Are All 60 Colours Really My Best?
December 15, 2011 by Christine Scaman
Excellent question #4: Are there people who are really best in only some of their colors and for whom other colors in the palette are a compromise?
Short answer: No, there are no such people. I would say you are best in all 60 colours of your Season’s colour palette, your personal colour analysis swatches, though many women will only partially agree.
From the analyst’s position, what I care about is that no colour brings out the imperfections that we worked for 2 hours to eliminate. In that context, all 60 colours do work. Many others might too. From the question above then, it depends on your definition of “really best”. Mine is the youngest, most flawless, and evenly coloured skin tone possible. Your personal issues with powder pink or baby blue are not foremost in my head as long as I have you in your best pink and blue.
No doubt, women have preferences in their palette. Some will just never see themselves in yellow, especially True Winter and Soft Summer. It may take a woman 10 years to overcome being a green-hater. When we conclude the draping, there are 15 beautiful Final Drapes (not the test drapes) that we look at to begin exposing the client to more of their most beautiful colours. She will always love some and not love others. Few will ever own an item in every colour in their swatch book.
She will always look better in some when we see her colours the second time wearing her perfect makeup colours and the hair down. And she’ll look worse in some because wrong hair colour is detracting from how beautiful and balanced she could look, but it’s important for her to see that. As awful as the gray cap is, it’s a real moment in personal growth when you see yourself looking better in it than in your present hair colour. This is when you truly get it.
You have no worries here. Having something to work towards is empowering in itself. By that stage of the session, you will find your mind supplying you with the colour your hair should be or the colour that will perfect the skin. It’s a brand new voice for everyone, nudging you to make the right change. What the colour should be will appear in your head as soon as you stop trying to be the boss of yourself. It’s a very polite voice. It won’t interrupt the traffic flow in your head till you hold up the STOP sign.
It’s also in how you wear your colours. A Dark Winter in a big block of light colour won’t look quite right. She needs darkness to balance it with the larger proportion of dark colour in her and set up the contrast that every Winter needs. If her complexion is very dark, that block of light will work better because the contrast will already be in place.
Many Soft Summers don’t feel right in some of their lightest drapes. Flip one or two of the medium and dark colours over her shoulder at the same time and the picture clicks. Soft Summer is the queen of the sophisticated colour combinations, where sophisticated can mean “to become less simple and straightforward through experience or education” and “to develop into a more complex form”. Soft Summer is very much about layers of meaning, intention, and nuance, in their thoughts as in their colours. When other Seasons combine colour, they drive up the energy. Soft Summer colours are so gentle that they can be combined and still keep the picture elegant and so refined. For me, this Season’s magic isn’t fully apparent until its colours are combined. I’d say the same about Soft Autumn. They’re not so much speak-for-themselves colours, like True Autumn and True Spring. They seem to support one another with a synergy other Seasons don’t achieve as well, or at least, as graciously.
Many Bright Season persons need time to adjust to the colour brightness and energy if they had no inkling of the outcome. The analyst’s job throughout is to keep them focusing on their face, not the drapes. It’s easy to get scared off if you’ve been dressing like your friends or if your cosmetics salesperson thinks “She’d look unbelievable in this red but there’s no way she’ll try it, let alone buy it.”
True and Dark Autumn usually love all their colours. If they arrived wearing blonde hair and black whatever, they recognize there’s a little work to do but they don’t shy away. They are job-oriented anyhow and now have their better alternatives. The next time you see them, they’re glorious.
Light Summer can be surprised, having lived as a Soft Autumn with warm golden hair for 20 years. Since it is impossible not to like this palette, the adjustment is easy. They look better in the gray hat and their Final Drapes than they do when the hair is down but the problem is plain to see. They are usually just excited to get going though apprehensive about how to explain to the colourist what needs doing. They go in armed with photos of what they do want and what they don’t want.
Light Spring is usually happy too. Springs are very natural people with lots of spunk and spirit and a good bit of daring. These personalities are not caught up in the complicated inner quests. There is often something very spiritual in their life. Emotion runs close to the surface. I seldom find Springs bury a lot of themselves, much more WYSIWYG. They’re hard to repress and anxious to get going. Black’s not good? Fine, give me grey then. They’ll be sending me links to gorgeous products they unearthed within about 2 weeks of their PCA.
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12 Responses to “Are All 60 Colours Really My Best?”
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I laughed outloud when you spoke about True Winters and yellow! I have stared at those yellows in my swatch, unable to comprehend how they could possibly be good for me. I didn’t realize that was so common amongst us True Winters. ( I don’t often come across other T.W.s ) I wish analysts with blogs would talk more about what we should do as a T.W., I still get confused sometimes. It seems like it should be clear cut to me, but it is hard for me to apply to everyday life.That all being said, I still can’t picture wearing yellow!
Maybe too many bad memories of the wrong yellows.
I like these recent articles.
Do you cover these kinds of concepts in your book?
I recognized myself (True Spring) in that green-hater, always veering anxiously back to blue when confronted with a green blouse or shirt. Maybe it was reading the bazaar scene in “Gone With the Wind”, where Scarlett sees a rival wearing a green dress:
Maybelle Merriwether went toward the next booth on the arm of the Zouave, in an apple-green tarlatan so wide that it reduced her waist to nothingness. … “How sweet I’d look in that dress,” thought Scarlett, a savage envy in her heart. “Her waist is as big as a cow’s. That green is just my color and it would make my eyes look– Why will blondes try to wear that color? Her skin looks as green as an old cheese.”
It’s taken 30 years to find out that some greens do work on me!
Jess,
Winters can look simply great in yellow, especially because it’s unexpected. But they do have to get it very right or it’s really quite wrong. Like everything else about Winter, a blueness must prevail, though not enough blue to turn it green.
Ashley,
No, or not with as much emphasis and explanation as here. I tried to keep the colour theory very small. Others are more qualified to talk about that than I am. Mine is more of a How To Use handbook.
I like doing these articles because they allow to think through the question. The fact that I hear these questions often means that this same hole exists in the understanding of many. Once we plug all these holes, we can get a knowledge baseline so we can move on. A bit like learning to use Word.
Heidi,
SOME greens? On a T Sp? Perhaps you meant MANY greens. New leaf, grassy, golden green, clear olive. Green is the colour of life and T Sp is certainly one of its flag-carrying Seasons.
Very interesting comment on Soft colours – I’ve been struggling rather, seeing my Soft Autumn colours as drab and murky but it’s quite true that combined, they can look fab (and that idea helps avoid the terribly ageing trap of head to toe beige which we’ve discussed before). Teal/peacock with olive or bronze, mocha with brick red, soft tan with marine navy. I’ve bought a few scarves that combine “safe” colours with the more vivid ones and I’m getting great effect from those.
Very true about True Winters and wearing yellow! I know a few TW’s my whole life and i’ve NEVER seen any of them wearing clothes or having accessories in warm colors and even close to the beige-yellow-orange colour family. It’s definitely an amazing thing that Seasons and personalities correlate to the smallest detailes which you’d never ever even thing about.
“Light Summer can be surprised, having lived as a Soft Autumn with warm golden hair for 20 years. ” OMG, this is me to a T. Seeing my colorist today, can hardly wait!!
I’m one of those soft summer yellow phobics. When I saw the yellow on my swatch book I thought it must be some cruel mistake. I hated the color and I refused to believe I could wear it.
I’ve, for the last two years, been on a mission to actually find that yellow in the wild wild west that is retail so I can prove to myself it’s possible. That’ll be like color exposure-therapy.
Ugh, this seems to conflict me. I have been told I’m a light summer, but ? Then, you said that about having golden blonde hair, living as a soft autumn, which I think I have done.
Still, all you say about the light spring sounds like me–that really sounds like me! I wish I lived close enough to be draped! I would accept if I could see it.
Hi Christine…..thought provoking article…… have you written any articles that refer to the colour combining for SA and SSu ??? any pictures of your fans suggesting this ?? I am looking forward to getting a fan that I can play with the arms and see how colours look together.My current swatch doesnt allow that as its fixed….
Thanks for any input
Janette x
Thanks for this post, Christine! This gets to the heart of my skepticism when I’ve been analyzed in the past (once as some sort of Winter, once as some sort of Autumn)…in both cases, I could see that some of the colors in the final palette were just NOT so great with my skin. And, in each cases, when I pointed it out to the analyst, she agreed, saying something like, “Well, yes I’m not such a fan of that one for you…”.
I’m looking forward to the rigor of a Sci-Art analysis. Heh, who knows…maybe we’ll discover the reason that folks have such a hard time pinning me down to Winter vs Autumn is that I’m NEITHER! J
Crystal,
I would accept if I could see it … my dear, you speak for thousands. Don’t place too much emphasis on hair colour and Season. Those associations can only ever be generalizations. I’ve seen numerous red headed Light Summers, or at least with apparently warm hair colour. I said this a Q from Inge from the Natural Hair Colour recent article:
Whatever the hair colour, it will contain pigments found in skin and eyes and therefore becomes a logical part of a unified whole picture. We can’t always see those pigments obviously, but they’re there. As I see it (but cannot prove it scientifically without a spectrophotometer), my husband’s hair contains some purple as does his skin, so they both fit perfectly, though subliminally, with the True Winter he is. When we try to replicate such colours from a bottle, those subtle, unifying pigments are absent so it just looks like wrong hair colour.
Janette,
Could you ask me your Q in another way? I’m not clear on what you’re trying to get at. Do you mean how those Seasons wear their colour combinations?
Ali,
You will LOVE the experience.