The Draping Process in Colour Analysis
February 28, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 3 Comments
To be accurate, Seasonal Colour Analysis requires:
- that the drapes be precisely coloured to proceed through each level of the 3 properties of colour, namely Light>>Dark, Warm>>Cool, and Clear>>Soft
- that the drapes be used in a logical order so the results can be evaluated accurately
It is a bonus if:
- the system checks itself, so you don’t wander down the wrong road
- the system allows you to find several ways of solving a question, should you arrive at an impasse.
The Sci\ART system provides all 4 elements of a methodical approach to Personal Colour Analysis. There are 12 Seasons, which allows for the subtle variations in colour levels without providing more choice than an eye could really distinguish.
PCA systems with more than 12 Seasons are probably distinguishing the Seasons based on how colours are combined, rather than the colours themselves. That is perfectly valid. Seasonal Colour Analysis is not just about your skin perfecting colours. It is very much about how the colours are worn to best harmonize with the energy of the person wearing them.
The video below is at YouTube, at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis The Draping Process, if the embedded video below doesn’t work.
The Right Shade Of Peach
February 28, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
A video blog today.
Peach may be the cosmetic colour that everyone owns in some shade or other. Is yours right for you? Most of the time, it’s too earthy and brown. On a light or clear complexion, that looks heavy and dominating and dull.
For eyeshadow, lipstick, and blush,
The Spring wears a light, yellow-based, very clear peach.
The Summer will fare better in a pastel pink.
Autumn colours mesh best with an earth, golden or browned peach.
Winter colours request icy pink or cool white instead of peach when choosing light colour tones.
A Colour Analysis gives you the knowledge of precisely which shades of all cosmetics colours (and clothes colours) is perfect for your skin tone.
Soft Summer Jewelry 2
February 22, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
I was looking for jewelry and shoes to go with cocktail dresses for a Soft Summer client. I love to do that when I have a person in mind whose colouring I understand. It’s like vicarious shopping.
From the 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis Sci\ART system, a quick Soft Summer review:
- approx 75% or more of the colouring is Summer (take a look at True Summer Jewelry to get a sense of how it feels to be/look at a True Summer)
- about 25% or less is Autumn
True Summer colours are absolutely cool. The cool effect comes from blue-grey or pink-grey. Clothes and makeup with one degree of heat turns these people yellow, or some variation on the theme.
What does the Autumn impose on Summer’s colours?
First, take a quick look at How The 5 Autumns Add Brown To Hair Colour – or to any colour, for that matter. There is an overlay of gray-brown. It is not orange, yellow, or camel. It is the colour of fog. The blueness of True Summer’s colours is being dimmed. These colours are less distinctly blue and more gray-browned.
The palette is still dusty plums, roses, blues, and mauves, the cornerstone colours of all Summers. The amber of Soft Autumn is still nowhere to be seen. The blush may be Desert Rose or Pink Tan, but it is not Mocha.
Autumn changes the feeling, not just the colours (because colour IS feeling!). It becomes less dainty and more sturdy and grounded. The shape shifts from round to a bit more square. This repeats in the face shape, where the jaw is often quite squared in an Autumn face, and the mouth shape more straight with a less obvious bow.
A simple silver chain is good, or silver hoop earrings. Grace Kelly going to the office is the image of this group.
Jewelry below all at Nordstrom. I’ve linked the pictures but I always end up on the Intl Shipping page. You can find them from the product info on Nordstrom’s excellent Search page.
These Alexis Bittar Small Drop earrings in Warm Grey (not the colour above) caught my attention. There is a soft lustre, like opal, which looks soft, like this Season. They’re round, but with a little squaring effect, just like Autumn’s squaring effect on Summer’s circle.
Soft Summer is a Neutral Season, with warmth and coolness. They can wear gold as long as it’s not too yellow or deeply golden.
What about these Triple Drop Earrings from Kate Spade? They’re light coloured, so are they Light Summer? No, still Soft to my eye.
Light Summer colour analysis swatches are a bit yellowed. Soft Summer are relatively grayed. I still see these as foggy day, not sunny day.
You might disagree and you might be right – there is turquoise here, always a Spring effect. With makeup and fashion, the difference between 80% and 100 may have to be ignored much of the time. There isn’t enough precise choice.
This is the Lauren Bead Cluster earring. They risk clutter against Summer’s restraint and moderation, but I like that they feel a little unexpected. With a simple dress that repeats some of the colours in the jet, it could look young and interesting. The metal parts are lacy and airy, as Summer’s should be.
I see them as too detailed and lightweight for Winter. I like the brown tones on the grey glass. Any kind of pearl always works with Summer, and gray pearl is amazing on Soft Summer.
These Dabby Reid Ltd. Linear Drop earrings have stillness and weight, I’d put them on Winter. The metal fastening is bold and dramatic, like Winter
Following rules is fine to a point. You have to put a personal spin on your choices, because nobody else is you and they won’t communicate about themselves just as you would.
Jocelyn Is A Bright Winter
February 13, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments
Jocelyn and I work together. Since we work with animals, all I see her in is surgical scrubs. I knew 4 things before we began:
- I have never seen her in a colour that she doesn’t completely dominate, with the exception of dark charcoal.
- Black (and cool colours in general) clear her skin.
- She can wear light colours as well as dark.
- There is great contrast (very light lights and very dark darks) in her colouring.
I try like h.ll to let the drapes guide the Personal Colour Analysis (PCA), and avoid all foregone conclusions. When I see someone every day, and the effects are this dramatic, I can’t help but have suspicions. What did I suspect?
- Her best colours would be very dark and/or very saturated. (see What Are Clear And Soft Colours? for an explanation of saturation.)
- There is great potential for clarity in her skin. Warm colours make her skin blotchy, heavy, green-yellow, murky, and thick-looking. Softly greyed colours (pastels) give the skin an allover-grey undertone. It’s Winter and Spring that have the clear colours.
- Dark Autumn and Dark Winter have some light colours, but not many. They just look better in darker colours. Joce looks fresh and beautiful in the right light colour.
- We’re probably looking for a Season of contrast, namely a Winter of some sort.
The expression “clears the skin” is confusing. It’s very hard to demonstrate but extremely important in interpreting ultimate skin perfection. You met Joce in the previous article, Clearing Skin With Colour Analysis and can watch this process on video there.
Joce has a strong natural flush in her cheeks. Isn’t “ruddy” a sign of Autumn? I’ve seen in Autumns, Winters, Springs, and Summers. Not useful information. Ignore it. On Joce, the redness in the cheeks blends back softly into her complexion only in Bright Winter’s colour intensity.
The boobytrap of matching brown eyes to brown (Autumn) drapes is waiting in ambush here. Yes, there was a connection between the two. Skin always takes precedence, and Autumn colours are easily Joce’s worst shades. All too easy to put brown eyeshadow on these eyes. Most shades of brown did not help this skin. Why then paint them on her face? True to her personal colour palette, her cosmetic colour was a blackened brown liner, and it meshed perfectly with her face. On a blue-eyed person, we would have used charcoal or deep sapphire.
She doesn’t have dark hair or the cliché “clear eyes”. Her hair is medium brown, but there are no orange tones in it, and very few yellow (she’s growing out some yellow dye at the moment). Have you ever in your life seen eyes like this? I promise you I did not adjust anything in this image other than to raise the exposure and sharpness 2 notches. And this is without mascara!!
As a Bright Winter, Jocelyn is primarily a Winter person, but she has a trace of Spring. When you combine the 2 Seasons of highest colour saturation, the energy of these colours in unwearable by anyone else. They will disappear inside such colour intensity, and therefore appear reduced. Never let your clothing send a message that diminishes you – or at least, don’t put down money for it!
This video shows the final draping process.
If your browser won’t play it here, watch it on YouTube at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis Bright Winter Final Drapes.
I’ve been asked why she’s wearing so much makeup in the video. For several reasons:
- I was taking photos as well as video and have learned that too little makeup is invisible in photos.
- I don’t try hard to match foundation, others can do that better than I – though you WILL finally know what your undertones are, unknowable without a PCA. I want you to see what your makeup colours look like, as your eye starts to learn this. I apply the makeup colours pretty heavily and I don’t blend. I want you to see how forgiving right makeup is and how it can dramatically heighten the magic in your natural colouring.
- Bright Winter is a Season of all-out glamour, like no other group. Just as they can carry unbelievably shocking colour intensity, so can they wear striking makeup.
Most importantly, I want you to stretch your preconceived limits of what is possible. I want you to start replacing the old pictures of yourself in your head.
Clearing Skin With Colour Analysis
February 9, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Clearing the skin is a very fundamental concept in Personal Colour Analysis. Very hard to describe though.
We watch for this effect across all the Seasons. Just like all the optical effects during the draping sequence, it is more obvious in some people. In many situations, we’re looking at a person of cool coloring, and watching for some kind of sallowness to clear away the instant the warm drapes are switched to cool.
The sallow effect may look orange, green-beige, yellow, blotchy and uneven, thick and opaque, muddy, or variations of those.
When the drape changes, it looks as though a yellow filter is suddenly made transparent. The evenly coloured milky calm returns to the skin tone.
Watch Jocelyn in this video.
If your browser won’t play it, watch it on YouTube at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis Clearing The Skin.
Jocelyn is a Bright Winter. As the Analysis proceeded, we knew she would not be an Autumn because of the yellow overtone in the skin that drained away in the cooler yellow drape. Her ultimate skin perfection is nowhere in Autumn colours.
Take care with these interpretations. Clearing the skin is always a positive thing, but it may happen that when the yellow clears away, what replaces it appears clearer because the yellow is gone, but it’s not necessarily better. In Joce’s case, her skin becomes evenly grayed in the Summer drapes, making the skin look ashy. Because it’s a pale grey, about the colour of her hat and my coat, it can be deceiving. You think ‘the skin is evenly coloured, so that’s good, right?’. In some people, that greyness makes them look truly corpse-like, it’s that strong.
It’s not good but it’s different. The photos below show Joce in the Autumn very yellow drape again, with the blotchy yellow skin, pronounced shadows under the eyes, and cheeks that are too pink.
One could say that the brown eyes come out in the yellow drape. Going down that road would lead you wrong. The skin comes first. The eyes and NATURAL hair colour will automatically be PERFECT. On EVERYONE. The Light and Soft Seasons can do things to make the hair more interesting, but the base colour is automatically the right one for you and what YOU are supposed to look like. The other Seasons usually have their right colour and nothing from a bottle can improve on it. Without Kate Hudson’s skin tone, you can’t believably pull off her hair.
The black drape creates an evenly coloured skin. It looks calm. It FEELS calm. The shadows are gone. Most of us are wearing too much concealer and foundation to fight the effects of bad clothes and hair colour. Yes, you’re right, Joce is 20-something and blessed with remarkable skin. Even what she wears makes a difference.
The black tones in her eyes snap. Here eyes no longer bloodshot and red-rimmed. You’ll see Joce again in an upcoming post. The eyes on this girl have to be seen to be believed.
How The 5 Autumns Add Brown To Hair Colour
February 3, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments
Pardon, but what 5 Autumns?
Well, in Seasonal Colour Analysis, there’s Soft, True, and Dark.
But Autumn’s blends include Soft Summer and Dark Winter too.
Only 1 True Season, and 4 Neutral Seasons all comprise some Autumn colour influence.
Autumn’s biggest misconception is the copper red hair. Usually, these people have brown hair.
The Autumn=copper association is often extended to include clothing colours, skin undertones, and makeup colours.
In fact, the shade of brown used to warm Autumn colours doesn’t attain copper’s heat till you’re way into the middle of the Autumn action.
Let’s start at True Summer. No orange. No gold. No yellow. The brown is grey and the grey is blueish.
As Autumn starts phasing in, we move to Soft Summer. A little brown is being added. A neutral brown, not orange yet, not even amber. The blue undertone is taken out. The colours appear to have a faint tan.
Soft Autumn comes along next. We see a soft amber brown. Yellows re-emerge, where True Summer barely had any, and they are golden as an amber-brown patina lays over all the colours of this palette. This is the beginning of the metallic quality we talk about in the skin and hair of Autumn people. It’s hard to describe. It doesn’t look like a tan, it’s much more in the skin than on it.
Finally, True Autumn. NOW the undercurrent is truly orange. Not before. Brown, remember, is just dark orange. This is an orangey brown. It is in the skin. It is also in the eye colour.
Up to Dark Autumn, a trace of Winter is felt. Winter’s colours are cooler and bring in red, the essential colour of the Winter group. The result is the red-orange undertone that defines the perfect disappearing blush and lipstick on Dark Autumn. Colour Analysis is all about cosmetic colours custom-coloured for your skin.
Since Winter is dark, we must add another Winter effect for Dark Winter : the addition of perceptible black. What orange remains is turning neutral brown again, like it was in Soft Summer, but a darker version caused by the black.
Now, we leave Autumn altogether and it’s True Winter. Orange is gone again.
Watch me do it.
Be careful.
Soft Summer’s hair is almost always too light and too highlighted with a colour that’s too yellow. At first glance, they seem like light people and it looks ok. The Colour Analysis drapes soon show us how aging the light hair is for the skin tone. Once it’s corrected, it is much better.
A Soft Autumn can too easily be put in too red hair. It is overkill every time. Unless Nature gave you red, it is VERY hard to get right from a bottle. Like thinking a bottle can replicate your childhood colour. Won’t happen. This is light tawny hair.
True Autumn in light tawny hair looks F-L-A-T. And instantly 10 years older. They need warmth and rich colour. They do not need highlights, lowlights, or other bizarre f/x. The colour should speak for itself.
Dark Autumn often adds a red rinse. You NEED to know if you’re on the warm or cool side of the Season. If the red is too cool, like red wine, it can be very artificial. Artificial works on the staff of the hair salon, not the clients.
Dark Winter should do what all Winters do. Think twice before lightening hair. They can have a dark force that is to be reckoned with. Breaking it up with frosted tips, well… I’d rather have the force. The skin-perfecting hair colour is a dark neutral brown, most of the time.
What’s the hair lesson? Nature will never give you hair colour that is your skin’s perfection. They accord automatically. Your natural colour is always your best base colour.
Can I Borrow My Neighbor Season’s Colours?
January 26, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
Short answer: you may have to.
So remember, when you get your Personal Colour Analysis, be sure to know if you fall on the cool or warm side of the Season. That means : when we’re finally down to testing between your last 2 Seasons, are we testing your #1 BEST Season against its warmer neighbor, or against the cooler one? Perhaps THE most exciting part of the analysis. Everybody tingles at this point.
In Wrong Colours Away From the Face, I said that I don’t buy into wearing colours that are not in your #1 BEST Season, unless people will only see you sitting at a desk.
To present a unified whole, you can’t have 1 big block that’s way off. The colours want to connect together to create a force, but they can’t if one is flowing against the current.
How you combine the colours of your personal colour palette depends on the energy of your Season. The colours themselves should all work together because they are all the same in 3 respects – how Light/Dark, Warm/Cool, and Clear/Soft they are.
If you’ve been reading here, you already know what I mean by that. For anyone new, let me explain. Any colour is described by where it sits on those 3 scales, its Light/Dark , its Warm/Cool, and its Clear/Soft positions. The colour might be one the blues, reds, purples, etc. in your body, or in the world outside you.
Colour Analysis finds those precise colours in your body and replicates their precise position on those 3 scales. We then give them to you in a so-brilliant Colour Analysis Swatch book. They’re called YOUR colours for 2 reasons : A. They’re the colours to shop for. And B. They literally are YOUR colours, in your own body.
Let’s look at Dark and True Autumn colours. Neighbor seasons. Some people straddle between the 2. But the MOST important aspect of Dark Autumn’s colours is their darkness. True Autumn’s MOST important feature is the warmth. Any 2 neighbor Seasons do NOT share the MOST important dimension in their colours. You screw up the whole accord by throwing in another dimension.
You will see clearly and easily during your Personal Colour Analysis how far behind your perfect season the runner up is, even when you border closely. Some shades may be permissible, but none will be as good as any in the perfect one. So, in our Season example above, the Dark Autumn may look pretty good in True Autumn’s darker shades, because darkness in general is forgiving. It still won’t look like magic.
When the off-colour is worn on the bottom half, away from the face, it STILL disrupts the harmony of the whole body presentation. When the off-colour is way off, the flow of the appearance is distorted in favor of the more dominant colour. That’s why Light people gain 15 lbs on the bottom half in black pants.
Of course, your skin tone perfection will suffer less when the off-colour is far way. Still, the viewer will perceive disagreement.
I know it’s hard to find good colours. Winters can’t find saturated colours. Summers and Lights can’t find professional clothes. I know the fashion industry and cosmetics colour offerings are disorganized and incomplete. They are desperately unevenly weighted. As you learn to excel at colour decisions, you’ll buy your clothes when you find them, rather than by Season. I was looking at Ann Taylor’s website recently. Soft Autumn will do very well. True Summer, head over to Banana Republic. The 3 Winters, wear what you have (unless you need something black or charcoal, always available).
It helps to know whether you’re on the cool on warm side of your Season (your PCA will tell you) so that you know how to err. If you can’t find your perfect red, you’ll know whether to allow cooler or warmer shades. In a perfect world, the stores would be colour-coded, but IRL, their palettes are far more restricted. They might bring in 4 of the same style shirt, but not 8. They do NOT want you knowing anything about what suits you. They want that merchandise out the door, preferably the day it came in. You may have to be close sometimes, but you’ll learn how to do that too. We’ll talk about it a lot when we meet.
It takes months to learn to match colours precisely, even with your Book. Since we ultimately understand colour by visual comparison, not by me or anyone else talking about it, it helps to gather several similarly coloured items in the store and compare those to your Book. You’ll be better able to tell if the match is perfect, and if it isn’t, then how it differs. Is it browner? duller? darker?
It takes a month or 2 to start to enjoy the empowerment when you shop. It gets stronger and stronger as you bypass trends and disregard advice you know to be wrong. And both are everywhere.
I so understand the frustration in the beginning of feeling like nothing is right and wondering when it ever will be. But even at the start, you are better than you used to be. Then, the pieces start coming together, and your good decisions far outweigh the bad. Your eyes will get better and better at recognizing it. That will FEEL like magic.
Activewear Jackets for The Light Spring Woman
January 25, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Because the Spring Season speaks primarily of movement and animation, you look great in active wear.
As always, staying true to your personal colour palette, I like this Zella jacket at Nordstrom.
Turquoise is certainly among your perfect clothes colours. It’s being marketed as THE colour this Season, but only 3 Seasons can wear a true clear turquoise, and the Light Spring is one of them.
I appreciate the flowing lines in the stitching. In 12 Season Colour Analysis, you are a Neutral Season, blending Spring with a little bit of Summer. Those wavy lines integrate your Summer touch with the flowing water effect, while still being gently zigzagged enough to suggest motion. As a gentle Spring, this gentle zigzag is a perfect mirror to your message in colour.
By comparison, this is not a good choice.
The draping, the batwing sleeves, the heavy ribbing and neck, and the prominent zipper do not express serious commitment to motion. Fabric with a very slight shimmer, like many activewear knits, is better on you. You are not well served by heavy fabrics like velour. Light, soft knits and synthetics are better.
You will express your personality better with some colour transitions. Your Summer trace is monochromatic, but not to this degree. Repeating a colour in the print of a top with a solid bottom will do well. Since you are predominantly Spring, you can certainly mix and match colours fairly freely. The jacket above was made for another Season.
A final great choice, below, the Nike Border Long Sleeve top. The fundamental shape of the Spring Season is the triangle.
The stitching at the armpit to neck conveys the triangle. The asymmetric Nike swoosh, with its lift at the corners, is a great little detail that says movement, and so Spring.
The colour could be yellower, ideally, but if you are on the cooler side of the Season, it may be perfect.
Can Wrong Colours Make You Ill?
January 20, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 4 Comments
…or, title option, do your clothes make others feel, um, unwell?
Women and men have told me that they buy clothing colour by feel. Both have asked me to remove a drape because they felt sick, one to the point of becoming faint.
Are they exaggerating? Too theatrical?
NO! It’s VERY real. Everybody senses colour, more than we see it. We may not all feel it to the degree of physical revulsion, but we all experience a mild discomfort in the presence of wrong colours. We don’t take the colour choices in our homes lightly for that reason.
Since most people go around in wrong colour, we’ve grown used to seeing it and compensating for the feeling. But why does it happen?
The short answer is “sensory mismatch”. It means that 2 of your senses are receiving information that your brain feels cannot make sense together. The result is nausea.
Motion sickness in a car means your eyes are seeing “movement” but your brain is getting information from your ear’s balance system and your limbs saying “not movement”. The 2 don’t jive. The brain decides you’ve been poisoned and you’re hallucinating, so it expels the toxin by vomiting. At least, it’s believed to have evolved that way.
To explain it with colours, we go back to the most fundamental principle of how Personal Colour Analysis (PCA) achieves skin perfection and ideal appearance.
Every colour, in you and outside you, answers to 3 characteristics only. How Light/Dark, how Warm/Cool, how Clear/Soft (ask me in a Comment if I can clarify those concepts). Every single shade in you, every single blue and red and purple in you, fits in EXACTLY the same place on those 3 scales. Fascinating in itself, I ponder this often.
PCA finds you a group of colours that also fit in EXACTLY the same positions on those 3 scales. Your Colour Analysis swatch book is simply an exploded diagram of your own precise colours. It’s far, far too complex to do this without a true 12 Season Colour Analysis, for clothes colours or makeup. Then, when you WEAR precisely the same colours that you already ARE, the colour energies are in absolute synchrony and it is strong.
With wrong colours, the sensory mismatch isn’t between your eyes and ears. It’s between your eyes and subconscious colour associations. Your eyes are seeing one set of colour wavelengths emanating from the body’s natural colours. There’s a whole other set of waves coming off the clothes. The signals are all jammed. It feels tiring to look at, and for some, nauseating.
Most people dress in such a skelter of colour that there is no signal at all. They don’t look ON. All the wrong colours together neutralize what colour potential exists.
Is my theory scientific fact? I don’t know. I didn’t read it anywhere. It just makes sense to me.
Kathryn Kalisz, In Honor And Remembrance
January 17, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
It is with the deepest sadness that we mourn the death of Kathryn, who lost her life 3 days ago.
A horrifying act of violence took this woman, her office manager, and a police officer. Two other family members were injured but will survive.
Kathryn was founder of the Sci\ART system of colour analysis. A visionary in her understanding and use of colour, she had achieved the highly respected title of American Master Colorist. She was a teacher and mentor in the finest sense of the word.
We feel her loss as a woman as well. She is survived by three daughters and their families. Having accomplished the highest level of eminence and authority in her field, never for a moment did she behave other than with gentle kindness. She set an example for women, that we can reach positions of influence and recognition and never compromise the female traits in search of a false strength.
The world of Colour Analysis feels a widespread grief with her passing.
May she find peace in a Universe of swirling colours as we mourn her loss.
Get daily makeup and colour updates. Join the 12 Blueprints Fan Club on Facebook! A Click on the box will take you there.
