Colour Analyzed Makeup Favorites
April 27, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Awhile ago, I got a makeup kit from Darin Wright, the Sci\ART analyst who developed cosmetics custom-coloured for the 12 Seasons (see the article The Ultimate Colour Analyzed Cosmetics.)
This was so interesting to me because of the opportunity to see my Season (Dark Winter) translated through another analyst’s eyes. Just because I see it one way doesn’t make it right. I get stuck in Season and appearance ruts just like everyone else. Being given a new way of looking at something is destabilizing, but its gives a much broader interpretation of the person, Season, and colours. More inputs means more choices and looks for the wearer.
With this product, you are using the smallest dusting of product to deliver big, blendable, pure colour. Imagine opening the pressed product you use now and picking up the least amount possible. The learning comes quickly but you have to retrain yourself in the beginning to barely touch the brush to the powder.
The blushes are my runaway favorite. There were lighter and fresher in every sense than any other I’ve tried, and very skin like. I loved all three. I mix Vehement with Frisky or Driven to make a colour that is neutral, warm and cool, just like the Season. (Miss November is the bronzer/contour for this Season. It is so awesomely good that it gets its own section further on.)Rub some on the end of your finger and you’ll think “Oh, jeez, it’s coral frost.” Fluff a dusting on your cheek and you’ll think “Oh, jeez, I’ve never seen blush that becomes part of my skin like that.”
From L, Frisky, Vehement, Driven, Miss November.
When I first looked at the blush, I had frost worries but it is barely what might be called glowing. It is a bit reflective when light strikes it, but you can’t see shimmer particles without a magnifier. You use such a sprinkling of product that frost doesn’t have time to really get going. Play with it. Its presentation is fun and using it is more fun. The mixability of these colours is probably their second best quality after colour. A dab on a brush picks up a few grains. I blend them on the side of my hand, or on a sheet of regular paper under the pots to see the colour better and catch any bits that might spill.
I think my biggest reason for this post is to show you the bronzer/contour. I used to wear Clinique Stay Matte 06 along the sides of my nose, at the temples, under the cheekbone, and along the jaw. I knew it was wishy washy on my Dark Winter skin and better for a lighter cool neutral like Soft Summer, but big range in this product would take years to find. Of the 4 cool Neutral Seasons (Soft Summer, Dark Winter, Bright Winter, Light Summer), the only woman I have ever seen improved by conventional bronzers is Light Summer, and that’s only if she’s buying peach-gold, not earthy tan. On the others, the skin looks duller. They do better with cool powders, a few shades darker than the skin. Hard to find.
Miss November is awesome. It’s one of the darker browns that are in already in Dark Winter skin so it has complete credibility on this face. Its darkness gives it more ability to carve features than the Clinique powder did. Use the tiniest amount and just lay down a shadow. It won’t be overdark (unless you use too much, but it’s controllable). Sometimes, I mix a little into the blushes if I’m wearing a browner lipstick. I also have it from a most discerning True Autumn that her Season’s version is beautiful as well. See how it’s redder than the foundation powders, and cooler? It is a brilliant colour.
From L, top row, Vehement, Driven, Miss Nov. Bottom row, 3 foundations.
My opinion is just my opinion. It’s not necessarily right. Darin has a pinker vision of Dark Winter than I do in lip colour. That’s fine. I mix colour constantly because it seems to bring the best out of each colour. This is a great way to learn about colour interaction and make that colour you have in your head, instead of spending money on tube after tube of near-identical lipstick. I have a browner vision of my Season, and I brown it a lot. I mix Lancome Perfect Fig (too dark alone but a great brown mixer for DW) about 50:50, with the eleablake lip colours or my previous standbys of Lauder Double Wear Ruby (too cool but I love the formula) and Arden Sugarplum Shimmer, to make my vision of browned raspberry (mix Fig with Double Wear Mulberry to make a browned red).
These are the eyeshadows. There are perfect greys, browned purples (which a very central colour for DW), matte pewters (Self-Reliant below; though it didn’t stick to the paper, it delivers huge colour on skin), and Dynamic, an excellent redwood brown. I am compelled to mix everything, as in the lower photo. Isn’t it great how the two colours come out at once? If that isn’t DW grey, I don’t know what is.
From L, Dynamic, Groovy, Self-Reliant, Proud.
Mixture of eyeshadows, Proud and Dynamic.
Darin is a professional makeup artist. Of course, she’s going to stretch the artistic limits. She’s going to know how to use and apply colours that I wouldn’t know where to begin with. There are mattes and shimmers. There are colours right from your swatches and some you won’t recognize or will wonder about. There are conservative colours and further out options. I’m not a coloured makeup woman, i.e. blue, teal, green, etc. Half of you will agree. Half will think BO-RING and wouldn’t leave the house with only grey and brown eye makeup.
Talk to Darin. She adjusts and adds colours and formulas all the time. Believe me, she understands that there’s a learning curve and is there to listen and help. I hear she has a new matte deep berry True Winter blush called Brainy that is said to be lovely. She could have a menu. I’d be the colours-from-fan/greys-and-pinks/matte-only-please person that probably puts her to sleep. Using her makeup is like having a second analyst chime in on your Season. Think about why she included each colour and you’ll only understand your Season better. Don’t love a colour? Exchange or return it.
If you love colour, ESPECIALLY if you love colour, at least know you’re wearing the right colour. There are beautiful icy pink and lavender eyeshadow highlighters for this Season too. Madcap (not shown) is a gorgeous iced lilac, that applies more as iced grey – which is my idea of coloured makeup: it has a unique effect by virtue of the colour, but the viewer doesn’t perceive purple.
Definitely buy at least one eyeshadow. Applied, it looks like coloured skin, not coloured powder on skin. Maybe a bit like a cream eyeshadow. Really good.
I admire that Darin is doing this, in a most beautiful product. eleablake is already closer to stellar than anyone has approached. It is your feedback and constructive responses that will allow her see her creation through your eyes, the consumer’s eyes. Tell her what you like and are not so sure about. Like me, it was from your comments that I got a sense of what you wanted me to talk about. You can pick, choose, and return, and Darin will keep tweaking her colour formulas.
As it is, you go to the department store, wander from counter to counter thinking “Wow, is it just me or does all this stuff look the same?” Yeah, no kidding it looks the same. I often think it pretty much is the same. The one-thing-fits-all formula that women recognize. We feel safe so we buy more.
Getting used to new things can feel annoying, as one woman put it so perfectly. We wonder why we didn’t just stick with the formulations and packaging we were used to. Because you didn’t want more of the same, that’s why. Because, with your PCA, you finally understood colour, real glowing pure colour, as it pertains to your skin. Remember when you were getting used to your Season? That was annoying too. You had to force yourself for a month, but it brought you to a better place. Who thought texting was fun from the start? Who uses the same mascara wand they used 8 years ago?
Choosing The Best Grey
April 18, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 9 Comments
First thing I ask myself when I’m trying to put a grey into a personal colour analysis Season is: “Does it contain any colour other than B&W?”
If I can only see black and white, it’s Winter. Winter’s greys can be the lightest light, colours known as icy, or the darkest near-blacks. If your eye doesn’t pick up anything other than some rendition of black, this is a Winter colour.
Grey is a most underused colour and the most important neutral colour. Grey can be your lights, mediums, darks, and neutrals. It is more imaginative than black, what isn’t, and makes an outfit look much more interesting. It’s elegant and sophisticated and far more slimming on most people. Grey is also wildly underused in eye makeup and suits more types of skin than brown. The drawbacks may be that there are so many versions, but there’s only one good ol’ black. The worst thing about black is that it’s so easy.
Grey can take on a suggestion of the colours around it, so it looks purplish as eyeshadow if lipstick or clothing is red or violet. For this reason, getting too particular about placing greys to a specific Season within the 12 is not something to worry about. As long as you can place it among the 4 True Seasons, it will adapt nicely with the rest of the outfit. The Neutral Seasons stick quite close to the parent True Season’s greys.
Winter’s greys are usually pretty easy. The might-as-well-be-wearing-nothing effect that does Winter no favors happens when the grey (or any color) is gentled. You know that generic soft heathered grey used in men’s T-shirts? A Winter will dominate that colour entirely, and the shirt will have no character at all, like a big blank space. It looks like underwear or pyjama wear. Along with being made of B&W, there should be a definite sense of sharpness, like a knife edge, or darkness, like a charcoal. Winter’s taupe, at the bottom of the graphic above, has that Winter redness that comes out of it, giving it a sharpness, making it unlikely to strike you as soft.
Soft Summer greys.
Summer’s grey is easy to pick out. There will be a wash of blue, pink, or mauve. Even the taupes, which go from grayer oyster to Portobello mushroom are pinkish.
If it’s brown or green, it’s Autumn’s grey. Autumn has more colour in their greys and taupes. The greys are more obviously greened, like camo, or oranged, which makes them look heavy, like a velvet couch. They may also seem browned (because brown is just dark orange), or greened in the various shades of dry tobacco. The taupes look more brown.
Soft Autumn greys.
In a Spring grey, you can see sunshine yellow coming out of it. Grey is inherently cool and Spring is not. Grey is quieter while Spring sings of colour. Therefore, Spring has few real greys and many more browns, peachy ones and greenish ones. Their greys are yellowish, which I could never pick up unless I held up several grey items in the store together. The greys are actually so yellow, they can seem a little green. Spring is often that way, like dandelion yellow is almost green, like the unripe banana is greenish-yellow, like the hair of some True Spring children is so yellow, it can seem greenish in pictures.
Spring greys.
Does darkness or lightness guide the grey to a Season? Doesn’t help. Every Season has several levels of light/darkness in most colours, including grey.
Sci\ART Colour Analysis in the UK
April 16, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 1 Comment
I’ve been asked many times about this and never had a good answer. Today, I have a great answer. This is a repost of a comment from another website that I will close down soon.
It is from Nikki Bogardus.
Contact her at nikki@mycolorrx.com
Her website is http://mycolorrx.com
I am a fully trained and experienced Sci/Art color analyst and come to the UK frequently…. with drapes packed in my suitcase! So if you are still interesed, please let me know and we will try to arrange something. FYI: I am a Brit, now living in New Jersey and Sci/Art is the best color analysis sytem available.
Many thanks, Nikki! I’ve changed the info in the Directory.
One Woman’s Colour Journey
April 12, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 7 Comments
We are beings of light. We project a light composed of our own particular version of each colour, as if we were the prisms that split incoming white light into its component colours. Our light is ours alone, a very special mixture of the lights of all those who came before us. They live on in us because we emanate their energy in the form of their light. Only our physical body goes away but a life, of which the physical body is only a small part, has no end.
We are made beautiful but we forget. We get lost. Sometimes, understanding our deepest sorrow is how we find our way back to ourselves. To feel the bedrock of who we came here to be is an experience in personal truth that can barely be described. The simplicity of a beautifully told story can move us to tears, as this one did for me. We can be connected with the truth and beauty of being human, and perfectly human, better than all the colour analysis in the world could achieve.
Here, this woman shares her story to remind us that in truth lies the greatest freedom of all. In our way, we are all works of art, even if not as literally as she can be.
I was a pretty little girl born in 1969. Blond hair, dark brown eyes, and I loved to look at myself in the mirror and sing. Before I learned to walk I would pull myself up to the full length mirror and dance and sing looking at my reflection. My mother was a music major in college and thought is was so cute that I was taking after her. As I got a little older, in the 70′s we lived in cheap apartments and homes decorated in harvest gold, rust, brown, and avocado green. We didn’t get a lot of sun in Alaska and my hair lost its lustre. It turned darker and drab and my family all had pasty white skin. It was okay because it was the 70′s and everyone was pretty “natural.” My parents had three kids after me. My sister looked like my mom with her beautiful dark hair, and my two brothers and I looked like my dad.
As we entered the 80′s, a time of bright colors, MTV, and supermodels, I looked around and felt invisible. My house was old fashioned and outdated, my parents were very sweet but not very cool, and I felt mousy and drab. My friends lived in big, fancy modern houses and wore trendy clothes that we couldn’t afford. Some even colored their hair, in junior high! I started using Sun In on my hair and QT self tanner and babysitting as much as possible so I could buy a new outfit at the mall every weekend. My confidence grew and I was very popular and confident all through high school.
I became the makeup artist and hairstylist for all of my friends and family and even kept a portfolio of my before and after photos. After high school I became a licensed hairdresser and esthetician and freelanced as a makeup artist. I wore a ton of makeup and had big, eighties style hair. When Color Me Beautiful came out in 1980 I was beyond fascinated. My mother “had her colors done” and was a winter but they wouldn’t pay for us girls to get ours done. I wanted so badly to be told that I was a winter or a summer or my third and final choice a spring. Anything but an autumn, all those yucky seventies colors. My dad was fixated on wearing camel, olive, and brown and most of the time he worn those colors in flannel or wool plaid shirts. I looked like my dad and my brothers without my makeup. I looked like a boy!
Fast forward to the past two years. I had an on-line color analysis as a Dark Autumn and I was horrified. I felt sick to my stomach and started to cry. I hated those colors. After a few weeks I decided to try on this new look with a new attitude and it never really fit but I got over my aversion. As you all have watched my progress on 12B you have seen that I am now very happily living in the Soft Autumn colors. These colors fit me like a glove and I will tell you why. Last year on January 12, 2010 my beloved father lost his battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and a fast growing esophageal cancer from smoking. It was a brutal way to die and he got very thin very fast. They had to buy very small sizes of jeans, belts, and he even wore suspenders with a belt to keep his pants up.
After he passed away we had to decide what to do with his clothes. I had all three of my siblings try on his jeans and his belt, and his millions of flannel shirts. The only person the jeans and belt fit was ME and the only flannel shirt that fit me was an olive green. I wore that shirt almost constantly for a month because it felt like he was hugging me in it. Everywhere I went people told how beautiful I looked in that pretty olive fabric and how it brought out the green in my hazel eyes. Wait, my eyes are dark brown?! In real life my eyes look just like my dad’s. I actually look so much like my dad that people who met me for the first time assumed that I must be Art’s daughter. So all along I was beautiful just like my father. I never needed to dye my hair, tan my skin, or pile on makeup. I just needed to be happy with the coloring that I was born with and know that I AM A WORK OF ART.
Meet Virtual Colour Analyst Lynda Tarantino
April 6, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 18 Comments
I am having as much fun with this Meet the Analyst series as I hope you are in reading the posts. It began as a way of showcasing some of the fascinating ways in which analysts apply their love and knowledge of colour, and has developed into an opportunity to meet creative, dedicated women who are passionate about colour and helping women look and feel as beautiful as possible.
Today’s featured Sci\ART analyst is Lynda Tarantino. Lynda’s studio is in Western New York. She is somewhat unique in that she is happy to do 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis online, using photographs and questionnaires. I think every colour analyst would agree that in-person draping is best, but the reality is that it is not available to everyone. I will be the first to stand up and tell you that Lynda has a remarkable talent for getting results that are as accurate as they can be over the Internet.
I hope Lynda won’t mind if I mention how good her hair colour is. True Autumn is so often too blonde, like many women before their PCA, but many have trouble leaving the blonde behind. Of course, you make your darkness adjustment based on your colouring, but super shiny, rich, warm, almost-metallic brown hair is just so awesome. It clears the skin of lines, opacity, age, yellowness, and it coordinates so much better with the right clothes and makeup. Lynda is a great example of how fabulous this colouring looks when the colour is right. What True Autumn can do always astounds me.
I asked Lynda a few questions that she kindly answered. If you have some of your own, please post them in the comments or contact her privately. I know she’d be glad to speak with you.
Lynda’s website is at www.thatsyourcolor.com
What path led you to colour analysis?
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