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Season Colours in the Off-Season

February 23, 2013 by Christine Scaman · 13 Comments 

We have two themes in this article. One is to assemble outfits that are ‘off-Season’. It’s easy to find clothing in our 12 Tone palettes at certain times of year and near impossible at other times. The second is to introduce a new style voice, since I wonder if my outfits are a little repetitive.

My daughter, Ally, has more style in her little finger than I’ll find in my whole life. She’s Kibbe-innocent but can see whether lines match people instantly. Today’s Polyvores are from her perspective.  I asked her to keep in mind that she’s dressing women of all ages, to which she replied, “No woman of any age needs to wear granny clothes and I’m not picking those.” Fair enough.

Ally’s also here to break a few rules. In her charming 17 year old way, she asked, “Why does anyone have to do what you say?”  Point taken. Nobody does. You’ll find colours and styles you might not normally see.

Light Summer in December

 

 

 

True Summer in October

 

 

Any one piece may not be perfect. But the whole thing together works. As S., the student who arrives this week for the training course, so aptly pointed out, the word ‘match’ isn’t always appropriate. I use it too often. Whether your clothes match the swatches in your palettes, whether your lipstick matches your red belt, whether your sweater matches your hair – it doesn’t really matter so much. They need not be identical colours. They need only look like they live in the same harmonic field relative to the the whole composition.

The idea is to use colour to create a vision that is cohesive. All the elements are working together and with you. Everything has a good reason for being there. That’s how we look at paintings, landscapes, and other people. We don’t dissect the saturation of their blouse. So the vest above is on the dark side. So the pink backpack could be pinker. In the big picture, I’m not sure it would make an important difference. The parts are finding enough in common to stay together. Not unlike  marriage, or any other relationship.

True Autumn in April

Yes, it really is this cold here in April.

It strikes me that we’re still just making Polyvores. This may answer part of our purpose, which is, how to wear muted, warm colours when everyone else looks like an Easter basket.

The other part of the question is, where do I go to find my colours in April when the stores are full of coloured candy floss?

- shop wider; I’ve actually begun buying things I find on Polyvore. As eBay is the world’s biggest yard sale, Polyvore is the world’s biggest shopping mall right in my house.

- buy online, always risky, but many allow free returns.

- shop all year round for all year round; within 6 months of your PCA, once it’s caught up with you, or you with it, you will keep most of your choices for years, and you’ll spend more per item because you’ll know it looks right and will work with the rest of your closet

 

 

True Winter in September (or March)

 

 

Any of us who knows both her colours and her body line finds shopping nearly as easy as it used to be. There’s no one-stop-shop any longer. We buy Christmas outfits in July, we are always looking. Other than True Winter and Soft Autumn, I don’t really dedicated stores for colours. Even for those groups, you’ve only got their (limited) design lines to select from.

 

By request, the Bright Spring Dramatic Classic

Dramatic Classic, where pouffy becomes maternity or Jack Sparrow. A rounded edge is Peter Pan.

What’s interesting here is that the Bright Seasons tend to have a lot of sweetness in the personality. I’ve heard them called pushovers but that comes from someone who’s only working from a traditional, narrow, male-based definition. Power wears many hats. These people are not mean, abrupt, rude, or rough. As the Bright Spring is a Spring, she will take things to heart. You can’t throw words around that you don’t mean. Being with her is an exercise in being happier and  more gentle.

Dramatic Classic is not sweet in the traditional sense either. If anything, it’s a little sharp. If you began with the absolute average woman, DC isn’t closer to being the average child. It’s closer to being the absolute average man.

The intersection of the two is that Bright Spring’s colours and DC’s lines are both very clean. No extras, no gadgets, no fuzzy, no fluff. If you drew the outline, the edges would be sharp, no question where one thing ends and the next begins. Nothing fades into anything else. Absence of blur effect, noise reduction up.

I gave Ally a few colour words – lively, clean, same or opposite colours, a little bit of Winter, and the shape words – sleek, expensive, close, upside-down triangle or straight lines, and then just asked her to dress me. She didn’t read the book because we get too rigid about rules and end up in costumes. Her job was to pull together an overall effect.

Black is small, shiny, on the bottom half, with other elements that warm up the overall look. If black is in the top half, it takes up small surface area, it’s opened up like lace or pointelle, or there’s lots of skin.

Every item need not be sunny, there’s Winter here. But each vignette should say bright, alive, warm, crisp.

Something delicate really looks good.  Crispness near the face looks good, it need not be especially yellow. Bulk with angularity looks clunky or spiky. Fine, thin crispness is good, like icicles.

Smooth, geometric, shiny, new, expensive – all work with the pearls, in a chunkier setting.  The pearls are fine because the edges are defined, as feathers would not be. Those long dangling earrings, some DC’s might disappear them, but on a Bright Spring DC, they’d be great. The sharpness offsets the small size.

Hearts are an inverted triangle shape, as are teardrops, both great on Spring and DC.

The whole earring that sprays up – unless you know different stores than me, you’d never wear earrings. Chunky smooth pieces that sit close to the ear  and have a solid presence on the ear lobe are good.

Mixed metals are good here when they’re shiny.

No platforms on shoes. Frankensteinish.

I normally would never wear a bow, but the asymmetric position of it is good. I like the design on that sweater, interesting with the blouse. One of those excellent combinations that nobody could do like Bright Spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope that you go to the site and make these images bigger. There are some really nice things here.

 

—

Dark Winter in Hot Weather

February 17, 2013 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments 

I am Canadian. Summer is from May to September. In some parts of our country, we seem to have two Seasons, July and Winter.

V is a Dark Winter who lives in the Northern US. She spent some weeks in Florida in July. She made these observations:

I must’ve seen about a dozen women (ages 40 – 80) during that 3 week time frame who were wearing all-white outfits.  These were just women who were out shopping, dining, whatever…not dressed up for anything special that would otherwise dictate wearing white.Some wore dresses, some wore loose tops with loose pants, etc.They all looked cool and appropriate. I didn’t have time to study what season they might have been. I simply thought they looked cool and refreshing.

V was attracted to the head-to-toe light colours but wondered if a dark  person would look great in all white. My first thought was, wear the clothes. Why not? It’s just clothes. Enjoy the holiday by changing everything about how you normally live.

If I think of Jacqui Onassis in all white or white&navy, I pick the white and navy. If you take in the totality of any person, all white is never enough. In the totality of an appearance, there exists much more than just clothes, like eyes and hair. Maybe by wearing all white, our heads become a little more colourful, and that’s not bad. Little things can go a long way. Lipstick and mascara count. Throw on a great belt, a superb watch, a gorgeous head scarf, or important earrings. As ever, taste is always right, but to me, all white isn’t much more interesting than all black. Those outfits succeed based entirely on what’s added to them.

 

Light and Location

V. did some research and came up with this excellent article.

The author is on to something. Equatorial light is more direct (straight overhead) so more short (blue) wavelengths must reach there more often, possibly causing colours to appear cooler.

And then there are cultural differences, like if everyone around you is a blonde, how long do you stay brunette before you start feeling like an outsider? When we bring ourselves to a new place, do we change our apparel colours to suit the place, the light there, or the fashion there? What’s in the stores is different. We buy stuff when we travel that we’d never buy at home, but it just felt right for the place and the time as a way to recognize the many ways in which the new place influences us consciously and physiologically.

 

Dark Winter About Town in July

Any woman who knows her best colours will find some times of year easier to shop in than others. The next article will show some off-season collections. For today’s palette, buying dark saturated colour in May isn’t easy, it’s true. Like everything, you get better at it. You learn to buy your summer clothes in November. Colour analyzed women have the confidence to buy apparel whenever they find it. The colour will be just as good in six months as it is today.

 

 

 

Exciting Colour Combinations

V asked,

I’ve had enough time living with my Dark Winter palette to now have a closet full of DW clothes. And the colors do all ‘go’ together, as one would expect. The question I have is…as so many of the DW colors are darker (and on the less-vibrant side, due to their ‘drop of chocolate’ or ‘slight film of soot’), when I pair 2 colors …for example a cobalt blue dress with a lightweight purple flyaway cardigan over it….to me, the color combination just looks “blah”. And I see this over and over with combining my DW clothes. The individual pieces are fine, but I can’t just easily mix and match. This is particularly obvious when I travel. I may have suitcase full of Dark Winter clothes but many of the combinations just don’t have much eye appeal. I’m obviously missing something that will add the ‘jazzy spark’. What am I missing?

 

I wondered about

1. Are the colours being worn truly saturated? This is something Winters have to grow into. As a Winter, colours are bold, strong, almost shocking. A person who doesn’t have the True Winter palette there for comparison might think many of your blues and greens are True Winter’s. These colours are so not blah that wearing too many at once can get parrotty.

2. Some women much more flamboyance and/or drama in their geometry or their preferences than others. They need styles of clothing that convey that. Design and style require that both colour and line to be right for the individual. Are the cuts too conservative/classic/careful for a person who needs more flair?  All of those will come across as frumpy-ish if you are Yanger than the clothes, no matter what colour they are. Flamboyant people wear more colour all the time.

3. Clothes alone, like makeup alone or hair colour alone, don’t convey the whole image. Accessories add many layers of expression. When we buy ourselves a present, it’s often a cosmetic – affordable and fun. We own enough cosmetics and they’re repetitive. We should be buying accessories. On Winter, they also are bold, noticeable, with big presence. The hard metallic element is very much part of the image.

4. Your own taste. My suggestions can only take you so far. If they were complete and applied equally to all women, that would mean that there are 12 kinds of women. Study how other image systems put colour together. Your answers are not in any one of them but in the places where they all intersect.

 

Dark Winter Staying Cool

Dark colours are also very warm. Any suggestions on how to look good dressed as a Dark Winter and stay cool too?

My eye likes a Dark Season person (in the 12-Tone personal colour analysis system, that’s Dark Autumn and Dark Winter) to give an overall medium to very dark impression. Don’t forget that you are already a dark block all by yourself. We tend to look at outfits, like the all white top and pants, and forget the person they’re hanging on, the block that makes the biggest contribution of all. Picture outfits from the top of your head down, not your neck. That’s how they look to the rest of us.

Sheer or floaty textiles and lots of skin can cool even if it’s dark. I find black much more interesting in hot weather. Icy colours are an automatic fix here too. It’s Winter that gets close to white in their lightest-darkest range and takes advantage of these colours in hot weather. Summer folks may have more choice in the stores in July, but their pastels are quite far from white.

 

 

Our appearance doesn’t begin or end with clothes. It begins with the person and ends with the entire composition. Dark nail polish, jewelry, lipstick, or a purse isn’t hotter to wear but absolutely affects the whole picture. Jacquie O. was fine in her white pants, white headscarf, and white&navy tee, but it was the huge dark glasses that balanced the image. Those were what we identified her with most.

I can’t think of a website that gives real women better advice, usable and beautiful, than Imogen’s. I see she’s done some work on the site and now has an e-book that you could get free. Here, Imogen shows colours for different seasons.

 

Dark Winter on Vacation

What might we wear that’s more interesting than all white and still relaxed?

 

 

—-

The Best Skin Finish on Winter Colouring

January 2, 2013 by Christine Scaman · 13 Comments 

In any change you want to effect, three questions matter:

1. What do I want?

2. Where am I now?

3. What am I willing to do to get what I want?

 

What Do I Want

Very hard question. Most of us are schooled in what we don’t want. You might want to develop the full edge and potential of your appearance. If your idea of great makeup is to take what’s already there and make more of it, as mine is, Winter’s best makeup might have your redefining your position. The colours in the face are a lot and now we’re going to add a lot more. Adding just a little more doesn’t move Winter very far from the start point, or nowhere close to the max point, but maybe you just want to know a nice eyeliner and gloss and that’s all. There is no right or wrong answer.

There is nothing wrong with being a Winter without makeup. The important thing is to channel what you do towards the outcome that you want. Too often, we’ve never identified either what we want or what we do to help or hinder that. If you’re a Winter, the time has come. No face is more altered with makeup. As in life, the good and bad are equal. As in all things Winter, they are also simultaneously at both outer limits. Other types of colouring tend to look more similar with and without makeup, which is a definite good thing. But it’s the Winters who can go miles from where they started, and that’s good too.

I like a lot of colour on Winter, a lot of makeup, a lot of drama. The face is that way already. I want every woman to be all they could be. Would our 80-year-old selves excuse us for having been less than that? Would our reasons have been good enough? Hint: no excuse or decision based on fear or negativity is ever good enough.

This is good.

 

 

I know it’s hard. This is the group whose language is power, a currency that women have been un-trained to deal in by every force in their lives. Power is not second nature to us.

 

Where Am I Now

Even harder question. Unpacking our own luggage and seeing what’s really in there can be scary, especially if the zipper has been jammed for awhile. Lots of people can’t admit their height and weight and those are facts. As the oft-heard quote states, “Reality is an acquired taste.” And slowly acquired at that.

All those Winters from the 80s, which seem to have been in the majority, are very seldom Winters, which is fine because they’re usually wearing Summer colours. The real Winters are buried among every other type of colouring. Their road back is a longer one for the Tone you might think would be the easiest to analyze and dress. They don’t see it coming unless they are very dark of hair and eye to begin with.

Once, I’d love the Winter to walk in who is overdone in her Winterness. The young ones are, even without makeup. They’re bringing it. More eyeliner (that we remove), thigh high boots (brown, but they’re trying to be bigger and it’s good), cape flying, doing something luscious with the hair, more ME-ME-ME. In our fifties, we women have toned ourselves so far down that we can lose our discernment of what is just normal and right.

Especially in our later years, when our faces finally carry all the power that took 50 years to build, isn’t it time to stop being so careful? I get that not everyone wants to present a heavily made up, dramatic face, but it’s not even about drama in makeup. There is so much caution to shake off. Drama and glamour haven’t been added for a long time and yet, this is where they are most at home, most normal.

Personal Colour Analysis is a gateway to Here’s Who You Are.

 

What’s In A Winter Face: both extremes at the same time.

To be more specific:

1.  Contrast. You saw this coming. It means that there is a lot of distance between everything and everything else, such as:

Features from skin.  The skin is very even, smooth, and quiet. Insert into that landscape a mouth, cheeks, eyes, and eyebrows whose colours create a big and sudden jump from the background. That Shiseido banner up above.

Light – dark levels of contiguous colours. Eyeliner is dark (it contains more black than any other group). The eyeshadow next to it, the lid colour, is a fair bit lighter (lid colour is medium on the other groups). The next band, the eyeshadow contour, is quite dark by comparison (more about that later). The eyeshadow highlight is icy light, nearly white (not the case for pastel on Summers and creamy on Warms).  The brow is quite dark (but not darkened more than Nature designed on anyone), very sharply defined, and dramatized extra (crisp, arched, lengthened, whatever works on that face, which is simply to see what’s there and make more of it).  For sure, any particular face might need these adjusted a little, but this is the generic look.

Textures, ultra matte to ultra shine. Quiet skin. No special effects. Snow White’s face isn’t contoured (which sets up lowlights for Autumn), dewy (sets up highlights, best on Spring), or cottony (sets up fluffy, just right on a dreamy Summer). On a Winter face or a winter landscape, those look muddy, busy, and trivial, a million miles from Winter. You want foundation whose coverage is opaque enough to make a very even blanket. Powder the whole face evenly.  Add lots of eyes, lots of mouth, more blush or less (both can be good). Done.

The Best Skin Finish on Winter Colouring is: Even.

 

2. Drama. It’s like a deficiency when drama is left out of a Winter eye design. Not wrong. There is no wrong, no answer that works across the board, even within a Season. Winters I’ve seen, they not only balance drama, they are enhanced further with it. It doesn’t look even dramatic, exciting, stimulating, theatrical, or otherwise extraordinary. It looks normal.

 

Would the image above make sense with a soft and gentle eye colour or shape (expression)? Winter’s is not a gradual, blended, or soft face.

When Summers buy cosmetics, look for products that have a gentle application. Remember when we applied your makeup and we divided the foundation with moisturizer, as I do on every Summer and Spring, because heavy and matte products look like a mask on your delicate skin texture and softened colouring? The same principle applies to all your cosmetics. Having said that, we also showed you that when a colour is correct, you can apply almost any amount of it and it just blends believably into the skin. That’s true, but these are two different ideas. Summer begins with a product that swatches like a watercolour. Winter is looking for oil paint.

 

3. Keep the number of cosmetic colours low. 1 is good. Colour is subtracted from winter landscapes. Many steely dark grays, many icy grays or icy colours (means nearly white). Very little colour activity. And suddenly, a deeply flushed cheek. A red or purple mouth. The colours in the face are shocking enough on a still and quiet energy.

Remember how on Lights, dark colour takes over? On Winters, it’s colour itself that becomes too much too quickly.

Would this be more effective if we added a buttercup, a bluejay, and a lilac? No, the red would lose its voltage. There are thousands of these photos out there because they make sense to humans by reinforcing something we already know and recognize.

 

 

4. Intensity. Don’t leave any features behind. Enhance each one to the same degree. Thou Shalt Not Be Wimpy. Apply a lot of colour to each feature and don’t blot any off till the whole face is done. Each part looks like too much on its own but it all works together when all the pieces are in place. Blend nothing till every part is done or you’ll overblend that feature back into cautious and unbalance the face.

Thou Shalt Not Be Wimpy applies equally to concealer as lipstick. The blues and purples in the skin are so saturated that a sheer concealer won’t hide them nearly as well as a product with good opacity. My favorite is Arbonne for that reason, plus it stays where it’s applied, it lasts amazingly well all day, and it dries fast so I can apply foundation over it immediately without overly diluting it or smearing it everywhere. I am very fussy about where concealer goes but I use a lot of it. For reference, I wear Arbonne Medium.

 

What Are You Willing To Do

Look very different to yourself? Exchanging a plaid duffel coat for a black and white herringbone is a step. Wearing bigger jewelry than all your friends? Be the only one of the girls to wear a fuchsia red mouth?

Draw a lot more attention to yourself? Stand out and apart? As many have discovered, getting noticed for being different isn’t easy, even is it’s a good different.

Wear your real true This Is Who I Am hair colour?

No right or wrong, just questions. Everything looks easy from the outside. Try it, you may find it takes some effort. What are the conditions on what you’re willing to do?

Would you wear twice as much makeup as you wear today? Most Winter women accept the eye makeup fairly easily. Lips can always be sheer. Winter’s sheer is Spring’s “Oh, dear Lord, too much, wipe it off, start again.” Winters, pick sheers with a lot of colour or save your money and buy Chapstick. Where you hear the brakes screech is with the blush. They feel like clowns for a week. What everyone else sees is a pulled-together face. Not in how much, which you can decide, but in how red. Blood on snow, right?

 

The Nature of Reflected Light

The Spring, Summer, and Autumn articles  preceding this one are linked in their names. The idea is that our natural colours have a way of reflecting light. Beyond just the colours of the reflected light, the wavelengths have properties that reach our other senses, as texture for instance. In Chinese medicine, our fingers are entry and exit points for energy. Of course. How could they not be? They touch everything. They’re up and down-loading who we are all the time. Each of our sense organs is doing the same. Each of the 12 Tone colour collections speaks a certain language, is evocative of certain emotions, reminds of certain landscapes, and makes sense if consistent in colour and touch and sound and scent and taste. It’s all happening at once. The knee bone is connected to the neck bone.

Summer’s soft, gentle, serene, muted colours don’t make sense in leather pants. Skin with that colouring has reflective properties truer to the surface of an opal, not a mirror or an elephant’s hide. Soft Autumn skin reflects light like felt and its colours are more beautiful in that texture than done up in Mr. Freezies. Do colours bounce light in certain ways that tell us texture? Or is it that skin painted in certain colours also carries other qualities that bounce light in a way that impresses texture?

The True Winter surface is smooth and hard. Dark Winter is smoother than Dark Autumn but not 100% smooth; it’s also thick, and not quite as hard as True Winter. Bright Winter is very smooth, shinier, and semitransparent – Dr. Sheldon Cooper, as opposed to Autumn’s Magnum P. I. Though some will cringe, I’m still going with rubbery for Winter skin by comparison with the other Seasons.

So far, we’ve said:

Bright Spring: glass

True Spring: persimmon

Light Spring: petal

 

Light Summer:  peach

True Summer:  cotton

Soft Summer:   flannel

 

Soft Autumn: suede

True Autumn: velvet

Dark Autumn: leather

 

Dark Winter: Vinyl

If we start at Dark Autumn and move along to its cooler side, we arrive next at Dark Winter. These are both Neutral Seasons. Dark Winter has more in common with the True Season parent of True Winter, but does share the most important dimension of colour, darkness, with the Neutral it’s paired with and whose descriptor it shares, that is, Dark Autumn.

We begin with Autumn’s canvas, which is strong and textured. As Winter settles in, the skin texture smooths out. Dark Autumn’s leather is transitioning.

Dark Winter skin throws light back like vinyl.

 

 

Not just record vinyl, but inflatable products, dominatrix gear, and tarps. Maybe even a car. Industrial, tough, shiny, smooth, waterproof, and useful. Good Dark Winter words. Not bad words for their jewelry and belts either. Dark Winter takes Dark Autumn’s gypsy/Rustic Opulent and shifts it to gladiator. A sweater in black or dark grey metallic looks like chain mail. Stud, armor, and heavy link effects are a natural fit here, scary elsewhere.

Dark Winter is mysterious. It’s Christmas Eve, the dark jewel-toned ornaments, the fireplace, the night, the lights in the windows. Very nice, but there’s something bigger going on. The feeling of waiting for something. Waiting for the reason behind the pretty. Deeper, even darker. Sinister.

Nude lips on Winter looks tired and old. Dead lips, a good friend calls it. My new favourite lipstick is Shiseido RD 305. It is just pink enough to not be red-lips. It is beautifully saturated with the touch of brown that Autumn adds to make your colours less cold and more natural than True Winter. That brown is essential to create the encompassing harmony that only a colour analyzed appearance can give. You are coloured with a little of that brown, where brown is dark orange, and your hair, skin, and eyes have some gold-amber-orange tones. If your skin is light to medium, this colour may be your best natural lip.  It’s not dark, often the case with Dark Season lip colours. It’s fresh daytime believable natural lip colour. Not ready for it yet? Top it with clear gloss.

Bronzer can play a tiny part because Autumn has left behind the slightest texture or roughness. Contour carefully, with powder that has enough red to disappear into the skin (eleablake‘s Miss November is great). Follow the 3 shape at the sides of the face and down the sides of the nose bridge, using a small amount, more to carve more geometric drama into the face than to warm it up.

Soft Summer’s darker foundation trick to contour is too wishy-washy here. More colour is required to be noticeable and achieve the outcome. It’s not a bad option as you learn or if you want a very subtle effect, just be sure the darker powder is as cool as your foundation or you’ll look yellow. It takes a lot of colour to make any difference on the intensity of this inherent colouring. A few shades of beige this way or that will make less difference on Winter skin. Carefulness is plain pointless.

Darkness works. Smoke is natural, like the Autumn muting in the skin. Smoked eyes make sense. The lighter lid eyeshadow can equally well be fairly dark. Any Season can do smoked eyes, but it’s most at home on the Darks. Even the other two Winters are best to exercise caution in darkness so it doesn’t look heavy. They look better in clean and silvery.

 

True Winter: Ceramic

Even smoother and even harder.

True Winter: ceramic. Like a white sink. Impenetrable, tough, and enduring.

 

 

Clean. Picture the makeup colours from your palette painted right on that white sink. Dark eyes, red-violet cheeks, red-violet lips. No fuss, no frills. Not smoked (Dark Winter) or clear, as in translucent (Bright Winter). Can you tell this before they’re draped, by looking at them? Absolutely not. True Winter is always the draping surprise for me, even more so than Bright Spring.

For True Winter, that very quiet blanket of skin without a lot of cheek colour, or with an icy light cheek, is excellent, like the picture at the top. For Bright and Dark, colour on the cheek is better, I find. It adds to Bright’s liveliness and Dark’s intensity.

Eyeliner is dark. Eyeshadow is quite light and silvered. Under brow highlight is near white or some icy (near white) colour. Contour and back corner eyeshadow is quite dark. Darkening the outer back corner of eyes looks good as a way of adding drama. Use a dark gray/black eyeshadow. Go over the eyeliner to fill in holes. Drag the dark shadow out past the crease. Turn around and start pulling in inward above the crease, not in the crease. This enlarges the apparent size of the eye and recedes the skin above the crease that can close in. On eyes where the upper half of the lid is smaller than the lower half, the crease is shallow, or the eye prominent, you would omit this effect. Deposit some dark shadow at the outer lid corner.

Other Seasons will use a darker shadow that isn’t much darker than the lid colour or skip the effect altogether. On a Light Season, where dark colour takes off, the eyeshadow contour can just be the medium lid colour packed on a bit more heavily. On a Soft Season, the liner, lid, and contour are quite close in darkness level, as in medium, with contour only slightly darker. They distinguish their roles by being of different colours in similar darkness levels, rather than Winter’s variations on one colour (gray) in extremes of darkness levels. On a Winter, light means really light and dark means really dark. You are it already. So be it, as P. said so cleverly.

I do not know how bronzer can improve this face but I’m willing to see it if anyone has good products or ideas. You wouldn’t want to dull that spectacular opposition of The Purity and The Darkness that only this colouring incarnates.

Winter’s sheer is Spring’s almost-opaque. The best Winter gloss I can think of comes from Lora Alexander at Pretty Your World. The texture, finish, and amount of colour are excellent, with good clarity. Glama and Hot Lips lip colours and Fast Track blush are great (I own them). From this compare page of the Cool Winter selections, Diva looks super good too.

Though True Winter is very red-based and looks great in blue-based red apparel, I find their most natural fit for blush and lipstick is somewhere in the pink-fuchsia-purple spectrum. That may be because true red lips are like true black eyeliner, somehow harder and more dramatic than human faces really are. Dark Winter’s burnt rose red and Bright Winter’s strawberry or pink red alleviate the pure redness. True Winter does the same by using violet, meaning clear purpled pinks. Arbonne’s Raisin gloss is a very impressive purple. Lauder’s Raspberry Pop is good but gentler, as is Merle Norman’s Raspberry on Ice.

 

Bright Winter: Silicone

How about Bright Winter? That amazing special blend of innocence with a dark, brittle edge. The geisha could span the Bright Seasons. Once the delicacy feels almost too rare to conceive on this Earth, the hummingbird, a membrane-thin gold foil, we’re into Bright Spring.

Spring has a hand in Bright Winter. Therefore, we need a sugar coating, shiny, fun, and ornamental. Pink frosting on lids, cheeks, and lips, lilac highlights, more play (more colours at once), more theater (cat eye, a few false lashes, fine winged brows, bright lips, hats with veils, cloche hats with beautiful ornaments, because hats and earrings are face accessories). Below, the haircut, the dress print and line, all awesome.

 

 

Definitely a lighter palette than the other Winters.

The skin’s reflectance had me searching for an analogy. Fine china with that near-transparent edge? Thinking, thinking,…mostly Winter, therefore rubbery and even, but a little softer with a transparency in the outermost layer… oh, you’re going to love this, jellyfish! Not good? Soft boiled egg? Maybe. Yes.

But jellyfish is so good. Stay with me here.

 

The flamenco dancer.

 

 

Heavenly and magical.

 

 

You see where I’m going?

 

How do we translate this to makeup? You don’t have to do a lot, you have this smooth and rubbery (all Winters) clarity (Brights) already. Clear silicone skin. Increase it with  intensely coloured products, pigments so pure, you would swear they’re transparent. Brush powders with the slightest finest shimmer effect on all exposed skin. Don’t stop at the jawline. It’s a sprinkling of fairy dust, that sugar topping, an overall crystalline effect.

Bronzer? A little icy gold uplight, sure. Baby peach, always good on Brights. Very little.  We feel no bronzer per se here:

 

 

Chanel Glossimer in Jalousie is nice. Bagatelle is a light, pretty peach, Clarins Crystal Violet and Revlon Lip Butter in Raspberry Pie could be shared with True Winter. Stila Lipglaze Raspberry Crush is very good.

 

Recap: The skin is calm and even in colour and texture. By using strong lines, bold colours, intense pigment deposits, and big distance between light and dark, both adjacent and separate, we create very clear feature definition. There is no question about where one ends and the other begins.

For Summer, we said: The skin is soft and dry, setting up gentleness and gradual muting. The features are blended into the skin with colours that create a soft flow or diffusion instead of sharp definition. As colours flow into each other as hazy mists, it feels difficult to tell where one feature ends and the next begins.

For Autumn: The skin is contoured, setting up lowlights. The features are defined from the skin by colours that are warm and velvety and the judicious use of metallic glints.

This was Spring: The skin is dewy, setting up highlights. The features are fresh, lively, distinguished from the skin by being very colourful, moist, and vibrant.

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Jackie and Annie Are Bright Winters

December 5, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 29 Comments 

Jackie

 

Visible darkness, the eyes are near black, but how much darkness exactly? How near black?

Is that muted skin (Summer or Autumn) or sallow (a Winter)?

Is she sweet (Spring) or graceful (Summer)? She’s both if you know her. Who expected her to pull off so much drama?

In Jackie, are we finding Summer’s ‘quiet-till-you-know-her’ or Winter’s contained?

 

 

If I am completely uncertain beforehand, she’s usually a True Something or a Bright Spring. I’ve seen Jackie at her work many times.  She chooses a lot of cool, muted colours, like a Soft Summer or any young woman in today’s retail offering. Sometimes she wears black, which clears, defines, and comes close to overpowering. No way she was warm enough for a Spring, even a Bright Spring. No doubt that the B&W of True Winter would be too sharp. I had never seen her wearing makeup.

In 12 Season (12 Tone) personal colour analysis, Bright Winter is the Neutral Season, or group of natural colouring, that takes most of its colour properties from Winter, with a small, but so important, contribution from Spring. When the two Tones of highest chroma come together in one person, our senses feel the hit of the purest pigments, offered in a most gentle presentation.

I didn’t imagine she would balance Bright Winter. A colour analyst has the same comparison-based sense of vision as everyone else. We can guess but we know how much money you will part with based on our advice. We don’t guess. We measure. She balanced it and then some. Her eyes were clean and crisp – what happens to part of the face happens to the whole face. It’s just that some features are better markers for it. If your eyes are clear, so is your skin. If their edges are clean, so are the rest of your features’.

Beginning with how a person looks, dark, light, etc. is only a little more secure than naming Season based on character. Especially the True Seasons. It takes a certain amount of guts to pronounce True with drapes, let alone without. Especially the True Spring and True Winter. They never look like the averages. Those we think we know from media are usually very altered.

Was I looking at a curvy faced Summer with sleepy eyes and swoopy lines? Or a Theatrical Romantic (TR) (as per David Kibbe’s fantastic 1987 book, Metamorphosis), with sharp curves in the face and the frame? All of Mr. Kibbe’s 13 body types appear in all 12 groups of natural colouring, but when I see TR, I think of Brights. What they have in common is slenderness. When you really look at them, they’re narrow from left to right, like the frames you imagine models must have to photograph so well, but much more feminine in the curves. Of the Brights I see, half or more are TR.

 

 

She couldn’t be Soft Summer. The connection that the black in the eyes made with Winter drapes was one thing. Only brown eyes in one of the 5 Winter-influenced Seasons will do that. Plus, just moving ideas around before the analysis, her character wasn’t right. The Softs are Brights are both gracious but contained. Soft Summer is steadier. She is thinking about keeping the ship on course, attending to the work of the day. She gave the analysis some thought and gathered a list of questions. She is going to get it right.

The Bright Seasons just show up for the experience. Winter thinks their way through it, Spring feels it. Brights are sparkly, not the first adjective you might think of for any Season on the Autumn side. Jackie is very sparkly once her right colours are near her, with the points of the sparkles in her nose, her chin. Anyone could have thought that was Summer’s doll-like face, small chin, beautifully shaped nose…but nobody can link character or facial features to colouring until the drapes find the truth of the colours. After that, a lot more starts to make sense.

Colorants remain pure in apparel and cosmetics for Bright Seasons because the native colours are pure. Saturation in dyes can go, and will go, as high as chemistry can take it, higher than Munsell saw back in his day. I have never seen the colour that can overpower this skin in purity. Darkness, yes. Chroma, no. Maybe if you wrap them in a neon tube, but I bet Bright Winter would just look better. Part of what sets them apart is the potential for extravagance that takes everyone by surprise, them most of all. Placing this skin in soft colour, meaning muted, meaning blued or pinked greys, meaning pastels, you wouldn’t do it if you’d watched what happens in real life with your own eyes. You’re looking at a face in a dirty mirror.

Colour saturation is extremely high in the Bright Seasons. Too often, we darken when we saturate colour in our imagination. The 3 Colour Scales (hue, value, chroma) are independent, meaning that when a colour is altered, the other colour dimensions are necessarily affected, just not necessarily in the same way. Bright Winter has higher chroma (more saturation, pure pigments), higher value (lighter), and warmer hue than the other Winters. (One could argue that theoretically, the overall value is mid range and the range reaching fully to B&W, so the same as True Winter. It is hard to accurately judge value when colours have different saturations and/or hues. My eyes think they see Bright as lighter than True, just because the yellow in the Bright palette looks lighter.)

 

 

I look for colours with incredible pigment purity and yet, some transparency. Coloured crystals, coloured glass. Jackie was too comfortable with Clinique Kissyfit lipgloss, magnificent that it was. I want you a little uncomfortable, especially Winters who don’t like to give up control. Many are pretty sure that they know their own best presentation better than anyone else (more Darks and Trues than Brights). They come in telling me they already have their best hair colour and they won’t wear pink or orange. In truth, they see themselves accurately to the exact same degree as anyone else, which is to say, maybe 50-50. Jackie had the perfect mindset. She wouldn’t put her foot on the brakes no matter what. She could see her appearance getting better and better and she just went with it. A little nervous? Maybe. Did it anyway.

I’ll keep adding till we push open those doors. As you know if I’ve put makeup on you, I’m not stingy or careful with the amount. I want you to see right colour fuse with your face and to give you balance. Never get in the way of your own glamour. Of your own anything. We moved on to Tarte Nuria gloss. Jackie could see that it was a lot more than she’s used to, but she couldn’t look away or say that it didn’t look superb. Each building block of makeup on a Winter looks like too much on its own. You need it all to balance. Eyes with this intensity need a mouth with something going on, or the face is off kilter.

We used a charcoal liner and lots of it and L’Oreal Blackened Smokes eyeshadows. Pulling the dark sparkly black shadow over the grey liner was magic. Black mascara. I’m coming to notice that Bright Winter often has ridiculously gorgeous eyelashes.

Lighting is variable in these photos and many are taken in a mirror. The colours may not be what you expect for Bright Winter. These photos have gone through four digital machines before you see them. Besides, they are surrounded by too many other colours and uncontrolled lighting to know what they really are. To know the truth of a colour, it must be surrounded by neutral gray. The walls of the room are painted neutral gray but they sure don’t look it, do they? Correct colour analysis requires neutral surroundings. For me, that’s the first non-negotiable standard.

 

 

I believe that the best beauty is the easiest for others to see. The minute something doesn’t fit, we feel it in our gut. The person has altered themselves, as if they couldn’t trust themselves the way they were. If they couldn’t, should we? People are more relaxed and honest with us if our appearance speaks the truth of us.

The beautiful girl in these pictures is at ease with herself. Jackie is easy easy for us to look at. She’s wearing lots of makeup but the colours feel like an effortless, natural part of her face. Most important, her expression shows us that Jackie feels happy and calm. We, in turn, feel happy and calm. Humans are highly empathic, women especially.

What I want to give you is what Jackie has in these photos, a feeling of being fully satisfied and grateful with what she was given, of knowing that her gifts are perfect, plenty, and enough for anything she chooses to do. I love to analyze young women so they can experience this no-turning back moment. May they carry it for a lifetime and never fill a makeup bag with colours made for anyone but their own true selves.

 

 

Annie

I am thrilled when I meet women who present themselves as they are. I have a lot of respect for the fact that when we meet, clients are without their makeup. I am given the enormous privilege of a blank slate and the permission to take it where I see the most genuine beauty. Some women don’t wear makeup and never will, and that’s fine as long as the decision is made from consciousness or hope, anything but fear (and if it’s fear, I will help you).

What happens when a woman loves sweats and denim jackets, sees herself as a student, say, or scientist, not a bombshell, dresses in Summer’s colours, and finds out in one short afternoon that she is a Bright Winter?

Annie is a stunning, and I mean stunning, Bright Winter with medium brown hair and aqua turquoise eyes.  Big similarities to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, with a little lighter hair colour (see the hair colour photo in next section). Annie works and studies, loves her jeans, runners, and hoodie, and has all her gear in a backpack.

Like Jackie, she found it hard to look away from her face in lovely makeup and her own, perfect colours. Once she got back home, it came to her that she wasn’t at all sure she wants to go around being stunning. Annie is discovering what many of us have, that being noticed for our great beauty surprises us by being awkward. We get over that. Then we have to put our clothes together.

She read all the adjectives about energized, dynamic, and sharp, thought about the Snow Princess analogies and heard this. It’s too loud. Bright Winter is not brash. No Season is. Each one finds a balance. The darker, the quieter. The bolder, the more minimalist. The purer, the more crystalline. The brighter, the sweeter.

 

 

This is too hard. Close in many ways, beautiful and powerful face,

 

 

Both of those forgot two very important elements that have to show up together: delicate (missing above) and happy (missing below).

 

In the meantime, Annie just wants to be this. Also beautiful, but Annie looks like this about as much Sophie E-B. There are aspects that are right but it’s probably not the best fit.

 

 

Some of these are personal adjustments, as Annie feels her way to being at home in brighter colours. I recall going in to work my first day after my ‘adjustment’ and thinking everyone would notice and comment. Nobody said a word. We move into our new direction too slowly for others to really pick up on it, but to us on the inside, those first few steps feel almost earth-shattering.

But also, Annie is right in that Bright Winter walks a fine line. To say Snow Princess and leave it at that emphasizes the cold, the regal, all true, may be easier if you have Nordic genes, but forgets Spring’s melt. The Bright Seasons are a world coming alive, fresh and young, the activity of life great and small on the forest floor, in the trees, and in the fields. The lid is still on, this is still Winter, and now getting ready to fire on all cylinders. That building up is the stored energy of Bright Winter, the flash of a yellow silk tank or lining in a dark tuxedo.

The contradiction of Bright Winter is in how it will fire: as babies, with all their innocence disguising a powerful intention to live. When we choose clothes, we want that element of extreme youth, even before birth, earliest dawn. Baby colours on Winter’s dark background. Sounds of bells when the sun comes up. A jeweled silver locket. Dangling crystal earrings. A thin, shiny, sugarplum belt. Yoga pants with a line of sequins down the leg. A pink scarf with  gold and silver metallic threads. Sun is still an afterthought in the early hours. Like a child’s tiara, it doesn’t have to be big and heavy. Accessories are a great way to bring your energy closer and keep the detachment you need to not feel threatened while you absorb it.

The  image below is closer to Bright Spring. They still have Winter’s darker reserve but it sneaks away from them. Many more giggles. Fireworks are delicate and temporary, true of all Spring, but there’s too much movement for Winter.

 

This is better. The feeling is not so much delicate as fragile. It is delicate as intricate. The colours are the same. The faces too.

 

 

Need not be complicated or expensive. Need not be a big area. We see small areas just as well. A bright pink tank top with a little pink sequin detail, an ice grey hoodie in an athletic knit instead of sweatpants fleece, dark jeans, runners with a turquoise swoosh, little diamond earrings for $7, and a backpack with a red zipper.

I can’t think of a store that does inspired style with a big nod to adorable better than J. Crew. Search the Women’s page. Icy boatneck tees, an awesome handknit mixed media sweater, bright cashmere…but these girls aren’t done up and fancy. They’re not Ice Anything. Somehow they still look a little special. They’re uncommonly accessorized. Kate Spade has sweetness too, but usually too perky for a Winter. Is Crew too safe? Maybe so, but by the time these women reach their 40s, they’ll be ready to pull out more stops.

What we do is just proof in the physical world of what we believe. We cannot change our beliefs instantly, regardless of how strong the argument and the evidence. We live through that shape shifting time when we saw one thing, we consciously know it’s true, but everything else is catching up.

Give yourself the time. Invisibility was a kind of superpower in its own right, just maybe not the one you want for the rest of your life if you really think about it. Once you’ve seen yourself in your best colours, going back to invisibility feels like letting yourself down. You feel your way into your new colours over a few months. You have time to wonder, “This is just clothes. Why is this affecting me so much?” You’re doing this for you, always the hardest person to convince. Once we believe in us, everyone says, “What took you so long?”

Tea and Coffee Hair

Bright Season hair is uncommon. It’s glassy. It’s lighter than True Winter in many cases. The mistake is made of assuming it’s light to medium brown because what else are we going to call it?  Wearing wrong colour, it can appear to have the dusty quality of Summer ash brown. Once the colours of clothing are adjusted, your hair looks as different, improved, and cleared, as your face.

Bright Season hair is never ash. If I were a hair colourist, I might know how to create it, or maybe it can’t be done. I have never seen it improved by hair colour. The colour is always too dense and heavy. Maybe it’s because the hair colour industry’s way of making choices for women is broken, not the fault of the stylists who are the nicest people. Maybe because Brights should just leave their hair alone. Colour chemistry hasn’t caught up with the specialness of it. I do wonder about Laminates though. They may have a place, as coloured cellophane, consistent with hair that is basically already that.

I’ve likened Bright Season hair colour to tea and Autumn-influenced hair to coffee. Bright Season hair is not only lighter in colour, the colour is lighter in density.

Annie’s hair, Earl Grey Tea with lemon in it.

 

Jackie’s hair:

 

 

Dont mess with this hair. This is not medium brown hair. It’s magic.

Often, a Bright Season tip-off  is hair that is not as dark as eyes, when eyes go to black. Not always. Asian people often have hair and eyes of equal darkness. We have another Bright Winter article coming with hair that is as dark. We’ll show you root beer and black tea.

 

What are your thoughts about Eva Green of James Bond’s Casino Royale, here and here?

Here is one reality.

Another.

Many aspects of her face remind me of Jackie’s. The shapes of the eyes and smile particularly.

Who knows what’s real? Are the freckles? The hair colour? But what colouring.

 

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Use of Images

The images contained in this article are of private individuals, not celebrities. I consider the permission for me to use them as a privilege. It is my intention to protect these women’s privacy and generosity. If you use any of the photos without permission, I will seek legal counsel. I do not want to have to reduce the beauty and detail of the photographs with watermarks.

This is a learning site. You are free to use any of my words so long as they are attributed back to the page you got them from (meaning entire URL, not just the site name), in every instance of their use. If you mix up my meaning and get the message wrong, feel free to omit any reference back to me.

 

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The 12 Colour Equations

November 24, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 10 Comments 

The first draft of the Training Guide came back from my wonderful editor. Iryna, my equally wonderful book formatter, is waiting to start but I still have some work to do.  I’ve been keeping my head down and not attending to posting articles and answering comments as I should. My apologies for that.

I should sound more excited because I am. I’m really looking forward to these training events – maybe especially the part where we put our feet up at the end of each day, have a glass of wine, and share some informal conversation. That and going across the street (from the hotel in London ON) to swatch makeup at Sephora. It’s going to be good.

I’m not going to talk much today. Many have asked for the 12 Colour Equations from the book, Return to Your Natural Colours (linked over in the right column) to be posted all in one place. Here, they be. Any that have appeared previously have a link to that article posted with the title. Explanations are in the articles and/or the book itself.

A reminder that these palettes went through Photoshop’s colour model, my computer, the servers, and your computer before you saw them. At each step, they changed a little. No two readers are seeing the same thing. Don’t use them to buy clothes or makeup. Use them as comparison with the eleven others. To choose your colours and know your true darkness range, use your 12 Tone swatch book. Nothing else is calibrated right.

Use them to notice how my taste  prefers to see neutral colours used, the overall degree of colourfulness, the use of complementary colours (to each other and to the skin undertone), and the gradual or sharp flow between colours. The geometric figures make it hard to impossible to illustrate watercolour diffusions between colour blocks, so for that, you need to read the book or other sections of this website.

 

 True Winter

If you see light icy gray, feel free to sub in diamond and platinum, certainly neutrals for you. These also can be used in place of white to set the high contrast range with black.

Very purple, this Tone. Not much red, but a lot of pink, fuchsia, and purple. No. 5′s purple is also a near neutral colour for True Winter, more magnificent than black against the skin tone.

 

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Dark Winter

In the article Colour Equations Dark Winter.

 

 

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Bright Winter

Easy one. Shoot the sat up to 98-100%. Small areas of complementary colours. Something has to be happy, which means a little random (repetitive=predictable=work=Autumn)

, but not too happy. If it gets too happy, rein it in. Move it darker. Make the pattern repeating. Bright Winter is the “Life is a party. So, how come I’m not having fun?” paradox.

Something has to be delicate too. Add significant jewels profusely. Jewelry is your normal.

And shiny shoes and purses. Super shiny is also your normal.

 

 

—————-

True Autumn

 

The original is darker and more saturated in Photoshop. They lose when they’re uploaded. As dark as the belt inset in #1 feels right.

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Soft Autumn

 

 

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Dark  Autumn

In the article Dark  Autumn CE and Apparel.

 

 

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True Spring

In the article Light And True Spring Neutral Colours at the Office and CE.

True Spring is a (2 colour + 1 neutral) or (2 neutrals + 1 colour) look. Actually, that’s probably everyone’s best way to use neutrals, but when you wear the  2 colour, they can both be equally sized if you choose (others might use 1 large and 1 smaller block), and they can be complementary or at least quite different colours (others would wear colours of the same family or neighbours on the colour wheel).  When you wear the 1 colour look, make it a bright one, not one of the gentler ones.

 

 

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Light Spring

In the article Light And True Spring Neutral Colours at the Office and CE.

 

 

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True Summer

 

Not happy with that one, it uploaded at the very low end of the saturation possibility. The bigger problem is that it looks too warm. True Summer hinges on absolute coolness. Try again to give a better sense of the darkness and saturation levels. Darn, now Soft Summer looks too light. It’s all about comparison.

 

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Light Summer

In the article Light Summer CE and Being Not Pale.

 

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Soft Summer

In Soft  Summer’s Gorgeous Colour and CEs.

 

 

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Undertone Equations

Also in the book RTYNC, I write an equation called Undertone Colour for each of the 12  Tones that describes how I see my version of the 12 undertones happening. The undertones are shown in the top right corner of the 12 colour layout pages. Below is a graphic that shows the colours I saw as the building blocks of those undertone equations.

To be really clear, I am not a colour mixing expert. This is only how I figure it in my head and much of it is probably incorrect.  You gotta start somewhere. This colour chart is a good guide to the colours referenced.

 

 

Winter

Blue = French Ultramarine

Red = True Red to Alizarin Crimson

Black

Summer

Blue = Cobalt Blue

Pink = Rose Madder Genuine looks right. In the photo below, I used Permanent Rose, Cobalt Blue, and some yellow to make the colour at 6 o’clock, True Summer.

Gray = is gray really added? As a product of black in pigments, a single drop can take over a mixture. Is the muting of the Tone done with complements alone to preserve the blue-pink undertone? I don’t know. In the colour circle below, no black was used, even for the Winters.

Spring

Yellow – the daffodil, the buttercup.

Autumn

Gold = Raw  Sienna to Gold Ochre.

 

Practicing The Undertones

A year ago, when I was thinking about the Undertones for the book, I did this. The white page at the top gives you a white balance.

I have many watercolours. If I had one straight that felt right, I used it, though it could easily have been made from the neighbour colours.

 

 

 

True Winter: Winsor Violet + Ultramarine Blue.

Dark Winter: Crimson Lake + Sepia.

Bright Winter: Permanent Red + Cadmium Yellow.

 

True Summer: Cobalt Blue + Permanent Rose + Spring yellow.

Light Summer: Cerulean Blue.

Soft Summer: True Summer’s mixture + Sepia.

 

True Spring: A mixture of Cadmium Yellow, quite warm on its own + Lemon Yellow hue.

Light Spring: Permanent Rose + Spring yellow + trace of Cobalt Blue.

Bright  Spring: Permanent Rose.

 

True Autumn: Burnt Sienna.

Soft Autumn: True Summer + Yellow Ochre. I like yellow ochre, it has a thickness and opacity that reminds of a strong Soft Autumn visual I have, which is fudge.

Dark Autumn: Brown Madder (and maybe some red or blue, I don’t recall)

 

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Lilia is a Dark Winter

October 31, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 17 Comments 

We share zodiac signs, Meyers Briggs types, and Season. How could we not have a day of the analysis and philosophy of beauty and self?

 

Here we begin. Cuteness beyond words.

 

Draping and Black

Once she had a chance to review the journey of her colour analysis, Lilia asked,

At first, we did the four drapings of black, brown, silver, and gold. We saw that black gave a severe look and was the worst followed by silver and gold which all gave something good and bad, and then brown that felt comfy but not striking.

So why in the world would I wear that black color on me if I know it was the worst on the first drapes we saw. If there is some color I should combine as a basic and then adjust to my Tone, why could it be more the brown that was the best of the four ? (from what I remember but maybe I have a bias in my memory?)

 

You’re remembering the very first drapes where the categories are still very broad. When I use those first four drapes, I am not thinking in terms of Season decisions. We were gathering information about what your skin does placed next to different colours. Only True Seasons will have definite Yes/No reactions, but they’re 1 person in 10.

We will see better and worse effects with all four of these early drapes. Dark Winter often looks comfortable in True Autumn if you ignore the yellow because they have a little muting and that type of warmth. Their eyes often connect with some Spring colour characteristics – why? Because they find and harmonize with the higher saturation.  I think in terms of “skin better with gold than yellow, eyes better with higher saturation” rather than “Winter over Summer”. All four of these first drapes can be equally success and compromise, even the one we might pick as best.

Black wasn’t Lilia’s worst. It was the best in some ways, despite too much shadowing. Summer silver grey was non-existent, diminishing of her and diminished by her. The drapes have an effect on us and we have an effect right back on them. The skin was fogged in, cloudy, yellowish, almost polluted – what Winter colours do to Summer colours when held side-by-side. Winter’s white makes Summer’s white look yellowish even though it’s not, it’s slightly blue-pink-muted. Only black cleared the smog to perfect the skin tone, removed the jaundice of Spring and Autumn, and brought definition to the features. Too much definition? Certainly, but we adjust that later on in the process.

Those first drapes represent the extremes of that pure Tone. Very few people wear them perfectly. I haven’t seen a True Winter (or True Autumn) in forever. Yes, it is a compromise to choose black as the best, but at the first drapes, everything is a compromise unless you’re a True Season. Plus, our eyes hadn’t yet learned all they were going to. They had many more comparisons to absorb. The process adjusts and adjusts. That True  Winter black is too blue-black and too shiny but there are many blacks, just like many blues, and so on. Dark Winter’s is a little warmer, a little duller. Extract some Winter blue, hold it in front of a diesel exhaust for a moment (meaning add a little Autumn gold), et voila! Dark Winter white extracts a little of True Winter’s blue and adds a drop of dark chocolate(Autumn gold).

 

 

I don’t suggest all black on anyone, even in your best black. It looks Babushka. It makes a person look older. Colour is younger without even trying. Head to toe black is outdated, an urban myth, an energy flat line. But Dark Winter can and should wear black. It is a very basic wardrobe colour on that Tone.  Some Dark Winters feel that dark brown or dark blue are more modern than black to wear with other colours and I don’t disagree at all. With black, the pendulum went too far and it’s time to center it again.

On Dark Winter, it’s only black that I don’t love best when it’s shiny. Shine exaggerates. Light gets lighter, warm seems warmer, cold, colder.  All the other colours in the Tone are equally good matte or shiny. My opinion only, Bright Winter is shinier than even Winter’s usual high shine. Dark Winter is the least super shiny.

 

That Green!

I take a lot of heat about this particular green. In the Masterpiece Drapes we show at the end of the session, there are 15 stunning colours for that Tone. About the green, every single woman says, “Are you sure?” She is uncomfortable and squirmy. She declares, “Ok, well, I’ll never own anything in this colour!” Some go out and it’s the first purchase they make (that’s usually the woman who’s given  me the most heat over it )

I still only own it as a facing on the collar of a red vest. I don’t remember it from my own PCA. But what did I know? We analyzed my family of 5 and found 3 True Seasons and  2 Neutral Seasons that were the same. Meant nothing to me. We could have been 5 Bright Springs and that would have seemed normal.

In a year, a woman owns an item from about half of her palette. She is comfortable in her more perfect makeup colours, and she pulls out the palette and thinks, “Look at that colour. Why have I never seen it before? Why do I not own anything in that colour?” And the world of you opens up a tiny bit more.

 

 

The green is important in the wholeness of you. Every one of your colours is. We get caught up wearing our six best but no landscape is complete with only that. We need our earth and bark, our bitters and sweets, to present our totality. We are a balance of our light and shadow places. The circle of life, the equilibrium that must exist. Your colours can access parts of you that you can’t reach on the day of your colour analysis. You don’t know about these levels and regions of you yet. The colours are looking further down the road of you.

There is a tendency to see these final drapes as 15 turtlenecks. They are wherever you insert them. Your eyes will capture one button on a friend’s coat. A navy coat is far more interesting with a narrow green band sewn into to the cuff or lining, or the whole lining!, than it would be as a solid navy block. The person is communicated more completely, as the multilayered individuals that we are. How amazing is it when your clothing can be that accurate about you?

 

The One and Only Magic

Lilia remarked,

Today, I wore lipstick and I just saw my lips, no harmony, just biiiiiiig lip color! I went back home and indeed it was a true winter sample. But on the palette it was good and did harmonize well! Also my coat is a navy blue, not as dark as the one in the fan but with more saturation and clearer. Funny how yesterday with a deeper blue/and black, I got complimented each time crossing someone and today, nothing. Seems true winter colors on me are awful and it makes such a difference switching from dark winter to true winter!

 

No question, it is unbelievable how the little adjustments make a giant difference in how you look and feel once your eyes and heart are sensitized to it.  If you can’t quite tell if a colour matches for saturation, look at it another way. Is it too blue? True Winter is where you may find most errors, but they’ll all be too blue.

How close your choices have to be to the swatches is something  many women wonder about. Next post: 3 Weeks After Your Colour Analysis.

 

Undertone

I wonder if colour analysts agree that we don’t meet people and work at guessing their Season before the draping begins. But subsconsciously, we analyze every person we meet – and for me, on every aspect of our interaction. True Winter will wear makeup to the appointment. I’ve only met 5 or 6 and it has not failed. They will find a way. The Lights will say, “Sheer is never sheer enough.” Dark Winter will tell me fairly early on what they don’t like. Lilia doesn’t like any version of purple, from the iced violet that is usually a favorite, to any other version. Burgundy felt much better.

She said, “I showed my PCA pictures to some people, and each time it’s Ooooooh that purple is SO beautiful on you! Dammit! As I see it, it is really a big deal because it’s the undertone.”

 

 

 

Yes, approximately what I see as the undertone of Dark Winter. As you’ll read in my book, I don’t really know what undertone is as a biological layer. Nobody ever defines it in a way that makes sense to me so I do what I always do – I make up my own version till I hear a better one. The book (RTYNC over in the right column) shows the undertones as I see them today, though for some (like Bright Winter), there were a couple of choices (not Dark Winter).

I’ve read that undertone is the colour of our different bloods. That implies structural changes to hemoglobin, doesn’t it? It’s not implausible that it could change its molecular structure enough to alter its colour without impeding its binding with oxygen. Who’s going to fund the research to prove it? What drug could be developed based on the data? Undertone is a bit of an aura feeling I get, though I’d never put that in a book. It’s like the sum total of the glow of the individual. Does that imply that I can see it before the draping? No way. My eyes need to see the reactions of your skin just as much as yours do.

Lilia: So from what I understand, I chose the only colour I hate in the world to be my very number 1 good colour.

Ok, Number 1, it’s funny.

But on a psychological level, philosopher that I am, I’m sure we have an intuition for colour. I’m sure we deeply know and recognize what’s good or not. When I see my wardrobe I can find a lot of consistency with Dark Winter. Why would I have eliminated the best colour on me ?

Christine: Yes, it is funny. And, for me, fun. I love to take you as far as possible from the woman you arrived as. I want to open every window in your mind that you will allow so you can see yourself as you never have. Your choice of words is so good, “I chose the only colour I hate…”, because you did.

Many women wonder why they have aversions to their best colour, even on a larger scale of “Why would I eliminate my entire Season?” I don’t know but I’ve talked about it or around it a lot. We lose our path. We hear other voices than our own from when we were that little face up at the top. We believe compliments to be accurate when in fact, compliments are always always emotionally invested. We don’t love who or what we are. We need permission to be our real selves. So many things.

Lilia: Is there something to fear about being beautiful?

C: Yes, I think there is. One woman said she actually felt uncomfortable being noticed for this reason. Like separating herself from the safety net of her human tribe. Like having to live up to a newer, bigger, fuller, stronger level of herself. When I pray, I don’t ask for cash or prizes. I ask for the health, happiness, and safety of those I love. And I ask that I can be enough to achieve the things I want. Could that be it? Could we feel afraid that we’re not going to be enough for what this new face communicates?

 

 

Philosopher’s Beauty

Lilia: Yesterday, I was wearing good colours. I was complimented and I felt SO awkward. That was so unusual. I didn’t expect that effect. I thought that I already had good colours in my makeup and clothes base. I felt that I just needed a few changes to put all of them together and the difference wouldn’t be that much that anyone would notice except me.

ERROR. I discovered there is a “wow” effect. There is a magical effect. (that magical effect  that I didn’t have with TW colours today). Now, I can now recognize it very well when “the magic” is here.

C: Those photos we took are striking in a visceral way. Only the exposure and saturation are raised a trace to show the true colours. Often with those last drapes and the makeup on, my heart rate speeds up. It’s very physiologic. The beauty of it makes me light-headed. My breathing patterns change because my brainwaves are altered. It’s not just me, I just have thought about it more.

Lilia: Colours are waves. Anybody who had already knows a little physics knows how waves and frequency work: when you add the same ones together and you have a signal amplified.  Adding contrary ones gives a zero signal. I just realized today how obvious it is to link colour analysis with the theory of amplification in physics.

M: Synchrony >> Synergy = More than the sum of its parts. Interference theory.

You get better at seeing magic when you compare closer and farther over the next few weeks of learning your colours. The closer to the palette, the better. With every shopping expedition, you will compromise less.

 

Reading to Grow Your Soul

Lilia brought this into my world. You will feel closer to who you want to be and how you’re going to get there. From before The Secret took over our co-creation paradigms.

Click on The Game of Life and How to Play It.

If you re-read or remember any part of it because you never heard it said that way,  then donate.

 

Use of Images

The images contained in this article are of private individuals, not celebrities. I consider the permission for me to use them as a privilege. It is my intention to protect these women’s privacy and generosity. If you use any of the photos without permission, I will seek legal counsel. I do not want to have to reduce the beauty and detail of the photographs with watermarks.

This is a learning site. Please do use my words with credit back to the web page you copied and pasted them from. If you mix up my meaning and get the message wrong, feel free to omit any reference back to me.

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Contrast For 12 Seasons

October 26, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 14 Comments 

Part 1

 

 

The video above is here at YouTube.

 

I need to refine something I said in Part 1. I’m grateful to anyone who steps forward and challenges me. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings, it’s next to impossible to do. I know you’re questioning my ideas, not me personally, so please do as Rachel did and respond honestly. We all learn something.

 

Rachel heard,

that  A) all colors in the palette should work equally well for anyone in any combination. This, in and of itself was easy to understand, but when combined with concept  B) if you don’t use the proper amount of contrast for your type (i.e. true winter is a high contrast type, so it needs high contrast combinations) you will be expressing less than your potential.

She responded, “Now, each one of these ideas works fine on its own, but when you put them together, I believe there is a contradiction going on.”

 

Good points, Rachel. I wasn’t clear in my thinking. How about this:

Part 2

 

 

Here at YouTube.

 

Rachel thought about it and asked,

Maybe what you meant was: stick with your type’s contrast level. If you are a season influenced by winter, that will be high. If you are a season influenced by summer, that will be low. Other seasons: medium. It works regardless of whether you are an exception to the seasonal stereotype. Have I got it now?

 

Me:

Yes, that’s what I meant – and that nobody needs to even think much about it except Winters.

I can’t think of any Season that couldn’t go to the highest extreme in their palette. Is it necessary to refine them? Only for the three Winters, not Bright Spring or Dark Autumn who also have some of Winter’s colour properties in them.

Also an important point: the size of the lightest and darkest doesn’t matter to establish the value contrast range. A band on a collar, a very shiny piece of platinum, a row of black navy buttons, white stitching…as long as the two extremes are present, the viewer will register them, the range is set, and the point is made. Adjust the size of the lightest and darkest blocks to the overall darkness level you want to achieve.

Would you sometimes need to heighten the contrast level offered by your Tone’s palette? I don’t think so. I don’t know of anyone within a Season who needs more contrast than their colours provide, regardless of the distance between hair and skin’s apparent darkness level. To do this, you have to lighten your lights, darken your darks, or both. We know that the 3 Colour Scales go up and down independent of each other (meaning you can have saturated colour that’s light or dark, warm or cool) but also that when you change one parameter, you influence the other two. To lighten your lights and/or darken your darks, what did you have to do? Add white? Yellow? Blue? In most cases, you’ll alter the colour right into one of the other 11 Tones and out of harmony with your natural colours.

 

Part 3

A few more questions from readers about True Winter.

Here at YouTube.

 

Who would wear very high value contrast (light to dark) and very high colour contrast (complementary colours, like the skirt and scarf mentioned earlier or similar shapes of nearly equal size)? A Bright Winter.

Like Dark Winter, she has a better white than True Winter’s so-white-it’s-blue. Retail reality probably means that she’ll just buy the TW white. She is the lightest of the 3 Winters and I find she is better in coal than the dark, dense pitch black of True and Dark Winter. The 3 Winters do go all the way to B&W but I see their pure unadulterated form best on True. Dark and Bright need to adulterate.

Important for me to be reminded that nothing applies to everybody. In our group on facebook, we talk about colour as it applies to different body types, even within the same Season. No two women will apply the same palette in the same way. Partly, that’s just taste. As the ladies pointed out, tapped in as they are to elegance and balance in body line as much as colour, (applying David Kibbe’s 13 Image Identities from his 1987 book, Metamorphosis), women of the same Season but different body line will combine from their palettes differently. As a Dramatic Classic Dark Winter, my colour contrasts are higher, with heavy use of neutral colours. A Theatrical Romantic Dark Winter might find that too stark and minimal. She would wear more colours together at once, using more of the mid-range colours together. She looks and moves in a more delicate and animated way than I do, and she looks right when  she repeats that energy in how she dresses, applies makeup, and chooses hairstyles.

Everybody adjusts everything in the way that’s right for them. It’s easy once you know how. One afternoon, you and I together. You will be amazed at the new tools in your toolbox.

 

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Winter’s Children

July 5, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 7 Comments 

Three years ago, I posted a series of articles on my then-blog, A Greener Tea. These descriptions of behaviour patterns in True Season children are funny to read now. They should be part of the body of 12B (just strikes  me that one could read 12B as “One to be.”), with some added observations about the adults they become.

Stereotypes are patterns that got noticed. There is no doubt for me that our colour genetics, body geometry genetics, and personality genetics are often transcribed together.

There might be some things you recognize. Don’t take anything personally. Remember that we are beings in perfect balance. Our negatives are simply the other extreme of our positives.

 

Winter Children

still, not manic, hard to take your eyes off the face with its ability to dominate all other colours in the photo

The drama and the trauma. Will not be controlled by parents, siblings, or anyone else. Cannot be approached with judgment. If that Spider Sense even twitches, in their either/or world, they’ll react like they’ve been attacked. There are no in-betweens here. Criticism isn’t taken well. Advice is best given in a very generic way, referring to someone out there who could possibly try to do the thing differently but of course, it would be up to them.

The power and the glory. Emotionally brutal. Can be single-mindedly intense adults once an idea takes hold.

Don’t care if they ride on the Children’s Camp float in the Old Home Week parade. But if they do, will ask why they can’t have a float of their own. Don’t need to be on stage but are compelling to watch once they’re there.

a beautiful face whose colouring would overpower anything dusty

May appear cool and detached, but often beset with worry. Simultaneous inferiority and superiority complexes.

The opposite of nurturing. It’s all about them. Ask her how her hair turned out today and she’ll tell you for half an hour. Might notice if you have hair for 2 seconds but wouldn’t have much to say about it.

Physically interesting to watch. Will choose furs, sparkles, satin, diamonds, you get the idea. Stock up on glitter. Boys look very good in dark suits and have the body carriage to pull off the look. Strike statue poses just buttering toast.

If she’s suffering, you’ll know about it. She’s in control (while Summer is in order) and she’s taking you down with her. The True Winter husband is much the same.

Have high expectations of what others should take from them (as opposed to Summer’s high expectations of what others should expect of themselves).

a lot of colour in a face that looks more determined than gentle – a present or future Dark Winter?

 Intensely creative. So perfectionist that they get in their own way.

True Winter is all about the opposite extremes. The recluse and the performer at once. Either they’re running a marathon or sitting on the couch eating pizza by the box, watching every season of The Biggest Loser. She somehow manages to be still as a statue and create drama all around her.

 

Winter Grownups

True Winter will sit immobile in the vet’s waiting room with their small dog, waiting to be called. She’s like a tuning fork, creating powerful vibration from slightest motion. Bright Winter will fidget a bit more, and when someone new arrives, her eyes dart to the door. The Dark is reading or typing, focused as a drill, her Autumn infusion putting time to use, feeling no remorse about ignoring everyone on behalf of productivity.

The wonderful Bernice Kentner of CMAS said, “If you want a job done fast, ask an Autumn. If you want a job done well, ask a Summer.”  Bernice is so smart. And, we could add, “If you want a Winter to do a job at all, there better be something in it for them.”

 focused and detached

A True Winter will arrive on time. There will be drama. She will have found some way to wear makeup to her colour appointment. There will be high heeled knee high boots, big belts and rings, a personality too big for the body, and dissection at every step of the process. Winter has to see her PCA with her own eyes or she will never be convinced. But once she sees it, she is not likely to question it again…though Autumn is even less likely to dwell.

A Dark Winter’s husband, like many husbands, might discover more right brain in his forties. His attempt to talk about, gulp, feelings, meets with “Yeah, whatever, I was trying to talk to you about emotions ten years ago. Pass me that calculator, would you? Nevermind your fuzzy feelings here.” from his ever-loving wife.

silent drama…would Carol call him Type 2? Outer eye corners swoop down, corners of mouth lift up making an S curve along lips, S curves from brow to nostril…there is softness in a dark and contained face. Perhaps a Dressing Your Truth Type 4/2?

 Dark Seasons are the analytical processors more so than the emotional ones. They don’t tear easily, seldom cry. Faced with what seems to be excess emotion, they wait it out and only wade in if they have to.

Winter has no trouble getting rid of great Grandma’s plate collection that Mom passed on to her. She’s doing well to visit Mom or phone Grandma. Makes her connections so deeply that she can appear not to have any.

any Season can have blue eyes, light in the Lights, hazy in the Softs, greenish (teal or turquoise) in the True Warms, and intensely coloured in the Winters

Wakes up in the morning thinking “Nobody’s going to tell me what I can and can’t do.”  Consider the Summer’s morning greeting of “If I’m kind to others, they’ll be kind to me.”

Can learn to soften their edges by impersonating a Summer when they feel the tension climbing…and be surprised at how much better the interaction went.

Bright Winter is amazing. As a child, the other girls were doing rond-de-jambe at the ballet barre while she was hanging upside-down by her knees. Today, she’s driving halfway across the country dragging a U-Haul, meeting a plane full of houseguests. She’s building an agility course for her dog and adding a new wing to start a home business.  She moves from big thing to big thing, changing direction, keeping her foot on the gas. Her internal GPS recalculates fast. She believes the book entitled “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff – And It’s All Small Stuff.” In her Winter take it or leave it world, she doesn’t carry a lot of mind clutter. Maybe that’s why she looks better without a lot of clothing clutter.

Looks so good when she wears makeup to separate the features from the face – eyebrows, eyes, cheeks, lips, contour lines. Forget about traditional nudes and flesh tones, they’re as exciting as a dial tone compared to fuchsias, cherries, and pomegranates, especially if you’re over 25. Sheer products are a place to start. They’re not a place to stay. This colouring is extreme and can’t be turned down. Indeed, it will turn the makeup down. All Winter can control, balance, even suppress colour causing heathered makeup to look yet greyer and disappeared in 2.2 minutes. Soft/dusty/blended = meek/lacking/vague on a colouring whose perfection hinges on very opposite concepts.

 

Silent Beauty 

 

Makeup Colours

All Winter may have trouble finding saturated blush colours.

True Winter should look at MUFE HD2 and Clarins lipstick in Mystic Plum. Lancome Rouge In Love 379N is also great as a purple but those are easier to find; 185N is a great blue-based berry pink.

Bright Winter on the cool side would like the same MUFE HD2 blush. Lancome Clock Strikes 12 is a mid-grey eyeshadow that could work on all 3 Winters.

 Dark Winter could look at lipsticks 22, 21, and 14 at the Body Shop. 21 is my favorite of the moment, not too dark, on the warm side, a great match with eleablake‘s Driven blush, these are the barely golden saturated coral reds that look so incredibly good on this colouring, among their best summertime colours.

 

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A reminder that I will not be shipping the book, Return to Your Natural Colours, in the month of July. If you’re in the US, Kerry at Indigo Tones may have some copies. Otherwise, best to wait till August.

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Dressing Your Truth in 4 Types and Seasons

June 4, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 64 Comments 

Nirmala left a comment after the last article on 12B that really sums it up. Kind of paraphrasing here, but as she says, we can’t see ourselves, that’s Problem 1.  Though we search for our truths, there’s no easy road. They are quite cleverly concealed, maybe as protection from us, for if any way were revealed too soon, we would probably misuse them like any information we get when we’re not ready.

A clothing system won’t be the as-the-crow-flies route to inner truth. The most it could do would be to open a window. The opinions of others, even professionals, are subjective, variable, relating taste and opinion more than anything else. Compliments are of no value to me, they just drag me off center for a week or two. Though the 12 Seasons of personal colour analysis may not have every answer, it is at least measurable as long as the compass is calibrated right.

The Sci\ART drapes are calibrated into measured increments. That’s what a Sci\ART colour analysis gets you that is so incredibly special. The line between one group and the next is clearly divided in coherent, defined, steady intervals. Connect the dots is way easier when the dots are numbered. Sci\ART has human colouring classified right. Doesn’t mean that analysts who do colour by eye are wrong. I’m a huge believer in humans as little electrical towers and perhaps some people can feel our emissions of light energy as our colours. I’d lose faith if two such analysts came up with really different answers though.

Dark Winter Type 1

Maybe Sally Field looking (not so sure she’s DW). Or Mario Tuttle, though with that nose shape, he’s more likely a Bright.

 

 

 

For Type 1, I went with light, young, fun, random, playful, upward, hearts and triangles, freedom of movement, sprays, fountains. Detail and eye catchers are placed high on the body, so no black outfits with yellow shoes.  Some bold is ok, this is Winter, but nothing serious, sharp, or rigidly repeating. Got to get light, bright, warm, fun, and alive into this. And fairly contrasting.

Tunics could be great here. And prints.

Lots of jewelry that doesn’t necessarily match. “Life of its own”, not floppy and not stiff, Perkily crisp.
I like the zigzag of the sleeves on the two tops at the top.

Clothes can feel light without being light coloured. Taylore Sinclair’s totality of radiance actually comes in here, where fabric, design, and texture all contribute to a person’s movement.

Chose heavy heart lockets that wouldn’t get lost in the contrast and weight of the colour. Torn between the 2 lockets.

Black can’t be chunky or serious or this girl will grind to a halt and look glued to the ground.

Shoes are light. Even a wedge is too blocky.

 Dressing Your Truth: What I Liked

About the Dressing Your Truth course, my friend asked “What do you like about it?”

- I like Carol. Makes no difference to me how she promotes herself, whether she’s licensed, whether women can or can’t find their Type, or how many websites she owns.

- I recognized my drive for standardization (of colour analysis systems), my obsession with being able to duplicate results (between colour analysts or it’s all useless to the client), and my need to promote it – all as Type 4 traits.

- I learned about the most dominant types of lines in my face. I follow them to apply eyeliner and blush. Our movement path could be drawn on paper as we negotiate tasks big and small, through problems towards solutions. The lines tend to be consistent with other lines, like those in our face. Fascinated me. I really like the part about how we move forward and how we get stuck. I’ve watched people who seem unable to end one interaction or activity and move on to the next. The nearer you get to an ending, the more they’re compelled to drag it out in a thousand ways. Since I almost erase the past as I’m living it, watching this deliberate delaying left me saying “Just  make a move. Don’t worry if it’s wrong or right!” Now I get why that was not helpful for them.

It was fun to actually draw makeup with those same lines. I see that if you draw a line across my eyes from outer corner> inner corner> inner corner other eye> outer corner other eye, the line is straight. So now I extend eyeliner out straight a little ways. My kids have not said I look nuts, which they are well trained to do given even a smidgen of provocation.

- The psychology that goes with the lines structures is great. I see now why True and Soft Summer have more issues with their palettes than everyone else put together…because it’s her (Type 2, Summer, whatever) nature to examine every single option over and over, like she can never have enough evidence to make a choice. And why I shoot off like a rocket and ignore all the fine print.

And why my Light Summer sister can get so deeply hurt over words or actions that I wouldn’t even notice. Her weakness isn’t her huge sensitivity; it is her strength because it’s her truth and because the world needs so much of what she has to offer. Telling her “Stop letting every little thing get to you!” is disrespectful and confusing to her. Now, I will hold her in higher esteem for it. Learning to honour others better has been the greatest reward of DYT. So much has fallen into place -why I’ve stood at makeup counters with Summers watching they energy test eyeliners.

Figured out why I have been sent so many more True and Soft Summer clients than any other. We relive the same experience over and over till we learn its lessons. I finally see that I need that character to balance me, to model certain behaviours I will need in my own future. I am grateful they came to see me.

- Picked up a few good clues on clothing to add to my Season and Kibbe, but this was far from the main selling point. As a matter of taste, Carol and I don’t share a belief of what looks good, let alone true. As a matter of statistics, it’s unlikely there are only 4 style Types in the world, even if you could prove that there are 4 main movement types. The diversity of genetics makes the probability too low unless the types are so broad that few can tell where they fit, especially if they contain some of each, which means most of us. And it’s been proven across populations that 4 main colour types won’t work. This energy system won’t be any different. Still, would I take the course again? I would in a heartbeat.

- Learned a lot more that I can apply as a better spouse/parent/workplace than as any kind of fashion star. But then, I came into it exposed to a lot of info about Winters, Dramatic dressing, etc. A newcomer might pick up some great advice or a good intro to thinking about how clothes are cut.  I did buy some jewelry and I like it.  For all 4 Types, the jewelry is nice for the price at the Store. Mine is about 2-4 times larger than it looks on the site.

IDK the DYT rules for the 4 Types.  I’m just extrapolating the energy of the person, like I did with how the colours felt to me in RTYNC (the blue book over in the right column). Doesn’t mean it’s the only way, just my way. DYT is a natural expression we feel as movement. Same with seeing those lines anywhere, a book plot, a mechanical device, a wind pattern. What Carol has tuned into and translated is four different movement types and how their energy feels interpreted with clothing to create a visual image. For instance, when we see parallel lines, they look like a mirror. With that, we associate reflectivity and stillness. Reminding of the 4 True Seasons? Absolutely, but a new spin in many ways.

There’s no reason you can’t be true to your colouring and your movement type even if they don’t coincide. Neither takes precedence because they’re describing different things. Your Sci\ART Season knows your colours. Your Type offers an opinion about your shape as expressed by your style of movement. The whole silver gold thing for Types, I pretend I never heard it.

True Spring Type 2

Type 2 is the Summer “stereotype”, awful word but it serves. So, connections – tops with bottoms, repeating colours, interlocking shapes. Gentle flow and drape. Less delicious and vivacious than the “stereotype” True Spring, more of a Summer analogous colour scheme. Wavy lines.

I know two of these women. They’re certainly True Spring, they look like T1, but they lead in movement with T2, at least when I met with them.

 

 

Beauty Sixth Sense

Do I agree that women have a “Sixth Sense” about their own beauty, as Carol claims in the Dressing Your Truth course? Not for a second.  I know for sure they don’t. I had to be in my 50s to come close to recognizing me. Others can’t always tell either. I have a True Winter daughter whose Kibbe or Type I cannot figure out. I wish women wouldn’t feel so devastated and to blame when they can’t find their answers. I wish they weren’t so willing, eager even, to believe every word of it all.  I read it all like a novel rather than non-fiction, let it come at me like one person’s story, like one person’s travel diary.  Your journal to the same place would read different. I read it like a recipe book. I find one I might try out, and 20 that I would never use but I don’t burn the book. Why give someone’s opinion more importance than that?

Anyone’s an expert if they say they are. One quick look at logic trees with 4 only branches (4 Seasons, 4 Types) can tell you they will only apply to each person superficially at best. If you saw a 4-branch tree to cover all disease in the world, how much attention would you give it to find your own aches?  Not more than a glance.

Kibbe used the Yin Yang metaphor to describe variations of shape of bone and flesh. He also brings in the very important issue of scale, not just what it is but how certain bodies make it look (the Yang-er you are, the taller you appear and the smaller you make jewelry look). If you can find yourself in his book, he’s the guy who got human body geometry sorted most ergonomically. He makes a point of keeping the colour talk very general. It surprises me how dogmatic DYT gets on this point given that it’s not their emphasis. They could do the whole thing as well, indeed far better, if they just left colour out of it, but fine marketer that Carol is, she realizes that if she’s not 100% convinced, nobody else will be either.

Bright Winter Type 3

boxy practical  functional big textured simple natural regular strong corners

a very Yang person, pants have a fly and a worn with a belt

not so straightforward to express work instead of fun with these colours

heavily accessorized…now that works with BW and T3, glad I found someplace these 2 come together,

though come to think of it, a BW usually has some big Yang elements of character and colour

every one of these Seasons/Kibbes/Types have their intersections; it’s when you find them that the fun starts.

the slightest whiff of Spring and turquoise and purple should appear (Autumn? teal and burgundy)

not too confined at the neck so she can move towards you, as it is her movement to do

 

 

Deleted Comments

I deleted several comments to this website aimed at exposing Ms. Tuttle and her sources. Find them on Amazon if you like. Truly, I just don’t care. Anybody can pick up the similarities in wording and philosophies between various colour systems.  So what? Ballet, yoga, and Pilates have similarities that stem back to their common origins. However similar the language, DYT seems to have applied the knowledge in a different way so that’s fair.

Why does DYT create such intense emotion when it doesn’t work for a person? In any discipline, there will be those who can deliver and those who can’t. The consumer decides for themselves, just like which vet to take their pet to. We’re not saving lives here. It’s clothes.  So Tuttle’s explanation doesn’t work for you. Another one will. Where does our perspective go? The words of others only have as much power on our path as we choose to give them. These days, I’m picking up the pieces and moving on about everything.

In an email, I was advised to examine my own reactions carefully as to why I removed those accusatory comments and blame-filled reviews that were deemed “heart-wrenching”. My contemplation came up with this: I didn’t find it heart-wrenching at all that some clothing system didn’t work for one person. Probably did for many and didn’t for many. The expectation was unrealistic to begin with. Call me a heartless Type 4 but I couldn’t get bogged down in something so full of holes and hope to see me come into focus somewhere out of the haze. That’s looking for love in all the wrong places and we’re back to the Kingdom of Heaven being within, but it takes a heck of a lot more self-work to get to it.

Everyone finds their true self, the deepest soul that their body incarnates, in different ways. Colour has been a metaphor for many revelations but it doesn’t bring me to my knees. Where I go to get myself right, where I finally understood what it means to say “Love is free”, learned the true purpose of prayer, figured out what the Chakras/sacraments really represent (abundance, health, humility, love, truth, wisdom, and grace in that order, my opinion only), and met my best and worst selves in a way I could work on them, was in Carolyn Myss’s book Entering the Castle. It’s the Bible that I read and practice each day.

Although your colours hold true as part of your energy spectrum at every level of your being, they’re also part of the physical world and part of the five senses. The special and specific grace that you came here to share comes from deeper than that, or any tip-of-the-iceberg colour, image, or clothing system. Your truths are far more encompassing and more connected to the energy of Divinity. We’re a long way from understanding that but we can approach it and we can feel it.

 Soft Autumn Type 4

All the usual True Winter adjectives – bold, simple, symmetric, long straight lines.

Structured for sure. I keep my jewelry in fishing tackle boxes. $4.46 at Walmart now that you ask.

The lower R corner outfit would be secondary T2, with S straps on shoes and teardrops or earrings.

This one was by far the  most difficult. In my mind, I can see these colours looking fine for this person (though not how I see their best), but finding the clothes is another thing.

 

 

 

Long ago in our lives, shopping began as an exercise in acquisition. It suddenly made a lot more sense when you learned your right colours and shapes, becoming something you could fully control. Then a few more levels of refinement opened up. Now, it’s a game of hide and seek.

 

 

True Winter Jewelry to 13 Kibbes

May 20, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 12 Comments 

You can use lipstick to help you narrow down your Season among the 12, and in some cases, you tap the nail on the head. You would have to use those colours that nobody else could wear as well. You need to stick close to TMIT for each.

As when test drapes are truly useful, they may or may not be colours that you’re supposed to love or go out and buy, though you could. They’re intended to create a colour reaction to help make a clear either/or choice. You need the extremes. If you’re a Light Season, pick a light lipstick colour. On everyone else, it will erase their lips and undefine the face, especially at maturity.

David Kibbe wrote Metamorphosis in the late 80s. It’s still brilliant. If you had a salon for women to discover their Image Identity, it would be near impossible to do by trying clothing styles, though it can be amazing how well that works taking photos of yourself in dressing rooms mirrors. In your salon, you’d need too many sizes and styles.

Can it be done with makeup? The makeup guidelines didn’t seem different enough in Kibbe’s book. Watercolours vs sculpted looked much the same because the face beneath was sculpted or it wasn’t. I can’t imagine finding your KibbeType with makeup.

Jewelry, now, that could be done. Maybe hats too. Choosing True Winter was a way to keep colour out of it to make the lines more audible. There are a couple of colours used if they shift the perception as pink >> soft, even icy pink. Oh, to be a True Winter. Black and White and you’re on the  mountaintop.

Removing colour also adds the stillness quality so beautiful and true to Winter people. I tried to keep a frozen in time quality, since symmetric and smooth are not right on everyone. Even the rough pieces have something sleek or motionless.

On TW, a strand of pearls doesn’t match the presence of the person. Just by their natural colouring, this person is edgy looking, however soft their body’s lines. Simple pearls need something extra to make the same statement as the person, even a double strand is better.

The Classics

 

 

This is True  Winter. Even when its line are soft, it should look hard in density. I love about that SC necklace the way the pearl is ‘balanced’. That’s such a strong Winter association.

Psychology Section

I’m using this article as a place to say something. Please skip if not into self-discovery conversations.

I read messages and questions from women learning their new Season and feeling more discouraged with themselves than ever.  I am so happy to see that such a community of support and good advice has evolved on so many facebook pages. The free and generous cheering for one another is a most beautiful expression of an abundance mentality.  Women have shared their experience and knowledge without pausing to realize that they are contributing great gifts of service to others. Putting goodness out into the world counts.

The Naturals

 

 

Like all forms of growth, you have to give yourself 6 months to learn to use your new colour palette.  Your mind needs time to untangle how it has seen stores for the last 20 years. Practice patience. Think of this like exercise, which works for every single person who stays with it. You will find your best self because everyone else did. It always works. Women who have had a Sci\ART analysis would not go back to how they used to shop and neither will you. Give any doubts about that to the wind before you read another word.

You have to put in the time to get the reward. Like asking someone else to meditate for you, it just won’t work that way. You can’t miss the journey. The journey is the whole point, there’s no final destination. You have to engage it with conscious thought, not skim the surface or expect an automatic lock ‘n load. Don’t think about the endpoint or wish to be there till it’s fairly earned. Focus on moving closer and closer to defining your center. That right there is the entire point. You will get very, very good at your colours. Expect to return a few things – on those days, you’ll know even more about yourself. Move towards those moments.

I want you to be happy to be all of you, not just your natural colouring – which I guarantee you is beautiful enough to bring tears to the eyes of anyone who takes the time to really look.

The  Gamines

Broken lines are the deal here. Connect the dots, dashes, seeds, beads. Add in swirls for soft and multi-directional lines for Flamboyant.

 

 

We all have these “I hate abcd about myself.” conversations, me just as much as anyone. Please don’t anyone email me and tell me I’m not sensitive to women’s body issues. I’ve got first hand knowledge of having your most basic survival foundations shaken by anorexia (high school but I can go back there in my head in an instant), of being beat around as a kid (school, not family). I get what humiliation at the hands of others and my own feels like. I fight it every day too.

Thing is, everybody does. Nobody’s life is all charmed. When I learned my Season, and when other women do, I noticed that it had a calming effect. The expression in the eyes at the end of the PCA is peaceful. I just figured that was recognition of that which lives in us and letting it have its voice.

Then I learned my Kibbe style. Again, that was calming. There seems a frantic rummaging that goes on, being unable to let it go till the puzzle is solved, followed by a strong, receiving quiet. Again, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be closer  to the real you than where you were.

The Dramatics

Note to self: Soft Anything = smoother and rounder. Also smooth does not  = sleek.

 

 

We have seen or been the woman going into stores with her new colour palette and finding nothing, leaving her with an “I’m not this, I’m not that, I’m not anything.” type of discouragement. And then joins on the appendix “And besides, I hate my shape.” So, to find that allowing, satisfied calm about your shape, I think you have to learn it, just like it works with colours. Doesn’t matter if you find the perfect answer or the perfect jacket. It’s about starting to ask the questions and getting closer to who you are, sometimes through the Who You Are Not maze. This appears to be calming and empowering to everyone who experiences it.

Saying

“What good are these colours I have? I can’t find them in stores. If I see something close, I’m either not sure or the style is off. All I see is the black they said I can’t wear. I hate the weight that won’t budge, I’m so tired of having big arms I’m always hiding them.

What I feel is really far away from finding a way to communicate with me, like she’s actually trying to get away or hide so I can’t find her. Who I thought I was, her seat is empty, as if everybody left without telling me and I got left here alone trying to figure this out. I don’t even know where to start.”

doesn’t feel as good as

“It will take time to break away all the hype I now believe about colour and me – and decide what of that I want to keep that does speak to me and for me. I have new knowledge and new tools. I don’t have to worry. It’s all happening right now in my subconscious, even when I’m asleep. It took time to get how it was and it’s going to take time to go back. I’m going to calm down about it. I make a devotion to me to stay in the boat and give myself that time.

Spending more time in stores is just more depressing. What I need is to find the places where I feel good. Maybe that’s new makeup instead of clothes. Maybe it’s time with women who’ve lived it and are there just to listen. What the women on facebook notice about me never seems to be my thighs. Should I start thinking that I’m the only one who sees them? They see how I barely need foundation and the shape of my lips. If I learned a bit more about me, would I find more good stuff on my own? It sure would feel better to be paying attention to that.”

I’m taking the Dressing Your Truth course now. I love Carol Tuttle’s honest, been-there style. I love her basic premise: There is nothing wrong with you. Not one single thing. Any fault lies with the fashion/cosmetic/marketing industry that has trained you with false proof (meaning that if the mannequin’s clothes don’t suit you, you must have a problem) to believe that you’re not perfect. And, since you can’t solve a problem till you’re mature and accountable enough to own the problem, a little fault lies with all of us women for allowing this to happen. I know it’s insidious but we’ve also been too easy a target. We gobble it up when we should turn the page.

And so again, following the same pattern, I went from the statement “I’m a Type 4, 3 secondary” to recognizing that little jolt of empowered and hopeful. I read what those Types give and take in the world and found them in me. They gave me direction, like knowing where you’re supposed to be going, like something definite to move towards, cushioned by all the good things that balance me.  Instead of feeling closed down if your palette doesn’t work, consider expanding yourself even more. The colours will fall in your lap when you’re thinking about something else.

We’ve seen the photos at the fashion collections where the  models parade down together at the end – can’t recall a better rendition of Clone Planet. Of course, we don’t look at their faces. We’re supposed stare at the clothes. But we don’t live in The Matrix, and who’d want to? Once we allow ourselves to graduate to another level, to be released from the magazines that try to get us to erase our me-ness, we can say

“I am an energy Type 2. That’s why I can feel so hurt for myself and for others. It’s not weak to try to make others feel better, that makes me stronger. I’m a Light Summer. When people look at me, they see the hope and feel the lift of a rainbow.  So I’m not tough. So I don’t wear black. I’d still rather be me, all of me, than anybody else.”

You might just feel so good and right in your own skin and everything you buy that you’ll have to work a wee bit harder at keeping your humility grounded and your joy contained.

The Romantics

 

 

Your truths are where your power is. What is true about you is what is strong about you. By the time you’re 35, you’re going to need a shovel to get at that. It won’t bubble up on its own for most of us. Those brave, intelligent, and very giving women of facebook didn’t start that way either. They started by talking the talk, hearing themselves in the stories and advice of others. They taught each other. They have come out on their other side, easily and steadily and continuously walking the walk. You will too. Just join the party. Look for the least contaminated truths you can find inside you when you talk. It’s really hard to do, but do it anyhow. Put yourself in a place of learning, only that, and make it good enough. If lovely clothes start finding their way into your life, fine, but make the primary purpose to learn who you are.  Your most beautiful lipstick is waiting for you to do that.

The road to Heaven isn’t paved with high achievers, right? It’s a one-at-a-time brick road of finding your Self, and never living one moment beneath or beside that again. We have many selves. In our past, they get pulled out like the pages of a book and left behind.  The restlessness you feel will settle when you gather them back where they belong. The Kingdom of Heaven is, has always been, and forever will be, inside. Anything that helps you find what is true and real and authentic about you will bring you closer.

 

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