The Draping Process in Colour Analysis
February 28, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 3 Comments
To be accurate, Seasonal Colour Analysis requires:
- that the drapes be precisely coloured to proceed through each level of the 3 properties of colour, namely Light>>Dark, Warm>>Cool, and Clear>>Soft
- that the drapes be used in a logical order so the results can be evaluated accurately
It is a bonus if:
- the system checks itself, so you don’t wander down the wrong road
- the system allows you to find several ways of solving a question, should you arrive at an impasse.
The Sci\ART system provides all 4 elements of a methodical approach to Personal Colour Analysis. There are 12 Seasons, which allows for the subtle variations in colour levels without providing more choice than an eye could really distinguish.
PCA systems with more than 12 Seasons are probably distinguishing the Seasons based on how colours are combined, rather than the colours themselves. That is perfectly valid. Seasonal Colour Analysis is not just about your skin perfecting colours. It is very much about how the colours are worn to best harmonize with the energy of the person wearing them.
The video below is at YouTube, at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis The Draping Process, if the embedded video below doesn’t work.
The Right Shade Of Peach
February 28, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
A video blog today.
Peach may be the cosmetic colour that everyone owns in some shade or other. Is yours right for you? Most of the time, it’s too earthy and brown. On a light or clear complexion, that looks heavy and dominating and dull.
For eyeshadow, lipstick, and blush,
The Spring wears a light, yellow-based, very clear peach.
The Summer will fare better in a pastel pink.
Autumn colours mesh best with an earth, golden or browned peach.
Winter colours request icy pink or cool white instead of peach when choosing light colour tones.
A Colour Analysis gives you the knowledge of precisely which shades of all cosmetics colours (and clothes colours) is perfect for your skin tone.
Clearing Skin With Colour Analysis
February 9, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Clearing the skin is a very fundamental concept in Personal Colour Analysis. Very hard to describe though.
We watch for this effect across all the Seasons. Just like all the optical effects during the draping sequence, it is more obvious in some people. In many situations, we’re looking at a person of cool coloring, and watching for some kind of sallowness to clear away the instant the warm drapes are switched to cool.
The sallow effect may look orange, green-beige, yellow, blotchy and uneven, thick and opaque, muddy, or variations of those.
When the drape changes, it looks as though a yellow filter is suddenly made transparent. The evenly coloured milky calm returns to the skin tone.
Watch Jocelyn in this video.
If your browser won’t play it, watch it on YouTube at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis Clearing The Skin.
Jocelyn is a Bright Winter. As the Analysis proceeded, we knew she would not be an Autumn because of the yellow overtone in the skin that drained away in the cooler yellow drape. Her ultimate skin perfection is nowhere in Autumn colours.
Take care with these interpretations. Clearing the skin is always a positive thing, but it may happen that when the yellow clears away, what replaces it appears clearer because the yellow is gone, but it’s not necessarily better. In Joce’s case, her skin becomes evenly grayed in the Summer drapes, making the skin look ashy. Because it’s a pale grey, about the colour of her hat and my coat, it can be deceiving. You think ‘the skin is evenly coloured, so that’s good, right?’. In some people, that greyness makes them look truly corpse-like, it’s that strong.
It’s not good but it’s different. The photos below show Joce in the Autumn very yellow drape again, with the blotchy yellow skin, pronounced shadows under the eyes, and cheeks that are too pink.
One could say that the brown eyes come out in the yellow drape. Going down that road would lead you wrong. The skin comes first. The eyes and NATURAL hair colour will automatically be PERFECT. On EVERYONE. The Light and Soft Seasons can do things to make the hair more interesting, but the base colour is automatically the right one for you and what YOU are supposed to look like. The other Seasons usually have their right colour and nothing from a bottle can improve on it. Without Kate Hudson’s skin tone, you can’t believably pull off her hair.
The black drape creates an evenly coloured skin. It looks calm. It FEELS calm. The shadows are gone. Most of us are wearing too much concealer and foundation to fight the effects of bad clothes and hair colour. Yes, you’re right, Joce is 20-something and blessed with remarkable skin. Even what she wears makes a difference.
The black tones in her eyes snap. Here eyes no longer bloodshot and red-rimmed. You’ll see Joce again in an upcoming post. The eyes on this girl have to be seen to be believed.
Can I Borrow My Neighbor Season’s Colours?
January 26, 2010 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
Short answer: you may have to.
So remember, when you get your Personal Colour Analysis, be sure to know if you fall on the cool or warm side of the Season. That means : when we’re finally down to testing between your last 2 Seasons, are we testing your #1 BEST Season against its warmer neighbor, or against the cooler one? Perhaps THE most exciting part of the analysis. Everybody tingles at this point.
In Wrong Colours Away From the Face, I said that I don’t buy into wearing colours that are not in your #1 BEST Season, unless people will only see you sitting at a desk.
To present a unified whole, you can’t have 1 big block that’s way off. The colours want to connect together to create a force, but they can’t if one is flowing against the current.
How you combine the colours of your personal colour palette depends on the energy of your Season. The colours themselves should all work together because they are all the same in 3 respects – how Light/Dark, Warm/Cool, and Clear/Soft they are.
If you’ve been reading here, you already know what I mean by that. For anyone new, let me explain. Any colour is described by where it sits on those 3 scales, its Light/Dark , its Warm/Cool, and its Clear/Soft positions. The colour might be one the blues, reds, purples, etc. in your body, or in the world outside you.
Colour Analysis finds those precise colours in your body and replicates their precise position on those 3 scales. We then give them to you in a so-brilliant Colour Analysis Swatch book. They’re called YOUR colours for 2 reasons : A. They’re the colours to shop for. And B. They literally are YOUR colours, in your own body.
Let’s look at Dark and True Autumn colours. Neighbor seasons. Some people straddle between the 2. But the MOST important aspect of Dark Autumn’s colours is their darkness. True Autumn’s MOST important feature is the warmth. Any 2 neighbor Seasons do NOT share the MOST important dimension in their colours. You screw up the whole accord by throwing in another dimension.
You will see clearly and easily during your Personal Colour Analysis how far behind your perfect season the runner up is, even when you border closely. Some shades may be permissible, but none will be as good as any in the perfect one. So, in our Season example above, the Dark Autumn may look pretty good in True Autumn’s darker shades, because darkness in general is forgiving. It still won’t look like magic.
When the off-colour is worn on the bottom half, away from the face, it STILL disrupts the harmony of the whole body presentation. When the off-colour is way off, the flow of the appearance is distorted in favor of the more dominant colour. That’s why Light people gain 15 lbs on the bottom half in black pants.
Of course, your skin tone perfection will suffer less when the off-colour is far way. Still, the viewer will perceive disagreement.
I know it’s hard to find good colours. Winters can’t find saturated colours. Summers and Lights can’t find professional clothes. I know the fashion industry and cosmetics colour offerings are disorganized and incomplete. They are desperately unevenly weighted. As you learn to excel at colour decisions, you’ll buy your clothes when you find them, rather than by Season. I was looking at Ann Taylor’s website recently. Soft Autumn will do very well. True Summer, head over to Banana Republic. The 3 Winters, wear what you have (unless you need something black or charcoal, always available).
It helps to know whether you’re on the cool on warm side of your Season (your PCA will tell you) so that you know how to err. If you can’t find your perfect red, you’ll know whether to allow cooler or warmer shades. In a perfect world, the stores would be colour-coded, but IRL, their palettes are far more restricted. They might bring in 4 of the same style shirt, but not 8. They do NOT want you knowing anything about what suits you. They want that merchandise out the door, preferably the day it came in. You may have to be close sometimes, but you’ll learn how to do that too. We’ll talk about it a lot when we meet.
It takes months to learn to match colours precisely, even with your Book. Since we ultimately understand colour by visual comparison, not by me or anyone else talking about it, it helps to gather several similarly coloured items in the store and compare those to your Book. You’ll be better able to tell if the match is perfect, and if it isn’t, then how it differs. Is it browner? duller? darker?
It takes a month or 2 to start to enjoy the empowerment when you shop. It gets stronger and stronger as you bypass trends and disregard advice you know to be wrong. And both are everywhere.
I so understand the frustration in the beginning of feeling like nothing is right and wondering when it ever will be. But even at the start, you are better than you used to be. Then, the pieces start coming together, and your good decisions far outweigh the bad. Your eyes will get better and better at recognizing it. That will FEEL like magic.
Can Wrong Colours Make You Ill?
January 20, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 4 Comments
…or, title option, do your clothes make others feel, um, unwell?
Women and men have told me that they buy clothing colour by feel. Both have asked me to remove a drape because they felt sick, one to the point of becoming faint.
Are they exaggerating? Too theatrical?
NO! It’s VERY real. Everybody senses colour, more than we see it. We may not all feel it to the degree of physical revulsion, but we all experience a mild discomfort in the presence of wrong colours. We don’t take the colour choices in our homes lightly for that reason.
Since most people go around in wrong colour, we’ve grown used to seeing it and compensating for the feeling. But why does it happen?
The short answer is “sensory mismatch”. It means that 2 of your senses are receiving information that your brain feels cannot make sense together. The result is nausea.
Motion sickness in a car means your eyes are seeing “movement” but your brain is getting information from your ear’s balance system and your limbs saying “not movement”. The 2 don’t jive. The brain decides you’ve been poisoned and you’re hallucinating, so it expels the toxin by vomiting. At least, it’s believed to have evolved that way.
To explain it with colours, we go back to the most fundamental principle of how Personal Colour Analysis (PCA) achieves skin perfection and ideal appearance.
Every colour, in you and outside you, answers to 3 characteristics only. How Light/Dark, how Warm/Cool, how Clear/Soft (ask me in a Comment if I can clarify those concepts). Every single shade in you, every single blue and red and purple in you, fits in EXACTLY the same place on those 3 scales. Fascinating in itself, I ponder this often.
PCA finds you a group of colours that also fit in EXACTLY the same positions on those 3 scales. Your Colour Analysis swatch book is simply an exploded diagram of your own precise colours. It’s far, far too complex to do this without a true 12 Season Colour Analysis, for clothes colours or makeup. Then, when you WEAR precisely the same colours that you already ARE, the colour energies are in absolute synchrony and it is strong.
With wrong colours, the sensory mismatch isn’t between your eyes and ears. It’s between your eyes and subconscious colour associations. Your eyes are seeing one set of colour wavelengths emanating from the body’s natural colours. There’s a whole other set of waves coming off the clothes. The signals are all jammed. It feels tiring to look at, and for some, nauseating.
Most people dress in such a skelter of colour that there is no signal at all. They don’t look ON. All the wrong colours together neutralize what colour potential exists.
Is my theory scientific fact? I don’t know. I didn’t read it anywhere. It just makes sense to me.
The Reason For The Season is YOU
January 11, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Among the 4 True Seasons in Personal Colour Analysis, there are 2 groups of people whose coloring has a blue-pink (or cool) undertone. They are the Summers and Winters. Their nature also tends to be less energetic and a little more reserved and slow-moving.
The Warm Seasons of the Springs and Autumns have skin with a yellow-to-gold undertone. They are lively, busy, talkative, and active.
Colour makes us feel certain feelings and think certain thoughts. A big block of why that is comes from the most primitive associations humans have made with colour. It is embedded in our genetics and the evolution of our brains from the beginnings of our consciousness.
Just as the energy of the 4 True Seasons follows the course of the year, from
the short-lived but almost frantically busy, almost reckless, activity of Spring
to
the hazy, flowing, genteel days of Summer
to
the time of yields and returns in the fields, of efficiency, and security, and responsibility in Autumn’s solid personality
to
Winter’s withheld reserve and its contrast of frozen yet shocking beauty. How can such austerity and colour severity be so beautiful? How can something so motionless be so compelling?
So does the warmth and coolness of the Seasons alternate in every 24 hour cycle.
Spring is a colour riot. It corresponds to the early morning’s optimistic business. The light is pale yellow, but there is a definite promise of heat to come.
Summer’s colours are seen between 12 – 3 PM where activity slows as the heat induces a softness and relaxed peacefulness to how we feel, as well as what we see.
Late afternoon light mellows and heats the colours of the world around us, just as it does to the coloring of people in the Autumn seasons.
Winter individuals, whose personal decoration in clothing, makeup, jewelry, and hair colour is stately, formal, and symmetrical, look best in the colours of the darker time when motion settles. This is a feeling of colour restraint worn in simple, contrasting ways.
Though there are 12 colour groups, or Seasons, among human beings, each has their special edge, their special effect. Learn what yours is and your appearance will crackle. Colour is above all a FEELING. People will keep looking for why you send sparks but they will not know.
Your thoughts project outward from you as a vibration. They are like your inner colours. You send an energy vibration by the colours of your body too. You have a wavelength all your own. Wearing wrong colours is a constant irritation because the wavelenghts don’t jive. You’re emanating too many frequencies that are all clashing.
Trying to look like what you could not be never works. Think about how you were INTENDED to look. You came here, meant to look a certain way. Are you close? You’ll feel it when it happens.
Colour, Complements, Clothes, and Cosmetics
December 20, 2009 by Christine Scaman · 10 Comments
You met Louise in Louise and Stevan Are Light Springs. This is a closeup of her eye.
Every human being is a colour story. The eyes are indeed the window of the soul because the colour story resides in them.
Your season is present in the colours and patterns of your iris design. Sometimes, the season can be read from the eye, it’s so classic. The eye might also contain traces of several seasons, not all of which will matter in how colour affects the skin in the colour analysis.
Colours and line patterns
The iris is predominantly blue or blue-gray. All the webbing radiates out likes waves. That’s a Summer eye.
But the skin at the inner corner and outer corner is yellowish. There is a yellow sunshine around the pupil, though separated from the pupil by a space. These are Spring’s traces.
Eyelashes are brown, indicating a lighter season.
Louise is a Spring, but she tends towards the cool side, close to Light Summer.
OK, so what good is all this information?
Clothing
Since yellow and purple are complements on a color wheel, meaning they’re opposite one another, each colour is intensified in the presence of the other. All the violets and orchid colours look beautiful with soft yellows. When Louise wears these colours, that yellow circlet around the iris looks like a garland of sunshine beaming out of her eyes. It illuminates the entire eye area, which looks healthy and youthful.
There is the slightest touch of green with the blue here. Turquoise, very much a Spring colour, looks remarkable on Louise. Nobody but Spring can do it so incredibly well. The right shade of turquoise, which she finds in her personal colour swatches, will detect and repeat the precise shade in the eye. The eye colour can become extremely powerful simply by repeating it exactly in clothing.
Makeup
Eyeshadow hilite should be cream with a tinge of soft pale yellow. This will repeat the yellow crown in the eye design more effectively than a cooler shade.
If you look at the yellow wreath in the iris, it has a light tan colour. From the 2 to 5 o’clock positions, it is a darker and less yellow shade of brown. This is very similar to the hair colour. If opportunity allows, matching eyeshadow to a brown or gray in the eye accentuates the eye in a way that appears very natural and blended. Colours diffuse, repeat, connect, and the whole flow feels very pleasing.
When you plant a garden, you repeat the same colour over and over. A garden made up of 1 appearance of 10 different plants requires far more visual effort, like a flea market. When the mind sees balance and repetition, it sees harmony, and so beauty.
I like brown eye makeup best on Louise. The article The Mystery Of Brown, the second of the 3 posts in this series, explained how different Spring and Autumn browns are from one another. If your mind says dull, earthy, heavy, brown-peach, brown-orange, gold-orange, muted, or drab gray, do not buy it. If it looks like a metal (copper, gold), do not buy it. If it looks like Autumn leaf colours, put it back.
Finding complementary colours
The web is loaded with free, small, simple downloadable programs to help you work with colour more precisely.
If you Google “digital color meter”, you’ll find lots of choices for little charts that tell you the precise web codes for whatever colour your mouse is hovering over.
I like simplicity. Too many bells and whistles are like cell phones with 1000 menus. Who knows how to use more than 10 of them?
I like this tool for finding complementary colours. The page features all kinds of colour picking tools, in the right margin. Play with them, they’re easy and interesting.
Type cdd87e into the box under the left square. That’s close to the yellow colour in Louise’s eye. See the purple show up opposite? Cool, hey?
Less is more. It looks expensive and organized. Begin by understanding precisely what you have, what you ARE, and you know everything. The rest is easy.
The Mystery of Brown
November 28, 2009 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
This article is the second of 3 connected posts. The first one was What Are Clear and Soft Colours?
There, we talked about muted colours belonging to Autumn and Summer. They’re lower intensity, duller, dusty, either grayish or browned. Summer has some lighter, softer grey browns, often with a blue or mauve tone. Autumn’s colours are darker and more golden-brown.
Spring and Autumn Browns
But Spring has true brown colours too, just like Autumn. When you shop for clothes or makeup, how do you pick Spring’s camel coat from Autumn’s?
Left, Spring. On the right, Autumn.
These colours are not rendered precisely. If you own a Colours Book for True Spring or True Autumn, you may notice that. It doesn’t matter. This illustrates the point well enough.
A color like camel can be very soft, or low saturation, or it can be very bright, or high saturation. It depends on how much gray is in the mix. Look at the 2 camel browns in the middle row. The Autumn one appears more golden, more dark, and more dull and murky.
The Spring brown FEELS closer to you because of it lightness. It almost feels more transparent, though transparency is not one of the ways in which we define colour.
Undertones
The difference between the spring colors and the autumn colors is this:
The springs have a yellow undertone, while the autumns have a gold undertone.
All of the spring colors have yellow added to them, and all of the autumn colors have gold added to them. So, the difference is between yellow and gold. Gold is a deeper and darker shade of yellow.
Spring colors feel light and bright. Autumn colors feel deeper, richer, darker, lower in saturation.
Autumn browns are of lower saturation than Spring because there is more grey in the mix. If they were musical notes, Autumn would resonate far more deeply. The register feels lower. Autumn’s colours are more golden, but a golden color has more gray in it than a yellow based color. Gold is a darker version of yellow AND it is of lower saturation, hence its place among the Autumn colours.
The color brown is actually orange that has been darkened. A dark orange is a brown.
Shopping with knowledge
When we get to 12 tones, vs 4 Season Color Analysis, the differences are slight, but do make a huge difference in the final result, and they are harmonious with each other. The key to having your entire wardrobe work as one, within itself and with you, is for every item to follow YOUR inborn synchrony. It’s important to match the colours as closely as possible to evoke the right feeling. For those of you who have been draped, you saw that your runner-up Season was not even remotely close to your best.
Below is an example of how to apply this information. It is easier with clothing than cosmetic colours. This is a Laura Mercier eyeshadow at Sephora. One of my many reasons for disliking eyeshadow palettes is that they make no sense together. And don’t get me started on lip palettes, which I have even less good feelings about.
Besides a Bright Spring, who would use everything here? That group might be 15% of the population.
Anyhow, looking only at the brown eyeshadow quad, do you notice that it is not gold or orange? The colours feel bright, lit with a pale yellow light. The musical note would be high and clear. These may be browns but they are not “earthy”, which gives a much heavier feeling.
The no-fail guide
But you know, with your Colours Book, you don’t really have to worry. You might think that the camels and honeys and light browns are quite similar between Seasons. When you actually look at the swatches in the Books, they’re obviously different. Your concern is not another Season’s colours. Always match YOUR personal colour palette as closely as possible and you will succeed. This is a visual judgment, not a verbal one. Colour is always best understood when compared to another colour.
Don’t try to shop from memory. Your success rate will drop to 50%. You won’t remember as well as you think you will. Always, always shop with your Book so you can meet my goal 
– which is to never, ever have you buy the wrong thing again.
And that should be done in natural daylight. Take the article up to a window to check the color, or be sure to ask the sales clerk if it can be exchanged if the color is off in natural light. Stores usually use the cheapest lighting possible, which is the worst for viewing true color.
I scribble the product on a piece of white paper because the swatches are painted on white cotton canvas. The sales assistant is standing there watching and possibly feeling quite irritated, but at least it’s not unsanitary. Is this a woman thing? Would a man recognize an easy and successful sale?
What are Clear and Soft Colours?
November 26, 2009 by Christine Scaman · 5 Comments
Let’s say that every colour begins as grey. Drop by drop, you add a colour pigment. As you increase the amount of pigment, so do you increase the “saturation”. The colour is becoming more clear and intense. Finally, there is no grey left and what you have is a pure colour.
Understanding saturation in 12 Season Colour Analysis is key to using your colour analysis swatches correctly for selecting clothes AND makeup.
Colour Saturation
This might look like grey>dusty rose> watermelon> fuchsia. You see how the grey is being subtracted? We began with a soft, muted, dusty colour of low saturation and ended with a more pure, vivid, brilliant colour of high saturation. Another word for saturation is chroma.
A clear colour is pure. It is very far from grey. It is closer to full saturation.
Here is another comparison chart. The colours on the right are not becoming darker, or warmer, or cooler. They’re just clearer or brighter, relative to grey.
Playing with colour parameters
You could darken a colour without removing the gray : grey > heather mist > lilac > lavender > mauve. But now, you’re playing with a different aspect of colour, namely the lightness/darkness. The saturation is not changing so much. These are all soft, muted colours.
You could equally change 2 parameters of colour at once : Wedgewood blue>sky blue>sapphire. We are increasing darkness and increasing saturation at once.
Colour has a third parameter, that being warm/cool. Personal Colour Analysis is determing exactly where your colouring stands in terms of all 3 criteria.
True and Neutral Season colour saturation
Who needs to know? Pretty well everybody, actually. The Summer and Autumn seasons wear absolutely muted colours. Though Autumn’s are more golden-brown and Summer’s are more grey, both are duller than the truly pure Winter and Spring shades.
The True Seasons are absolutes insofar as the colour clarity or softness. Either the colours are clear or they’re not. For the 75% of you who are a Season blend, or a Neutral Season, your colours are softened or muted to a degree. The PCA tells you how much.
In fact, the True Seasons are absolute with respect to all 3 parameters of colour – warm vs. cool and light vs. dark, as well as bright/soft. Therein lies the problem with 4 Season Colour Analysis.
The Neutral Seasons are born with a personal colour palette that is warm/cool/light/dark/bright soft to some degree. It is in the particular combination of the degrees that you arrive at the 8 Neutral groups.
The saturation of grey
Can grey itself be more or less clear?It sure seems crisper and sharper in the Winter greys than in softer Summer greys.
Winter’s grey is pure. That means that it is made of black and white. That’s it.
Summer’s greys have blue in them. Spring’s have yellow, and Autumn’s have brown.
Yellow?
How about a pure vs. muted yellow? Daffodil vs. butterscotch.
Brown
Brown is a little complicated. Brown is a dark orange, but it’s also an important characteristic of the entire Autumn group. It is most certainly NOT a characteristic of the other Seasons, or at least, it takes a much different form.
It’s incredibly important to get it right because it is such a wardrobe neutral and cosmetic colour staple. The Mystery Of Brown is the topic of the next article.
Icy Colours and Pastels
October 17, 2009 by Christine Scaman · 1 Comment
Personal Colour Analysis determines what the colours that perfect your skin tone have in common. We use terms like “icy” and “pastel”.
The Winter seasons wear their light shades as “icy colours”.
The Summers wear their light shades as “pastels”.
What’s the difference?
Icy colours are pure. They are not grayed, dulled, or dusty (that’s called a “soft” colour). They are very clear.
Icy colours are also very, very light. On a light/dark scale, they are much closer to white than pastels are. Pastels have more colour. Icy means those colours reflected when ice crystals act as prisms and split white light.
Icy colours are completely cool. They are crisp and frosty.
They are consistent with Winter’s formal feeling. They are more regal (Winter) than soothing (Summer).
So ICY = VERY LIGHT + CLEAR + COOL
ICY IS NOT PASTEL, NOT SOFT, AND NOT WARM.
A pastel is light, but not extremely light. It’s also grayed or softened just a little. Pastels are gentle, soothing as watercolours. They are in keeping with the delicacy of Summer, whose mood is peaceful and calm.
Each of the 12 Seasons has an atmosphere all its own. True Summer dressed in their tranquil, conservative pastels are so harmonious that it FEELS wonderful to look at.
Put True Winter in that outfit and it is flatter than flat. Dressed in their icy Winter colours with 1 dark, cold contrast, with the drama created by the colour simplicity, it is difficult to tear your eyes away.
Get daily makeup and colour updates. Join the 12 Blueprints Fan Club on Facebook! A Click on the box will take you there.
