Colour, Complements, Clothes, and Cosmetics
December 20, 2009 by Christine Scaman
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.
Comments
10 Responses to “Colour, Complements, Clothes, and Cosmetics”
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I find the concept of eye patterns fascinating, mostly because I have little “pattern” in mine. They’re just brown. Not the deepest brown, and no flecks of gold or green, just brown. Maybe a little reddish. The most interesting thing is the deep, green-gray rim around the iris, and even that I can barely see unless the light is good.
In Louise’s eye is the yellow the yellow sunburst common in a spring eye? I have that, too, but it doesn’t show unless I look with a flashlight or in bright sunlight. I swear, even my ophthalmologist hasn’t examined my eyes as closely as I have in the past few weeks.
Christine,
very interesting article. My mom has the same colour eye of Louise, except for the yellow sunshine. Her skin at the inner corner and outer corner is yellowish. I’ve always thought she was an Autumn, a Soft Autumn like me, but closer to True Autumn. Is the yellowish skin you mentioned possible for Autumn?
Kathy,
The yellow rim is common to any of the Seasons with a Spring component, including Light Summer where there is just a trace of Spring. It looks faded when the Spring is not strong. It’s also much easier to see in a light eye. Brown eyes are more difficult. Just because there is no pattern doesn’t at all imply that you couldn’t be a Spring. Could you say that there seems to be a flower-like shape around the pupil?
Luana,
The skin colour around the eye can be hard to distinguish. Theoretically, in Autumn people, it’s more orange than yellow, but this is by no means easy to see in everyone. These pictures tend to illustrate the classic examples. Autumn people almost always have brown specks, random smudges of brown, or a brown star around the pupil. The brown is often orange-amber. I would say that this brown is more consistent among Autumns than the obviously orange skin colour around the eye.
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“Could you say that there seems to be a flower-like shape around the pupil?”
No. More of a star. And it’s dark, olive-y brown/yellow. I should have been more specific. My overall eye color is a deep red-brown, but I know by now that’s not as important as other things.
Is it this common to waver between two or three seasons? I mean, in the sense that one day you’re convinced you’re a bright spring, then the next a deep autumn, and then the next maybe a warm autumn? Well, I know I’m warm, not soft and not light.
Flowers and stars are both very possible. Autumns tend to be more star-like, especially Autumn/Winter blends.
It is very common to be uncertain. I was this way with everyone I met till I got this thing figured out.
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I could almost buy deep autumn but a lot of those rich, dark colors wash me out. I seem to favor a handful of colors from clear spring, deep autumn and warm (or true) autumn. Winter colors aren’t that fantastic on me except for deep magenta (if it’s not too blue) and burgundy. (I know haircolor is less important that skin, but as a child mine was lighter, coppery brown, so I doubt there’s much about me that’s cool.)
I bought a sweater in a brightish, very warm olive green the other day was surprised how good it looks. I would have never picked that color since I started playing around with color analysis. I know it belongs to one of the autumns, so I’m getting there.
I love this! I did one for myself — here are the codes: 302923 (that’s for the color I picked out of my eye — a deep, dark brown) and its opposite CFD6DC (I think it might be either an icy slate blue or something else, I don’t know. But it looks like either a Winter or a Summer color). What do you make of this?
Samantha,
I see the blue as a Summer colour in that it is quite greyish. A Facebook reader introduced me to this great page:
http://www.yaelf.com/colour.shtml
Powder Blue is icier, Sky Blue is more pastel. To be Winter, it must be icy, so no grey, but still very light.
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Christine, this is fascinating. I think I remember reading in CMB (original) about Winter’s “Spokes on a wheel,” Autumn’s “Aztec Sun,” Summer’s “Cracked Glass,” and Spring’s “Starburst.”
Does this still hold true? According to that site (with my monitor’s questionable colour settings!) my eyes seem to be dark fading to to light slate blue, with burnt sienna in the centre, in I guess what could be considered “petals”? But they’re large petals that fade from the brown to the blue-grey.
Hm. Would you be able to post examples of different types of eye patterns?
Hi, Ellen,
Yes, those descriptions are very real- but just as there is enormous variation among skin colouring, so is there in the eyes. If we do an accurate PCA from eyes, people could just mail in their photos. It took me awhile to learn it. I certainly don’t look at the eye of every client, though I try because I enjoy it, and use that information other than as confirmation that we’re probably headed the right way with the drapes.
I don’t take pictures of eyes. I’ve looked on the internet but don’t see the degree of close up and focus needed to illustrate the point.
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