Like every other aspect of choosing your  most beautiful colours, recognizing your best eye makeup depends in large part on recognizing everyone else’s too, at least in a general sense.

Tricia Bratley is a (trust me) beautiful (shockingly so and I’m going to prove it in the next post) Bright Winter. She lives on the Wirral Peninsula in the NW U.K. And she loves makeup, all makeup, not just her own Season’s, in which she is most accomplished. Tricia assembled the palettes you see below, took the photos, and so graciously sent them to me to share with you.

This series sets Summer and Winter neutral (as in grays and taupes) eyeshadows, colour eyeshadows, and blushers, adjacent. Within each palette of eyeshadows, you may find options for the three Seasons within each True Season, but Tricia focussed primarily on the True Summer and True Winter when she organized these collections.

These palettes consist of MAC colours. If you have any questions about specific pans, please post them in the Comments and Tricia will come in and answer.

Neutral Eyeshadows

Summer

Summer neutral eyeshadows.

Winter

Winter neutral eyeshadows.

——–

Coloured Eyeshadows

Summer

Summer colour eyeshadows.

Winter

Winter colour eyeshadows.

—–

Blush 

Summer

Summer's blush.

Winter

Winter's blush.

These photos are so good that there is nothing I  can add. Enormous thanks to Tricia for her work and her generosity

Never fear, the True warm Seasons are next.

The Light Summer person is light to look at standing in front of a black wall. But not always. In their natural beige brown hair and eyebrow colour, they look more medium till you start putting colour next to or on their skin. Then you notice that the lightest blusher that would be invisible on most women has a huge effect. To balance and not overtake, their closet is light. Light needn’t mean a bowl of dinner mints. How does a rainbow dress to look interesting and impacting? First, see yourself through others’ eyes.

Nobody complains about looking at rainbows. They feel fresh, hopeful, soothing, and happy. Let yourself be who you are and get media perceptions about power out of your way. The clothing, weight loss, anti-aging, personal growth, and cosmetic industries can get you to buy more stuff if they can convince you there’s something wrong with you. It’s cheaper for them to make clone colours. Please believe me, there is nothing wrong with you. In your light colours, you are breathtaking. The sun shines out through the sky and water of your eye colour. That is such a special magic and few are capable of it.

I had a very beautiful, natural, easy Light Summer client. She arrived quite certain that she was a Winter and was going though the motions of a PCA just to confirm it (and come to find out, she had recently bought light blue and peach Capris just because.) Part of her Winter conviction came from seeing her facial structure as strong or intense, which it was, more in keeping with her ideas about Winter. When I think of Spring Summer blends, fragile doesn’t describe their bone structure – or anybody’s bone structure, for that matter. Meryl Streep (whom she greatly resembled), Sharon Stone, Joni Mitchell, Carmindy, Ivanka Trump (perhaps a stronger Spring), these faces express far more than daintiness. You’ll see many fine-boned faces among all Seasons. Media’s convenient typecast of power as dark, intense, and masculine is very far indeed from what power really is. It’s important to distinguish power from intimidation, the cheapest form of power. And like all things cheap, it is neither sustainable or enduring.

Light Summer is a Summer above all. She likes precision and dislikes clutter. Like True Summer, her personality is considerate, and to a lesser degree, can work the details all day and all night, and be uncompromising about getting them right.  She is not really stubborn, just striving towards an idyllic vision that’s almost romantic, as in Utopian.

We often think of  ‘feminine’ for True Summer, all lace and flounce, but that’s not quite the right adjective. Womanly is better. Moon goddess. Fertile (her version of earthy), giving, patient, complete (hence the circle symbol).  She can be very sentimental though the first interaction may be quite formal. Relationships, wisdom, and intuition are nearer her heart than raw intellect, which on its own strikes her as unkind, one-dimensional, and too boringly linear, logical, and external.

Spring’s arrival brings the potential for a little more giddiness. She’s more cooperative, happy in the middle ground, and so easy to get along with. She loves a laugh and takes life less seriously. The sun is coming out. She has humour, self-directed humour, the single best entry ticket to self-knowledge. She doesn’t get all the way to the stronger Springs’ “If life’s not fun, what’s the point?” but she does think “Why can’t everyone just lighten up and get along? Why did God even make Dark Winters? They’re missing all the good stuff.”

She embodies the simplicity of just being pretty. A little cute but mostly pretty. A face like a doll. Christina Applegate. Light Summer is not tough or rugged, it’s tender. Not stern, it’s lenient. Not funky, but still informal. Life can get so complicated, but not here. This is the afternoon off, the nowhere-to-be day, the tell-your-troubles-to person.

Light Spring is creamy, Soft Summer is foggy, True Summer is cool and misty, Light Summer is sunny and barely misty (or do I mean myst?), like a Once Upon A Time land. The rainbow when the sun comes out. Flower petal showers. Trees always in leaf. The lightest dusting of sugar sprinkled all over, a Cotton Candyland (Light Spring is the Jellybean Candyland).

______________________________________

Polyvore

She wears the light taupe shoe well because her hair is light taupe. On this woman, it actually does elongate the leg.

She may carry a green purse and she’d probably even go about in green pants. Light, fresh, and fun.

Warmth? Cashmere. It comes in so many colours. Likewise, fleece. It floats.

Wash those white pants with your darks to soften the white a bit.

A serious colour? Add a girlie colour.

A lot of light? Add a darker colour in a small area. Sunglasses count. Cool frame, cool lens, light hardware.

The light colours aren’t that light. Winter’s are even lighter because they’re not pastels. Make big use of your medium range of colours to move away from the pale feeling.

Squint to blur the details and you see dappled light, the perfect light on Light Summer.

Could drift away like a thistle on a breeze.

The dress on the left, too dark? Maybe so slightly. Reminded me of bunches of grapes. Good colour flow. Wear a light shrug or Pashmina and a fun shoe. Carry a light purse. Impact without consequences.

Turquoise ruffled blouse too saturated? Maybe. Don’t care. Love the colour on this person and I see it on them just fine (rather than not seeing them in a too-much colour).

Those blue capris, that’s darker and more saturated than your navy. The pants will be what people see so the area will get bigger by proportion. The V-neck top to the right of the yellow dress is better. But, they work well enough. If you look at the whole picture, they don’t jump out.

The fun juicy accessory. Why not? So people see your Miu Miu  pink coral clutch first (in the outfit along the R side.) So what. Wear your matching lipstick and carpe diem. Light Summer has that Spring fun element. True Spring is the Hawaiian luau. The luscious scent of the lei, the side to side sway of the hula dance, all about relaxed mood, hips, deliciousness, and fun. Light Summer might not get that unfastened but she’s Spring enough for the hair to come down.

I love when Neutral Seasons  (those groups of natural colouring whose inborn pigments are neither 100% cool or 100% warm, but have in-between colouring on the heat scale) demonstrate both Seasons they’re composed of. Wearing cooler and warmer versions of their colours together, as a cool pink lipstick and a light gold lip gloss, is an example. It gives them dimensionality. I also love when they wear both esthetics together. A Soft Summer looks superb in lace (Summer grace) and denim (Autumn strength). A Soft Autumn is beautiful in a flowing scarf (Summer water/flow) and cowboy boots (Autumn leather/desert).

Light Summer’s elements are Summer (graceful, water, feminine) and Spring (sun, movement, sport, play). I love ballet effects (grace and sport) as wrap tops and skirts, ballet flats, scoop necks like leotards, or body-fitting fabric in pretty colours. I love prints a lot, that can show the dewdrops feeling and depict motion with the body’s movements. Outdoor combinations that repeat water and sun, as any kind of sun hat, floppy to baseball to gardening, are great. Small sparkly stones near or on another colour are beautiful, raindrops on roses, as beading on a cardi, better in a wave, or a necklace against a blouse, or an earring near a rose lip.

I was asked how a True Spring expresses two energetic states at once.  I haven’t come up with anything because there is only the one energy. That seeming rivalry isn’t there. But there are many ways of depicting the sun and on a True Spring, there is almost no such thing as clutter.  A yellow or turquoise Swatch, several beaded bracelets, a necklace of turquoise beads and another of different length with a cluster of small gold charms, all three at once, it just looks better and better. Keep sunshine and colour near the eyes at all times.

——-

In the each Season chapter of the book, there’s section  called Colour Equations. To help you see what was in my head when I put those together, and I appreciate that illustrating them is needed, I’ve pasted that section below:

Colour Equations

One light, medium, or dark neutral colour + one light colour or one medium colour

One light to medium-dark neutral colour + one light colour + one medium colour

Two light to medium neutral colours + one other colour as a smaller block

More restrained use of complements as gentler colours or smaller areas

Use of analogous colour combinations, moving towards True Summer’s monochromatic designs

Overall light to medium darkness effect

—————–

I was seeing this:

Is it pale? Well, compared to what?  Dusk? Yes. All the black in the stores? Sure. The person we’re putting it on? No.

Does it still feel too light? Add a darker block and keep it smaller. People will see it.

There’s a fair bit of colour variation but still continuity between colours, because that’s what this person looks like. Mixing up the colours even more than what’s shown looks really good. Keep a balance. The more colourful the look, the gentler the colours should be. This isn’t something to worry about if you have a Colour Book of swatches, the gentleness levels are built in.

My thanks to Natalie who pointed me to Alima Pure’s line of cosmetics. The eyeshadow and foundation selections are beautiful, with many choices for Neutral Seasons. Under Products, choose your category and when the page opens, click View Swatches. You’ll see the whole panel open up for comparisons with colour accuracy that appears very good. I can’t recommend particular colours, having never tested them, but if you have experience with this line, please do leave a comment.

If we’re dressing to repeat how we already look (and we are because it feels good to the viewer), the overall effect shouldn’t get darker than medium on a white to black scale. Big light blocks can look bridal or sterile, not right on a fun-in-a-quiet way, optimistic, and cheerful person. Getting too saturated or busy with colour means her clothes compete with her and win. If colours get too dark, her skin will be drained and grey (and it will follow, who needs grayer teeth?) Remember too that viewers have a lot more colours to process besides your clothes – there’s hair, makeup, eyes, and that big block of skin – that aren’t in the graphic above. They will thank you if everything matches.

The Dance

How could I forget the music? From classical ballet origins in True Summer and then loosened up when Spring appeared. Spring brings magic and mysticism, freedom and imagination.

Proving that anybody can make fire:

Too hot for Light Summer? Maybe that’s Light Spring’s and we need something dreamier? A reader felt a connection with this very beautiful harp music.

We know from How Can I Be 3 Seasons? that the field of colour analysis will be a sure-fire appearance asset for 100% of consumers once we sort a few things out. Already now, when it works, it REALLY works. When it’s good, it’s VERY GOOD. It is THE BEST thing that could ever happen to how you look and how you shop. The problems and questions need to be hauled out in the sunshine so we can get a good look at the cracks so we can seal them up for you.

This week, we’re sharing some of the questions I receive most by women who phrased the issue really well. Any changes I made are to preserve anonymity.

#3: …what I really would like to know is, what is the range for a Soft Summer when using the [swatches]?  I mostly mean in terms of value. For example, there is this one random rose brown that is unlike the rest of the browns. Do I need to buy rose-browns that are that depth? A few months ago I purchased a set of Soft Summer paint chips from Mary Steele Lawler and since I’m [interested in home decor], I found it quite interesting. When I found the rose-brown in a paint strip card, I believe it was the second darkest color and it had several lighter colors on that card. None of these are in my Soft Summer fan. Does that mean that they are also allowed since they are just darker and lighter versions of the same color? Can I take any of the colors to my darkest and lightest range?

Good, good question. Short answer: No, you can’t go fully to the lightest and darkest versions of your colours. Why not? Because they have to be lightened or darkened by adding or changing something. As soon as you do that, you change value (lightness/darkness) but you also change some other colour dimension too, either warmth or saturation. And then, poof, they look better on somebody else who matches the new settings better.

Soft Summer can go a tinge lighter than the swatches but not a lot before you trip into another Season. If colours become too light by having too much of the greying effect subtracted, the colours get too saturated and they don’t work with the person or the rest of the clothes. If you lighten the colours by adding white, they get too light for the person to balance. If you lighten them by adding yellow, you add too much of the wrong kind of warmth, plus you increase the saturation.

Photo by Dominic Morel, South Africa.

But.

You might be able to move a little in value depending on your Season.

Whatever your Season, always observe The Most Important Thing about your Season’s colours. For the Lights, it’s lightness of colour, where even the darker colours would look light on people of non-Light-Season natural colouring. For the Darks, it’s that colours be quite dark overall, without saying that every colour is dark.  Lightness and darkness respectively is what makes the skin of these groups most young and evenly coloured. They cannot compromise on these key points. Warmth/coolness of colour is less stringent unless you’re a True Season. A Light could go a touch warmer and that might work, as long as she stays light in the colour. A Dark might go a little warmer or cooler, but darkness is what the viewer should recognize first overall.

Does this mean that a Light Season person can go as light as they want? No, it doesn’t. If you fan out a Winter and a Light Summer colour swatch book, you’ll see that Winter’s lightest colours are actually lighter than Summer’s. To satisfy Winter’s requirement for light colours to be icy, they contain very little colour pigment. Summer’s lightest colours are more ‘colourful’. To create the very high contrast Winters all need to look their very best, their icy colours must be very close to white. A Summer’s lightest tones are called pastel, meaning more pigment and greyed a little bit. Colour analysis wants to establish ‘How light are your lights and how dark are your darks and let’s get your wearing your full range’. Summer’s range of lightest to darkest is narrower, Winter’s goes to the very ends at white and black. A Light person can go a little lighter but needs to keep it pastel.

Awareness of what you see first takes practice. It may be easier to learn this by looking at an entire person. A Dark Season outfit will make the first impression of being darker than medium on a white to black scale. There may be (there should be) light parts that are very light, but what sinks into your sight center first is dark. A Bright Season person’s first ping on your consciousness should be clarity. One speck of dust, one little puff of cloud floating through, a trace of haze, and all those other great colours she’s wearing just got neutralized a little bit, and so did the glow of her face.

For the Softs, your eyes should register grayness, mutedness, fogginess, dullness before they check-in what the colour is. It’s gray before it’s yellow or purple or blue.  Soft Summer’s greying will be more perceptible, might strike your consciousness before how warm/cool or how light/dark. It’s that softness that matters most to perfect this skin and to meld what you wear with what you are. The position on the warm/cool scale isn’t quite so tight, there is a little fluctuation. The degree of lightness or darkness isn’t very tight either. A pretty wide range of each exists, though not all the way to white or black.

Even the lightest colours have a fair amount of pigment, more than the other two Summer Seasons. The Soft Summer represents the Summer palette seen in the shade. A little gold is added, though so little this far away from True Autumn that its effect is to complement Summer’s blue and make greyness. It will warm too, but out here, it doesn’t look gold or yellow, it looks like a fog brown overlaying True Summer.

Soft Summer is capable of many colours besides what’s in the Book as long as they hold the saturation position very low (and of course, adhere to the warmth and darkness ranges). It’s a balancing act. If the colours are changing their lightness/darkness level and changing the saturation too, then it wouldn’t look so good. If the colour is becoming lighter/darker and is staying very soft and muted and is staying cooler than warm, the harmony for Soft  Summer should be pretty good. You’re always balancing the 3 scales of colour at once. If you see a rosy brown outside your fan but your taste tells you it would look fine with your other fan colours, then it probably would, especially if it’s not a big area.

We often try to change one parameter of colour in our questions, forgetting that as soon as you change it, the other 2 change right away.

This is how it works in my eyes and thinking. If ever I find a colour mixing course to teach me in more detail, I’ll be there, brushes and mixing pots in hand. Something I’d like to know is this: Is there a lower limit to Soft Summer’s saturation? Does the Season occupy all the cool-neutral, mid-value colour space back to the starting point at the all grey axis? I’d say not because that axis is made of Winter greys, meaning composed only of B&W. To be a Summer Season grey, some pink, mauve, or blue should be definitely discernible. To qualify as a pastel at all, a fair bit of pigment must be present, more than for an icy colour. Hey. Either I’m wrong or I just answered my own question.

——–

Light Summer

Even if we are determined to ignore the stereotypes, uncertainty will creep in. How can a Light Summer grey early in life and to a medium dark grey? Wouldn’t that disqualify Light Summer? Let us call our model Linda, one of the many women of such sensitivity and emotional intelligence that colour has brought into my life.

For Linda, and she is far from alone, hair becomes our ‘self-defining monstrosity’. It’s never right. We’re subservient to hair stylists and their often-demented tastes, trends, and media, and our own dogged dissatisfaction with everything, most especially what we were given.

Bonaparte said “Good politics is getting people to believe they’re free.” Well, so is good marketing. The industrial revolution learned to create a prototype and then reproduce it as many times as possible with the least inputs. The plan worked rather well in the 20th century. Not so any more.

Bonaparte also said “History is just a series of lies on which we all agree.” Turns out you could substitute the word marketing for many other words in all sorts of contexts.

Linda’s PCA was done IRL with thanks to Sci\ART analyst Julia Dupps of Wish Wardrobe Consulting.

When we look together at your face changing with the drapes, we pay attention to the amount of shadowing under the chin. If there’s none, there’s no distinction between face and neck. They appear to be in the same plane, 2D, giving a heavy double-chin impression. If there’s too much shadow, the darkness bleeds up the sides and front of the face. It looks tired, severe, overly shadowed. On Linda, the lower half of her face is 10 years older than the upper half when she wears black. That’s not just a Summer effect, it’s very often a Light Season effect. Other Summer types handle darkness better.

What helped Linda to see the effect of black was to cover the lower half of the face in the photo wearing black. Let your eyes relax and take in the upper half of the face. Now take your hand away. Not the same, is it? You feel a step backwards, of tension, not the step-forward of relief.

She herself asked it perfectly: “Given that hair colors vary so widely in all the Seasons, why is it that two people are perfected by roughly the same colors but not the same hair color? Or does it have something to do with personal intensity levels and contrasts?”

Right! It’s a great thing when a question snaps straight to the issue. For instance, why can a True Winter who cannot look good in any orange in makeup or clothing get born with seemingly orange hair, as a natural redhead, and look magnificent? Even if we agree that hair colour is not tied to Season, only skin tone is, how can a person without orange in the skin wear an orange hat without clashing?

Short answer: Not sure but I’ve seen it so many times that I’m convinced. I have never once seen natural hair colour not work beautifully with the palette and the skin. It just looks more unique, more unexpected, more individual, a personal signature optical effect. It always looks breathtaking. Even if we agree that hair colour is extremely variable among Seasons, how can orange in hair work when orange in clothes doesn’t?

My longer answer is that there are many ways of using primary pigments (red, blue, yellow) to create colours. You can make the very same orange, say, using many combinations of red, blue, and yellow, as you vary saturation, warmth, and value. It’s the endless play between the 3 primaries and the 3 dimensions (warmth, darkness, saturation) that makes the variety. So perhaps the red-haired True Winter or True Summer got there with cooler pigments. When pure cool Seasons reach their 20s, if they got red hair, it’s not usually Ron Weasley red. There’s often a pink or purple cast, like cinnamon rose, or a lot of darkness. Below is my husband, a True Winter, with our daughter who is now an 18 year old Dark Winter with a million freckles. His eyes are warm amber brown. He ain’t no Autumn, the ruddiness in his skin is out of control in muted colour, warm or cool. He is mostly grey now and still absolutely needs True Winter coolness and saturation to calm his skin and slim his face.

The idea that you can make the same colour using many different pigment combinations isn’t new to us. We see certain swatches that are so very similar between Seasons. They were created using different combinations of the primary pigments, and adhere to the particular 3 colour dimensions of their respective Seasons, but the final swatches can look very  alike. As one of Rachel’s recent comments reminded me, what makes the two similar dots ‘belong’ to their different Seasons is the colours you wear them with. Visually there is harmony because at a more fundamental level, all the swatches were created with the same colour properties in mind so they can make a visual connection when seen or worn together. That’s their reason for being together on your body, with your Season’s palette, in each outfit, and with your hair and cosmetic colours. They feel related to one another with a ring of truth and believability. We can perceive it better than we can describe it.

The graphic below was made for an article dedicated to helping True Summers select their best corals. There’s a similar article about choosing blue.

Dark Winter above, True Summer below.

Dark Winter and True Summer have some really similar cool corals. Not surprising since both are cool Seasons and both are slightly muted. The difference is how they’re muted, in that True Summer is muted by blue-gray. Dark Winter is muted by Autumn gold but there’s so little of it out here at Autumn’s outer limits that it just looks like a trace of cool grey in the colours, not unlike True Summer gray. Dark Winter is much more saturated colour but True Summer has some clarity too. Each version of coral belongs with its palette very naturally and easily. No swatch sticks out like a visitor because they were all made with pigments undeviating with the rest of the colours for that group.

Eye colour is more predictable than hair in a Season but there are still surprises. Some of you have taken close-up pictures and couldn’t believe the colours the camera found. Or you try to photograph a Catherine Zeta-Jones golden brown Winter eye and all this black comes out. My conclusion is that we just don’t know precisely how our pigments are combined, or if someone knows, I would be most grateful if they would tell me.

I think there are other variables than just colour. Skin thickness for instance. Summer skin really looks thinner to me, like a rabbit compared to a big dog, for those of you with a fascination for animal surgery. Maybe more venous blue is showing through Summer skin. Winter is thicker-skinned (in more ways than one), more rubber than paper. Fewer colours show through. Winter’s can be an almost colourless skin without makeup except that the red comes out…makes sense, red is a colour whose contribution we perceive more strongly. Munsell’s properties of colour were developed based on how we perceive colour, yellow less and red more.

Many, many True Summers have quite dark hair.  Jaclyn Smith for one. Olivia Newton-John for another (who might be a Light Summer but I say True only because she isn’t a great blonde).

Dark hair can be found in Light Summer too. We could call her Lily.

She even looks like Jaclyn Smith. Round eyes, full lips, rounded cheekbones, this is a very Summer face. When I look at photos, first thing I do is make a hand window to block out the hair, natural or not. If you screen off the hair from the face, suddenly it’s a much softer look. The bold Winter drapes would be far too aggressive. The faintest, most gentle heat is here.

I can hear someone thinking “Wait a minute? What about Bright  Spring?”  This is when I start flipping makeup colours in my head. Let’s put near-neon-rose lipstick on Lily’s face. What do you see first? The lipstick or the woman? A Bright Spring could not only balance that colour but needs it for her makeup to rise up to meet her natural pigments.  There’s always something a little crisp for me in Spring. Light Summer is crisp as in lettuce, so still soft. Light  Spring is tissue paper. True Spring, hm, taffeta? Bright Spring contains Winter, it has more hardness. It has to snap when it breaks like a matchstick icicle. Bright Winter is a candy cane. Lily’s face has gentle, rounded features and watery (not intense) colours in her eyes. (Not that I do colour by these analogies, just that it’s interesting.)

And yet, Lily’s hair and eyebrows are darker than you’d expect on a Light  Season. In Light Summer’s cool, fresh colours, only warmed exactly as much as her eyes and skin, her skin will be positively blooming, clean, and young. The mantle of darker hair makes a higher contrast than we usually see on the lighter-haired wearer of those colours, the most pleasant surprise. We want to keep looking. That’s her special radiance. Getting back to Linda’s original question, this is also why I don’t talk about contrast very much. There are too many versions of it in any Season. What looks real and right and makes sense for contrast is to repeat what you look like. Lily and Linda will balance more distance between light and darks than Michelle Pfeiffer, but all three women are working from the same Light Summer colour menu.

Our Linda looks perfect with radiant skin and distinctively beautiful eyes in her light, fresh colours. A weight seems to have been lifted from her, even in the expression in her face and eyes. Instead of the eye stalling on the dark colours, we look at her face and are aware of the light aqua in the same eye space and have a good feeling from that. Her hair that could look hard when repeated in Winter’s colours takes on a cool lightness of weight, and gives her face the composure, wisdom, and individuality that she has earned. Light, fluffy, soft grey hair could be lovely too but somehow the darker colour and texture give a self-possession that distinguishes her more, not less.

It sometimes seems as if younger women want permission to be every Season, desperately seeking proof that anything really does work. By the time we’re 45, many just want permission to be Winters. In our 60s, we seem to segue into True Summer. After years of ‘winterizing’ herself, Linda questioned her hair colour for her Light Summer (and she’s not fully winterized – saturate the jacket to full on royal purple and imagine fuchsia lips!). She’s more perceptive than overly sentimental about herself and was able to  realize this : “…the underlying issue was that I did not want to be a Light Summer and was looking for a way out!!  I focused on my hair as the reason why I just could not be a Light – not wanting to remember how lovely my skin looked with that palette. I pictured lights as Cate Blanchett and Naomi Watts – but more defining than how I pictured Lights is how I pictured myself. ”

———–

The Soft Seasons

A woman who has had every hair colour is very often a Soft Summer or Soft  Autumn. As we said in Soft Summer Landscapes, the medium-ness of this colouring allows it to be swayed in many directions, though seldom with big success if it rocks too far. The owner of said colouring can feel restless and questioning, like “Is this all there is for me? Peacock everywhere and I’m fog?  What am I supposed to do with that?” Hair and  makeup advice is all over the map for these women because without draping, nobody can figure out the common denominator that knits every colour to the canvas.

If an industry can convince you there’s something wrong with you, they can destabilize you, which makes you buy more stuff. That’s easy to do. Just make everyone believe that if you can’t do peacock and your friend can, then you must have missed the boat. We forget how sensitive we all are to colour. One man in a room, one pink stripe in his tie, and every woman caught it. Being bashed over the head is less distinctive in our world than quiet self-assurance. Isn’t it quiet self-assurance we’re all striving to reach?

I won’t say a lot about Soft Season hair because it’s been covered. Ask me where if you can’t find it. Hold the faith that every colour is beautiful. Worn by a human being who contains those very same colours, it becomes miraculously beautiful. The person is elevated to a version of themselves that even their second best Season colour-analyzed swatch book can’t achieve, no matter how close you are between the two. A Soft woman’s best hair grows out of her head as a slightly warmed ash, maybe darker, maybe lighter.

The next four are photos of (let’s say) Micaela. She is a Soft Autumn, though to me, looks closer to Soft Summer than True Autumn.

Blonde (and wearing white):

Dark:

Red:

Natural:

Did you feel the relief when you got to the last picture? It takes an effort to go back to the first three. Micaela feels it too, you see the ease in her face when she releases the struggle and simply wears what she was made to wear. How could she possibly make herself more lovely to look at than in the final photo? Why would anyone be given so much pure beautiful light and proceed to conceal it? As she said, we all look back at past photographs and wonder “Why couldn’t I see it before?”

Once a colour analysis is done, it is undeniable to have seen your own face change with your own eyes. Many women keep the result to themselves for a few days. They feel a mental and emotional shift taking hold that feels quite precarious at first. It’s always vulnerable to come out of a hiding place. Eventually, you carefully give way to the delight of finding a secret garden in your interior, a cautious ‘hard to believe this could be as good as it looks’. Soon enough, the need to protect it and keep it private evaporates. Nobody is happier for you than me. Not because you’ll wear better lipstick. Everyone should find their garden.

Mr. Springsteen said “You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.”

But this is more fun.

The name of the album is You Get What You Give. Very apt.

Listen to the song.

…change your geography.

…when you lose yourself, you find the key to paradise.

With great thanks to the women whose grace and generosity in allowing their photos to be shared helped us to see and learn. And with recognition of their achievement in having outgrown their hiding places.

Autumn’s determination is coming on board. Settled by Summer’s consideration for others, it feels more like stability. Ask a Winter what they think. Ask a Summer how they feel. This person gladly answers to both, easily exploring both worlds, allowing them to flow in and out of one another, calm and safe, without the need to erect or protect boundaries between them. This is Part 1 of why we analyze so many of them.

The darkest of the Summers, Soft Summer does not look like a light person. They look like Kate Middleton and Angelina Jolie, like Christy Turlington and Fergie. Their very mediumness makes it strangely easy to mistakenly place them in almost any Season. And that’s Part 2.

This is the group that feels dusky to me. Many appear to have a natural tan year round. Dark Winter is often called dusky but they have too much hardness and clarity for that. Think of Demi Moore, Cindy Crawford, Hilary Swank, or Sally Field compared to Ellen Pompeo where the hair to skin to eyes transitions are incredibly gradual or not even there.

Telegraph Interview by Steve Marsi at TV Fanatic

How The World Feels

So very comfortable. Not mild exactly, that feeling is more in some of  Light Spring’s colours. Just easy to be with. The Soft Seasons are surely the least demanding. These are the days when the heat and humidity of summer have passed recently enough to still feel them. Not too hot or too cold, too squinty light or too dark. The air is cool enough that clothes don’t stick and faces don’t shine. Our limbs move through downy silky air. Being outdoors is the relief it was intended to be. The easing that comes with simply being in our Nature home is denied in our lifestyle. Yet, the restoration is undeniable when we make time for it. We come from earth and are balanced and completed by intimacy with it. In Soft Summer, Nature is the shelter, support, and contentment of the bed of moss under the canopy of pine branches.

>> in clothing, the translation is in maintaining the mediumness; no piece should demand attention over any other, not eyeliner, not jewelry, not lipstick, not shoes. If you wear a light or a dark, balance it with a medium.

The mediumness on the heat scale (75% cool/25% warm) is factored into the personal colour swatches automatically.  A no brainer for you. The genius of Kathryn Kalisz was to create these 8 Neutral Seasons with 60 specific and exclusive colours that are unrepeated in the other Seasons and harmonize exactly within each Season. You have to see these colour collections to appreciate how singular and extraordinary the palettes are and how special this system of PCA becomes as a result. In this and other aspects, it is unique, correct, and quite magnificent.

The clarity level isn’t medium, it’s way low. That doesn’t mean colourless, look at the photos and Polyvore below, it just means not as colourful as the others. When life assaults our senses from every angle to get noticed, what we feel here is gratitude and a place to relax. The choice of where we direct our attention is ours for a change. In a cloud, edges are shadowy, they vanish and reappear continuously. Lines can wave, surfaces can shimmer.

>> in a composition, an outfit, there’s an undercurrent of grey that unites the elements and provides the visual continuity. Prints blur from a distance like tricks of the light. No big transitions between colour elements exist so objects blend into one another so gradually, as hallucinations, being inside a dream, a watercolour mirage.

Peaceful because sounds are muffled, the air is velvety, and intrusive presence is always veiled. Secluded tranquility enfolds us as we are lulled into believing that the only company is the one we choose.

Relief in the stillness that cushions and absorbs. Like Soft Autumn, Soft Summer’s colours are all giving and no taking

>> in clothes and makeup, colour pops don’t belong here. Stay inside the palette and keep colour subliminally gradual. Soft Summer is never explicit.

See the deer? In a B&W photo, you’d miss it. The precise edges of Ellen Pompeo’s features would be very hard to identify too.

Notice the tree trunk colour, a good blued grey. There are some great pinks and greens here to provide the feeling of gentled strength. I know one reader at least will be thankful that the quantity of pink in this photo is so small because she couldn’t bear to wear more than this. She is very much a Soft Summer in her feelings about how pink she is, a colour many have the most trouble identifying with, far more so than True Summer, while Light Summer has no trouble at all.

Colour Scales

In 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, the Soft Summer comprises those whose natural colouring is

Quieted by the fog gray that settles over the True Summer swatches – this is the Most Important Thing. The Season is not muted, it’s MUTED+cool. Gotta see the grey, as opposed to True Summer where it’s COOL + muted. Look at the pictures until you can be consciously aware of the greying that flows through each element, joining it to every other as if by a barely  visible web. Like the forest in the movie Avatar, every piece is connected by a grey neural net in our perception.

Cooler than warm and a little warmer than True Summer, but it doesn’t feel like warmth yet. It feels like dull. In How The 5 Springs Add Yellow, you saw that the heat isn’t that hot yet. What Autumn adds to the palettes it influences is really gold, but there’s so little of it still that the effect is more to cloak some brightness (add Autumn gold-orange to Summer blue and you get gray by the effect of complementary colour, right?)

Medium darkness, no black or white. They are jarring. You saw this photo in Soft Summer’s Best Hair Color. If you had to pick a highlight, would yellow really be the one that feels best? And that’s a soft yellow. Bleach that up a few notches and add a chemical glint and the result would not fall from the beautiful tree. By comparison, the taupe feels good. It feels like it belongs (because it does).

Soft Summer Clothing

If anyone ever needed proof that accomplished Season beauty is not about going out and buying anything made in your colours, Polyvore would have to be it. Pick a colour and look at the selection. Even if you ignore the utterly silly and the stuff a 5’11″, Size 2, 20-year old couldn’t look good in, there’s still too much that makes no sense. The image below is set up as little Soft Summer vignettes.

Other than a few greiges, there is a fair bit of colour. It happens to be a bit faded compared to the other Seasons.We’re not sure if it’s the lighting, but it feels as though less colour is really light than we expect for Summer. On a sunny day, some of the colours might be quite light, but not today. Like a rainy day, there is a sense of glad acceptance, of productivity, of dressing for a charity lunch at the museum or an afternoon symphony. I’m pretty sure she gets there in a brushed silver Camry.

There needs to be darkness somewhere, not a lot, just a touch. Very light isn’t what she looks like. Isn’t natural hair colour the best? If ever a Season should emanate cool un-complication, it is this one. The hair is too often called mousy and interfered with.

Photo: Splash News.

We’re trying to continue the flow between how you look and what you add to yourself. If you’re lighter, you’ll wear an overall lighter effect than a darker woman would. If your hair is dark and skin light, you’ll wear more lights with darks and not strive to incorporate a medium block. The overall palette remains the same, the one that made your skin the most perfect, that made you look youngest. In women over 30, I could almost do the whole analysis just across the eye band (the client and I divide her face into three horizontal bands when we evaluate the changing drapes), so much are age effects evident in wrong colour. We all lose objectivity within 4 feet of a mirror. Try taking some photos or video of yourself to see how widely separated your light/dark span appears to others. It’s better.

Reckoning the amount of warmth is hardish. See that red cardigan center just south of middle? See how it’s not really blued? It’s more fogged? Take berries, almost any sort, and fog them. Not sugar dusted, rather dust dusted, the colour of the object still coming through. Look for the layer of good old house dust.

Less eyelet and lace than True Summer, though she can wear bits of both, and a little more bulk. Still Summer sheer but a bit straighter though not yet sturdy. Still quite ladylike, though she doesn’t really emphasize that part of herself.  Pearls and cameos certainly work, in the rosy, fleshy browns of the inside of red grapes. She is not heavy in texture. She does tasteful ruffle cascades beautifully. Some women are very feminine, others feel conspicuous in girlishness and want to get back to their hoodie and yoga pants or cargo shorts. She will almost always take the time to put in earrings.

Her song, being around her, can feel like this (sorry, couldn’t embed it). That slowed-down, soothing way she moves, the softness of the way she moves her mouth and the sounds she makes, those are very characteristic of Soft Seasons. Ever heard Jennifer Aniston interviewed? Lots of soft oo and mm sounds. Angelina Jolie is similar.  She’s quiet, controlled, unhurried, loving but forthright. She is more reserved than Spring spunky. She’s exactly halfway between emotional and analytical.

More colours apart than True Summer, ie: less monochromatic.  Not all over the map but introducing some variety absolutely works. The combinations in this Season are particularly amazing to me. Maybe they just sound amazing. Hold these colours together in your head till you see them clearly: antique turquoise with grey pearl ; dove grey and cocoa rose; sage and stormcloud blue ; pewter and softest rose. Feels good, doesn’t it?  Always softness with strength. The two, together at once, in colour, texture, and design, are the very heart of Soft Summer.

She is Vivianne and Nimue, ruling priestess, Lady of the Lake, loving and seducing Merlin, and granting Arthur Excalibur. She is a moon goddess and the caretaker of Arthur’s dead body on its journey to Avalon. A Camry?? What am I talking about? She lives in a land of chivalrous knights and drifting mists. She drives a Phantom Silver Ghost, of course.

The taupes are tremendous and there are many. In everything from eyeliner to shoes, this is a neutral to be worn and worn. Entire outfits can be based on light dark variations, since any Summer does well in monochromatics.

People ask about maintaining best contrast in their Season. You know, the Colour Book does the thinking for you. If your best look is low contrast as here, the palette won’t give you black, white, or any extremes that are are outside your range in the first place. You’d have trouble setting up max contrast in Soft Summer if you tried. You do want colours to flow easily. That means that you can wear your darkest and your lightest, sure, but insert a medium darkness element to bridge the two ends and bring them closer.

Soft Summer fabric can be matte. The makeup should be. With artificial frosting, this complexion ends up going more muted (read, greyer) by comparions while the frost look hard and glittery. Fabric is also gorgeous with a soft sheen, lustrous like the inside of an oyster and the surface of the pearl within.  Some gleam on the lips repeats this just right. As Autumn arrives, gently textured textile, like a light boucle works well, so a little more weave, a little more grain.

The greens are completely magically beautiful. For any Autumn, your teals are transformative, workhorses of your wardrobe. The greener colours can be underdone once Soft Summer is able to spot her teals.  That light lustrous shirt, I love it a lot.

Seasonal Colour Analysis Makeup Colours

Kidney purple was a description I loved from a reader regarding the excellence of Dior Addict lipstick Londres. We have some brilliant shoppers, experts in their colours, among our readers. If they’d add their favorite cosmetic colours to the Comments, many women will be grateful, I as well. I would try NARS Tokyo Duo eyeshadow. MAC Syrup lipstick and eyeshadows MAC Shale, Yogurt, Aria are good. Their Malt is a great eyeshadow to reduce frost and saturation in other eyeshadows you may own. Lips? Clinique Voluptuous Violet, Lauder Soft Amethyst, Bobbi Brown Rose Petal, Cover Girl Honey Plum Glow, could all be good. The great red lip with a little more depth for evening? You might look at Mercier Dry Rose.

We’re after believable beauty, not the kind that obviously came from a bottle. Attention getting elements are not believable here. Whispered suggestions, uncertainty about what you heard and thought you heard, Soft Summer colours and shapes move in and out of your perception like ghosts of their original form.

There is no point in reading someone else’s lines when it’s so much easier and more real to play your own part. Heidi described it brilliantly as dialing in the tuning band on a radio to find your own frequency. Stay close to who you are and far from who they want (or tell) you to be.

True Summer is particular. There are no scratches or smudges on her glasses. She keeps special cloths and fluids at home and office and purse and car. And watch her clean them or take off her nail polish. Like she’s in her own private hell. If Winter wants control, True Summer wants precision.

She’s helpful and tailored but not excessive, like a flight attendant. At all times, gun to her head, she is well behaved and ready to negotiate. In one word, and I know I’ll take some heat, the word I hold in my head when I search is ladylike.  There it is, the word we all love to hate. 50% of readers would swear I just said prissy.

Not prissy, prude, prim, proper, whatever. OK, maybe a little bit proper. Therefore she has personal restraint enough for all for us. Etiquette does make the world a better place and if everyone had more of it, oh, how good that would be. For this woman, a tub of Haagen-Daz really does have 4 servings.

This is a challenging clothing style to find in our Lady Gaga world. Ballet flats are too sweet. This woman isn’t that. She takes life pretty seriously, not as competition but as a force for good. She won’t have the bag in the shape of a frog and probably not a pink or yellow one either.

True Summer is least harmonized by menswear influences. This is a rounded body with many curved lines that glides when it walks. Boxiness, straight lines, rigid designs, they are not nearly as good as swirls. I think this is where the constant searching and feeling of unrest stems from that women have about shopping. The clothing industry has all these gaps it could fill instead of making more of the same. Women know what’s out there isn’t right and can’t quite put their finger on why.

I tried to think in terms of outfits so there are groups within groups here.

True Summer sets by christinems featuring strappy sandals

Colours are a little muted. White white jeans will positively glisten next to the rest of the colours. They appear aggressive on a part of our body where that can send the wrong message unless that’s what you’re trying to do. Jeans in the very colour and texture of chalk would be perfect. No heat, no shine. Part of what holds the whole picture together is that little bit of greyness that hovers over it. No greyness and the item won’t fit under the umbrella so it sticks out there, getting wet, which looks neither strong or attractive. Pretend you can’t see the orange purse.

Some darkness is necessary. This person is usually quite medium in darkness, but some seem quite dark. The odd one has white blond hair, quite an effect next to the navy blue eyes, but there the eyes hold the dark.

Green is underdone because it’s hard to find. There are several. The prototype is clover, blued and a very smidgen dusted. Still a lot of colour. You know that background feeling of a grey fluff round the outer edges of a clover leaf? That’s very much the essence of True Summer, that  gentle blurring of the overall effect. The moon is like that, a very effective grey- white glow on this Season.

I won’t say too much. Ask if you wonder what I was thinking.

Since I hang my drapes in this order, let’s look at the colours this way:

Light Spring

- a very light yellow green

- a clear blue, not purple enough to be periwinkle

- purple, which transforms Springs into someone you’ve never seen before

- with note that the aqua-turquoises for any Spring blend are a sure thing, just like teals are no-brainers in any of the 5 Autumn blends.

True Spring

- the home of Jello colours

- every green is beautiful, but pure golden leaf green is such a proclamation of life on this planet, the interaction on True Spring colouring is phenomenal

- beige yellow, one of the hair tones, it affirms the delicacy that Spring always has in their behaviour and their face, like Joni Mitchell, so spiritual and creative and never ever over-bearing. Lovely people. In The Emmas Are True Springs Part 2, Emma 2′s face always reminds me of these qualities (and that artist).

- sunny orange red, and this is the lipstick intensity that’s needed or this person will dial less vibrant colours down to greyer and boring

Bright Spring

- intense teal

- sharp mid-dark grey, which looks elegant and interesting as can be because the person is quite colourful, so it’s intriguing when the clothes play the role of quiet counterbalance without reducing the overall thrill

- the u-tone (undertone for future ref) blued rose

Light Summer

- their marshmallow white

- violet-washed sky blue

- clear red; muted colour can be hard to show in this format; it’s the cherry Popsicle

 True Summer

- swimming pool blue, a happy colour as Ashley said so well, lovely and young on this skin

- pure rose

- dark stormy sea blue is very powerful, an essential in a business suit; add the whitecaps in jewelry, like filigree silver

- with honourable mention to the undertone, forget-me-not blue

 Soft Summer

- antique turquoise, try to find it in pearlescent, it is simply beautiful in fabric

- muted dark pine (the best eye colour intensifier on every single person, if this trick doesn’t work, I’ll doubt the Season)

- pale mauve, it looks very pretty with every suit, feminine without being girlie which this Season does not identify with; it takes only a mist of pigment to have enormous effect when natural colouring is very gentled with grey, colours as soothing as the person (Light Summer and Spring are not soothing, they’re more get-up-and-go, somewhere in the sunny>> jolly>> spunky>>bouncy spectrum) (now I think of it, True Summer isn’t soothing either, or not soothing to me; if Winter wants control, True Summer wants precision)

- with runners-up burgundy and pewter, both very sexy masculine on the men

Soft Autumn

- brown; I like brown on this Season best of all, not a favorite on the other Autumns, though they certainly have brown

- some form of warm willow green (can anyone think of a better name? avocado, I guess?)

- warm muted yellow, they glow in this colour and never seem to have any idea, I find it really captures my attention

True Autumn

- chili pepper red

- their very green teal

- glowing hot gold, add a metallic thread

Dark Autumn

- blackened colour is so good; sometimes, the person seems darker than a Dark Winter, whose whiter whites and pinker pinks can make them seem lighter because they’re clearer; DA has light colours but they’re hard to find, would almost need custom-dyeing ; it’s amazing to me how the colour is quite coal grey and still so intensely purple

- my favorite being the black tobacco; the dark grey brown of loose black tea is also great, makes a fabulous eyeliner

- cherrywood brown, very defining colour

Dark Winter

- battleship grey is always here, maybe because I love it, it’s the eyeshadow, it’s an essential neutral in a Season that wears them more than anyone to reduce the overall number of colour elements, and it looks real good; I’ve been thinking a lot about how the colours are made lately; interestingly, I made this one by making a balanced R-G-B-equal grey, like duct tape grey, then decided DW’s heat is Winter red and Autumn orange, but more red, so I raised that setting. So that’s interesting to some of us.

- those who read here know that saturated purple-brown-more-purple-than-brown is where my thinking of where DW’s undertone lives but undertone floats from warm to cool, depending on the position of the person in the Season. This deep currant is the warmer position. To make it in lipstick, use Lauder Mulberry Double Wear. Bite Balm in Claret is an outstanding way to brown colour without darkening it, something I spend a fair bit of time doing. This will get you to lunch, even with a cup of green tea and a client every 20 minutes.

- black-navy showcases the majesty best, but iced violet had to be here

True Winter

- it’s B and W, not B or W, and more B than W

- dark purple blue, the u-tone

- icy pink, not sure why I always like this, perhaps it insinuates the high contrast of the extreme of youth and innocence in colour on a person that is ageless and enduring, solid and hard, the extremes of dazzle and hard rock reality

 Bright  Winter

- sweet, funny, cute people, they need sugarplum purple

- always dimples or mischievous eyebrows (interesting, I see this more in the Spring/Winter blends, not the True and Light Spring), and BIG colour capacity, fantastic in electric blue, not too dark, hard to look away from; worn in a tank top with a white tank beneath, it looks really right

- the lightest of the Winter group; Winter red + Spring yellow makes an icy peach, my favorite of the icy lights on this colouring; they look great in iced white gold gloss over every lipstick, iced peach eyeshadow highlighter; to me, it’s gorgeous

We all embody a particular landscape, where a landscape is a collection of colours and shapes that fulfill a purpose and belong together.

Natural landscapes make sense to us. We expect certain things to go together to feed all five senses in a way that is consistent. Bark isn’t pink, doesn’t smell like vanilla, or feel like slime. If it made a sound, it wouldn’t be tinkly. A Soft Summer (bark) woman (Princess Kate) dressed in flamingo (Light Spring), a lush jungle aromatic with vanilla and cocoa (True Spring), or seaweed greens and anemone reds (Bright Spring), she just wouldn’t feel quite right.  Nothing wrong with any of them, but there’s incongruence, of puzzle pieces made to fit that really don’t.

All of us emanate our own landscape in colour, feeling, and mood. When we wear colours as an extension of our natural appearance, and when those colours appear in the shapes and textures to which they naturally belong, we look plausible, logical, believable, possible, synchronized. You could say harmonious. To the viewer, it is the purest form of eye candy. It feels so damn good that you keep looking. We call that beautiful.

When our embellishments don’t belong in our landscape, to the viewer, we look forced, like an appearance that couldn’t possibly have happened on its own. To ourselves, we feel like we’re somehow stretching our truths. But what are those truths in the first place?

None of this is new to you, from me. Life challenges us to figure out our questions. Real success is when we become equipped to find those answers ourselves. Instead of taking my/everyone/ anyone else’s word, your own word is the last one you need. Our answers really have been given to us, we just don’t always let ourselves hear them.

In the Comments to The Emmas Are True Springs Part 1, Melinda asked a great question about whether the style, textile, and texture associations are true, and what if I don’t always feel like what they say for my Season? You can read what I said and know that your thoughts are welcome. No two persons will wear their Season in the same way. We all want to convey our inner territories and they have a thousand stories to tell. Choose what you love and let personal colour analysis give you a sense of where not to go if you have a job interview today.

In a world too hot and loud, the quiet palettes can feel discouraged. True Summer is a very complicated Season. Indeed, they all are. The palette (ok, every palette) is one that nobody could figure out on their own, without a colour expert’s input. The pure coolness and the particular degree of clearing, without going overboard, that’s challenging. True Summer is a most gorgeous group of colours that takes too many hits by being misunderstood or compared to the boldness we’re bombarded with. I want to make it beautiful for you.

Dress to look like this. Choose colours that would belong in these pictures. The water in the distance, the gentle splash. The freshest greens. The clean soft breeze. Put them together in a way that feels the same. Be Nature herself. Put the scenery of you together to create the feeling you get from the photos that follow.

Don’t fuss the swatches colours till you feel frustrated. True Summer colours should not feel like there’s sun shining on them, or very  fogged in, or earthy. They’re just a little cloudy and cool. Let it be relaxed and easy. Just hold the picture in your head when you assemble your decorations. If you say a colour feels good in this scene, then it does. Be who you would love to be and express. I don’t think many would paint a line of black (eyeliner), yellow (hair stripe), or crimson (there is no alarm here) into these landscapes and call them better.

True Summer, boring? grey? I can’t buy that.

Photo credit: Sonja Mason

Photo credit: Sonja Mason

NOTE :  To round out this article, a True Summer Polyvore article was added to show you how I might interpret these pictures in clothing.

Many wonderful Summer pictures. I’ve put them in Light, True, Soft Summer order. Hovering the cursor over each will give you the Season.

Summer eyes are the most predictable, unless they’re brown, in which case I find it very tough to read anything. Look for a flower or ring-shaped space around the pupil that has no lines in it. Look at the iris and notice the gentlest rippling water type lines, no definite serpentines, stars, or petal shapes. The 3rd eye from the top is an exception in that it contains a lot of lines and patterns, like a kaleidoscope.

I’m not getting all worried here that lighting and focus may not be perfect. My explanations are just fun observations. I never look in an eye before or during a PCA, because I don’t want any nagging second thoughts if eye patterns and skin don’t  match. The skin absolutely is the deciding factor.

—

Light Summer

Can you see the faintest pale yellow light coming out in a ring, out in the iris?

Notice in the above eye that all the colours are soft, light, even watery, and that the skin is faintly yellow(Spring) and pink (Summer)?

Below is the eye of a 12 year old girl whom I draped 2 years ago as a True Summer, with true pure blue eyes. Yellow has come into her skin and her eye has changed dramatically. The overall colour has warmed and the yellow ring is present in the iris.

She’s presently cleanest and freshest in Light Summer, but so very close to tipping over into Light Spring. There were so many beautiful effects in Light Spring that my decision was something of a compromise. By the age of sixteen, I expect she’ll be a Spring of some sort. She’s been able to adjust her own wardrobe accordingly, as children often can. Her hair is yellow-white and has not changed.

The pair of eyes below belong to the same woman. She is a Light Summer, with True Summer as second best but lacking in the ability to refine the features or add a creamy, even-coloured quality to her skin. She wondered if seeming dark to look at, at least from her hair colour which is a darker grey, would exclude her from belonging to the Light Seasons, but she already knew the answer: No!! What matters is which colours make your skin and face the  most perfect. Hair colour is only loosely tied to Season.

This pattern is fantastic. It reminds me of being underwater and looking up at the sun, especially the lower photo where the yellow seems to serpentine through the iris. In the upper eye, the sun is  mostly seen in the points, arranged in a circle out in the iris. This leaves the appearance of a grey rim round the outside of the iris, a very frequent Light Summer effect, which is very striking in person and can be heightened a lot with right-coloured clothing and makeup.

The eyes have that open, line-free, very distinct floral shape round the pupil which is Summer. The ability to see some lines and the more defined geometry from 8 to 10 in the upper eye are not uncommon in Spring blends. Both contain a lot of yellow (Spring). There is some orange but it’s clear, not clouded as  Autumn’s is, and it’s not uncommon to see it in Spring influenced-eyes. A Spring effect can put irregularity in the eye patterns, I find them the least predictable, maybe because I haven’t looked at enough Spring eyes. The lashes are light and have warmth. Also a fair bit of yellow and pink in the skin.

The thing that would surprise you most about the Light Summer people to whom these eyes belong is that about one third of them are dark haired. They may be iron grey or medium dark brunettes, not the stereotypic blonde and light beiges you expect. And yet, the supremely beautiful eye below is classic for Light Summer, though the woman’s hair is fairly dark brown. The overall colour is watery with lots of grey (Summer), the lines are like gentle ripples in water (Summer, not Winter’s heavy spokes and serpentines), and the faintest yellow sun is coming in as a wreath in the iris close to the pupil, to signal the Spring presence. Light Summer is the doll’s face come to life, the big, round eyes and small, beautiful mouth. The woman below is the dark-haired doll, petite face with girlish features, big eyes, smaller perfect mouth and chin. You can see Spring’s faint yellowness and youthful perfection in her skin.

—

True Summer

Classic  True Summer, the eye above. The open space, the greyed colour, the pink skin, the medium sandy brown lashes. The camera picked up the odd orange fleck is floating around, an Autumn influence, but there is no heat in the skin.

Blue, blue eye, no apparent heat, pink skin and blood vessels. The brown around the pupil is cool greyed taupe. I don’t see any heat here.

Below, we see an eye with a lot of line pattern. This woman would probably be overwhelmed in Winter’s blackened, intense colours, but she has some darkness in her. The white of the eye is a soft white, not the intense blue white you see in the Winter Eye Album. Nonetheless, we would have to drape carefully for Winter.

The eyes below are those of a woman who draped as a True Summer. Sandy brown lashes, a soft white of the eye, and beautiful clear water effects in the iris corroborate that. What’s special is the amount of heat (meaning warm colours like golds and browns) that have found their way into the iris. Like the eye just above, there’s also a fair bit of line pattern and the lines begin just at the edge of the iris, effects seen more in Spring and Winter. As magnificent as it is, these are a lovely reminder of why we don’t do colour analysis by eye colour.

—

Soft Summer

Very muted colours, little line pattern, could be similar to the 4th Light Summer, except the skin seems greyer, not sunny.

More warmth in this eye. This woman wondered if she was a Soft Autumn, and the heat is coming in, but she drapes better in Soft Summer.

The 2 photos below go together. This very beautiful woman was recently analyzed (online) as a Soft Summer. 20 years ago, an analysis said Soft Autumn. A later PCA said a Dark Winter, but the makeup and colours felt too dark and aging. This threesome of Seasons is one of the most commonly confused. The eye supports one of the Soft Seasons. I’ve talked before about the particular facial geometry of many Soft Summers, with the delicately carved cheekbones and jawline and the very symmetric and beautifully fine-edged outline of the face. Here you see a perfect example. No other palette than Soft Summer will reveal these. In Soft Autumn colour, the edges are far less defined and the features seem blunted, not nearly as delicately clean as this.

What’s not to like about the Light Spring and Light Summer? Agreeable in every way, reminding of sunshine, mild weather, pleasant temperatures, and easiness.What if you want to express the serious contender side of yourself, and not a dally in a rowboat?

You can dress like the boss, but he/she probably has no idea what to wear either. Two shades lighter than the men in that business seems reasonable. Can color be used to make women less threatening in male dominated workplaces? Or be seen more as equals?

When you want to be heard, it’s easy to forget that whispers work better. They clear the air like an early morning rain in a world where everyone seems to be yelling. A beautiful, natural face like the one below relaxes everyone around them. They ease the tension in a room just by being there. Light Summer personifies the breath of fresh air like no other.

When we look at the colour palettes fanned out for any Season, our eye tends to be drawn to the colours. If you planted an acre garden and it contained a single bloom, your eye would be drawn to that spot of colour. We have to make a conscious effort to notice all the other colours, meaning the neutrals. They’re the spine of the whole wardrobe, the items that the real colours are added to. Use them a lot. You don’t need an item in everyone of your greens, but owning each of the greys is a good investment. For Light Summer, they are the colour of breath, shade, and shadows.

Monochromatic (all one colour) and analogous (neighbour colours on the colour wheel) colour schemes look organized and work very well on Summers and their blends, though Spring will use more colour difference and brightness in their prints and combinations. Pair a blue-grey with a blue, or a lilac-grey with a colour from the pink-violet family. This quiets the colour but introduces the friendliness, creativity, and confidence that colour does, and is very appropriate at work.

Avoid child like details, like pintucks, gathers, bows, or dots, unless the colour is quite serious and the effect is low key. These can look great on any Spring blend, but we’re trying to look less pediatric. Smocked blouses or hippie/tie-dye tunics can look as fine as peasant and folk styles on Autumn, but best worn on days off.

Keep in mind the most essential aspect of your colouring: it never gets darker than medium, so your clothes don’t either. There is always a light block somewhere to give an overall light feeling, because that’s how looking at you feels. Get too dark and your clothes take over your face, your body, your size, your presence. You have room to move with warmth and coolness, and with mutedness or clearness, because as long as colour stays light, it is very forgiving to your skin tone’s perfection.

Light Summer is gentle colour, misty light, an early sun, and an airiness that’s still cooler than it is warm. Silver and gold would both be fine in the photo above, but silver feels more at home. There is no stark white (I know the boat is white, but that’s your left brain telling you so; if you were to paint this picture, the sky and boat are grey, and silvery grey at that). And black? Put one black spot anywhere here and your eye would see nothing else.

I set the max price at 100 for most items. Your workplace may be more glam than mine, so you may see this as a casual look.

I liked the cardi because it reminds me of how planet Earth looks from outer space, a water planet, all swirling greens, blues, and whites.

Nothing gets very dark. There would be more white tops but they publish with odd reflections.

The blue jacket on the left – too muted? Maybe. It could be sunnier, but sometimes you’ll love something that will be close enough, or you won’t be able to find the perfect thing with the time and money you own. It all has to work in the real world. Light Summer is Summer above all. Denim blues are all pretty good.

The silver watch too chunky? Better suited to a Winter? Maybe, but I like a big watch. The strap is a brushed silver and the stones, numbers, and details set in the face are small. It balances well enough.

As ever, I’m more interested in what you don’t agree with because it helps me learn. I never take anything personally, trust me.

Next post will be Light Spring.