same could be said of any two practitioners in any field. Having your colors analyzed is still the best, fastest, easiest way of spending less money smarter and looking way the heck better.
Remember that I define Season not by how you look, but by which group of colors make your skin look as perfect, young, healthy, and evenly colored as it possibly can. We figure that out using many sets of very specially colored drapes. When we find the set that enhances you above all the others, what we have really uncovered are the exact pigments already in your skin, in your body. When you then wear the colors you already are, you look like magic because your person and your attire is sending the same wavelength of energy to the viewer. That feels really good to be and to look at.
L to R, True Summer, Dark Winter, True Summer.
So, for hair and eye color to play a factor in Season, they would have to contain the exact same pigments as those in the skin.
We know that the genes that code hair, skin, eyes (eye color and line patterns in the iris, since those quite consistently seen together), and personality are not the same ones.
We know too that some combination of these genes often travel together when the chromosomes divide (or are transcribed together when the proteins are made, or there is some sort of genetic coupling at work), because we so often see certain traits together like blue eyes and blond hair. I think it’s scientifically reasonable to say that these genes are commonly expressed together in the individual or phenotype. If anyone knows more about human genetics than I do, I would love to know your opinion.
When I look at the people whose skin I’ve analyzed, the colors that are in the skin, and so in the colors in their color analysis palette that the drapes matched with, contain the vast majority of eye colours (and certain Season-specific line patterns) in 80% of people. I extrapolate this to say that eye colour and pattern can be correlated to skin pigmentation, and therefore Season, 80% of the time. Since it’s so very hard to correctly identify the precise colours in eyes, that value might be reduced to 70%.
The hair colors are present in the swatch book about 60% of the time. There are True Winters with orange hair. There are Light Summers with pink-red-orange hair. Colour variability abounds, and with eyebrows even more so. This says to me that hair colours and skin colours are genetically linked about 60% of the time (or less, because picking out the exact tones that create a given hair colour is really difficult).
Character traits are consistent among people in a Season pretty often, but are predominant to the Season stereotype only about 40% of the time. Personality traits are too diluted by experience, environment, and so on. Personality is too much of a hurricane to try to figure Season with. It’s a fun curiosity.
Rachel from Truth Is Beauty also made the fascinating point that as races interbreed, the eye-skin color association should fade. I’ll make the strong point that if you have not visited that website, and you have an interest in color, you really should. She has examples of the 12 Seasons, chosen with great accuracy and attention to detail. The information is also organized in a beautiful way.
-
Let your natural colouring guide you to your most flattering clothing, makeup, and hair colour choices.12 Seasons of practical, affordable information on the styles, cosmetics, hair colour, and jewelry that each palette wears most beautifully and the comparisons you need to wear your Season perfectly!
Get daily makeup and colour updates. Join the 12 Blueprints Fan Club on Facebook! A Click on the box will take you there.
