Does The Darkness Range of My Colours Matter?
December 12, 2011 by Christine Scaman
David Chilton wrote The Wealthy Barber and the recent The Wealthy Barber Returns to help people understand how financial planning is do-able by everybody. Securities analysts can discuss financial theory till Wall Street freezes over but for consumers, the answer to all that is “Yeah, great. Show me how to use it. Show me how I’m supposed to make it work.” The same applies to colour analysts.
We know from How Can I Be 3 Seasons? that the field of colour analysis will be a sure-fire appearance asset for 100% of consumers once we sort a few things out. Already now, when it works, it REALLY works. When it’s good, it’s VERY GOOD. It is THE BEST thing that could ever happen to how you look and how you shop. The problems and questions need to be hauled out in the sunshine so we can get a good look at the cracks so we can seal them up for you.
This week, we’re sharing some of the questions I receive most by women who phrased the issue really well. Any changes I made are to preserve anonymity.
#3: …what I really would like to know is, what is the range for a Soft Summer when using the [swatches]? I mostly mean in terms of value. For example, there is this one random rose brown that is unlike the rest of the browns. Do I need to buy rose-browns that are that depth? A few months ago I purchased a set of Soft Summer paint chips from Mary Steele Lawler and since I’m [interested in home decor], I found it quite interesting. When I found the rose-brown in a paint strip card, I believe it was the second darkest color and it had several lighter colors on that card. None of these are in my Soft Summer fan. Does that mean that they are also allowed since they are just darker and lighter versions of the same color? Can I take any of the colors to my darkest and lightest range?
Good, good question. Short answer: No, you can’t go fully to the lightest and darkest versions of your colours. Why not? Because they have to be lightened or darkened by adding or changing something. As soon as you do that, you change value (lightness/darkness) but you also change some other colour dimension too, either warmth or saturation. And then, poof, they look better on somebody else who matches the new settings better.
Soft Summer can go a tinge lighter than the swatches but not a lot before you trip into another Season. If colours become too light by having too much of the greying effect subtracted, the colours get too saturated and they don’t work with the person or the rest of the clothes. If you lighten the colours by adding white, they get too light for the person to balance. If you lighten them by adding yellow, you add too much of the wrong kind of warmth, plus you increase the saturation.
Photo by Dominic Morel, South Africa.
But.
You might be able to move a little in value depending on your Season.
Whatever your Season, always observe The Most Important Thing about your Season’s colours. For the Lights, it’s lightness of colour, where even the darker colours would look light on people of non-Light-Season natural colouring. For the Darks, it’s that colours be quite dark overall, without saying that every colour is dark. Lightness and darkness respectively is what makes the skin of these groups most young and evenly coloured. They cannot compromise on these key points. Warmth/coolness of colour is less stringent unless you’re a True Season. A Light could go a touch warmer and that might work, as long as she stays light in the colour. A Dark might go a little warmer or cooler, but darkness is what the viewer should recognize first overall.
Does this mean that a Light Season person can go as light as they want? No, it doesn’t. If you fan out a Winter and a Light Summer colour swatch book, you’ll see that Winter’s lightest colours are actually lighter than Summer’s. To satisfy Winter’s requirement for light colours to be icy, they contain very little colour pigment. Summer’s lightest colours are more ‘colourful’. To create the very high contrast Winters all need to look their very best, their icy colours must be very close to white. A Summer’s lightest tones are called pastel, meaning more pigment and greyed a little bit. Colour analysis wants to establish ‘How light are your lights and how dark are your darks and let’s get your wearing your full range’. Summer’s range of lightest to darkest is narrower, Winter’s goes to the very ends at white and black. A Light person can go a little lighter but needs to keep it pastel.
Awareness of what you see first takes practice. It may be easier to learn this by looking at an entire person. A Dark Season outfit will make the first impression of being darker than medium on a white to black scale. There may be (there should be) light parts that are very light, but what sinks into your sight center first is dark. A Bright Season person’s first ping on your consciousness should be clarity. One speck of dust, one little puff of cloud floating through, a trace of haze, and all those other great colours she’s wearing just got neutralized a little bit, and so did the glow of her face.
For the Softs, your eyes should register grayness, mutedness, fogginess, dullness before they check-in what the colour is. It’s gray before it’s yellow or purple or blue. Soft Summer’s greying will be more perceptible, might strike your consciousness before how warm/cool or how light/dark. It’s that softness that matters most to perfect this skin and to meld what you wear with what you are. The position on the warm/cool scale isn’t quite so tight, there is a little fluctuation. The degree of lightness or darkness isn’t very tight either. A pretty wide range of each exists, though not all the way to white or black.
Even the lightest colours have a fair amount of pigment, more than the other two Summer Seasons. The Soft Summer represents the Summer palette seen in the shade. A little gold is added, though so little this far away from True Autumn that its effect is to complement Summer’s blue and make greyness. It will warm too, but out here, it doesn’t look gold or yellow, it looks like a fog brown overlaying True Summer.
Soft Summer is capable of many colours besides what’s in the Book as long as they hold the saturation position very low (and of course, adhere to the warmth and darkness ranges). It’s a balancing act. If the colours are changing their lightness/darkness level and changing the saturation too, then it wouldn’t look so good. If the colour is becoming lighter/darker and is staying very soft and muted and is staying cooler than warm, the harmony for Soft Summer should be pretty good. You’re always balancing the 3 scales of colour at once. If you see a rosy brown outside your fan but your taste tells you it would look fine with your other fan colours, then it probably would, especially if it’s not a big area.
We often try to change one parameter of colour in our questions, forgetting that as soon as you change it, the other 2 change right away.
This is how it works in my eyes and thinking. If ever I find a colour mixing course to teach me in more detail, I’ll be there, brushes and mixing pots in hand. Something I’d like to know is this: Is there a lower limit to Soft Summer’s saturation? Does the Season occupy all the cool-neutral, mid-value colour space back to the starting point at the all grey axis? I’d say not because that axis is made of Winter greys, meaning composed only of B&W. To be a Summer Season grey, some pink, mauve, or blue should be definitely discernible. To qualify as a pastel at all, a fair bit of pigment must be present, more than for an icy colour. Hey. Either I’m wrong or I just answered my own question.
Related posts:
- Soft Autumn Darkness Adjustments
- Icy Colours and Pastels
- Are All 60 Colours Really My Best?
- Best Makeup Colours : Soft Summer
- You Know Your Colours – Now What?
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Thanks again Christine – can’t wait for your book. In the meantime – is each season’s “most important thing” listed here on your website? That would be a great resource – one page with TMIT for each season, a kind of ‘if all else fails, remember this….’ when shopping. Maybe you already have such a page and I’ve missed it or maybe it’s in the book.
You didn’t miss it, Esther. I’ll do a post on it.
Thanks for posting this Christine! I have found that the light-medium value of my True summer colors seems to look the best with my skin tone. Every time I devite lighter (icy pastel territory) or a lot darker (stark black on it’s own), my skin looks worse. The only exception is navy that is slightly darker then my darkest true summer blue when worn away from the face. I recently received a new swatch book from TCA and compared the colors with my skin. In almost all of the swatches, the best colours were the lightest and the second darkest tones. The colours with in the middle and the darkest colours didn’t have the same wow factor althought they still looked good. Of course, it could just be the colour per se, but the the trend for the lightest and second darkest being the best really made me wonder about the value in relation to how much a colour works of doesn;t work.
Christine, thanks so much for commenting here. For me this statement is all-telling: “For the Softs, your eyes should register grayness, mutedness, fogginess, dullness before they check-in what the colour is. It’s gray before it’s yellow or purple or blue. ”
This is exactly what my experience is saying. Everything that looks right on me is greyed first and foremost and is the reason that some of the colors on one of my cheaper fans don’t all work. I’m learning to trust my eyes first and the fan second. (But the fan is a good start.)
Hi Christine,
Stopped following your blog for many months following house move and dodgy internet. it is so nice to be back. I really appreciate the thought and eloquence in your pieces, it’s soo far from a corporate/ formulaic style and is a real inspiration to me. Am going to gte yr bok, can’t wait. I lost patience waiting for sci/art and trained with kim bolsover improvability, as I very much wanted to get on with it. If spectrafile does a course i’d like to do it. My emphasis is on giving the client an understanding of her own colouring, and the limits of its Palette tolerance as it were, this article v relevent. I do covet the accuracy of the sci/art system, but find also that clients are bowled over by the effects of getting out of the wrong colours, and moving towards the right ones.
I just love the newer articles on soft summers. I have always found my s/s colouring quite fiddly, the formulaic systems don’t get it…..my eyes are foggy grey but with some khaki/topaz which pings in dulled cooler yellow greens and in complementary purples. Colour ingenues see that and see me as an autumn, but warm peachy colours shadow me up and overall look is neutral/cool . What struck me is that somewhere else you talked about s/s being a most nuanced palette. I find myself loving novel but blended/muted colour combinations, often “plagiarising” a pallette from a sophisticated print on a scarf or getting ideas from a picture. I love soft cool/warm blends.
This post is extremely confirmative also, in that it emphasises the “wiggle room” in the pallette on warm/cool; light/dark. This wiggle room has caused me to doubt my season, but it seems that perhaps this quality characterises it. I’m typing wearing aubergine velvet trousers, a soft warmish/neutral green top with greyed mauve cami under it, covered with a mid rose pink cardi. It reflects the “colour blocking ” trend, but the colour values of all are similar so it blends, and all the colours are soft (the aubergine is lightened/ softened by the velvet).
I’ve started a personal colour consulting company called beautiful by design (www.beautiful-by-design.co.uk). website is in its infancy but hoping to grow things. Anyone in Wales, UK, or fancying a coastal break v welcome!
Happy New Year.
Love your descriptions, Ruth. The cool-eyed Soft Summer, blues and greens, is fairly straightforward to characterize. Many have warmer eye tones, avocado and army greens and amber browns, and oh, boy, I find I have to be on my toes. Add a dark eyebrow and they arrive thinking they’re Dark Autumns. Then you see the quiet, evenly coloured skin and rested face in Summer colours versus the punched in the eye look of
Winter colours and you have an inkling of where the PCA is about to go. You really must pay close attention to skin only on these. I’m terribly grateful when the woman’s hair colour is her own because once it comes down from the gray cap, the whole story knits itself together.
Your colour combinations – I agree. I don’t find this Season nearly as defined in one of their colours as in combinations. Any combination. Warm/cool, dark/light. A woman who has some distance between her lightest and darkest element, so appears fairly contrasting like Kate Beckinsale, AND who has the warm eye/cool skin this Season can do (same as DW, quite remarkable when you see the cool skin + warm yellowed eye), her combinations are endless and able to repeat all those many colour variations that live in her. Soft Summer is a most remarkable Season.
Very best of luck on your new venture!
Hi, Thanks Christine, I only just found this, not getting alerts. It is so affirming to talk about these blends, nuances and combinations of colours. Thanks for your encouragement. S/s often characterised as wishy washy but can have great strength of colour. I find it hard to convey this stuff to clients, but have put links to your blog on some of my emails. I have the warm eye/ cool hair and skin blend. Darkish hair/ eyebrows earned ma a DA typing on my CMB analysis, and a bit of a telling off for my s/s self diagnosis lol. First reaction :I don’t like that lipstick (dark bright brick red). Can you get a more damning verdict than that??
Cannot find a hair dye colour and have gone natural… am lovng it! Even the grey bit.. Highlights arent me and go brassy. Too much warmth in the hair liberated by the peroxide. The s/s with the natural hair you showed in another post sums it up.
Re lipsticks, have you seen Rose Aglow by clinique? it’s a sheer, creamy browned mauve. Works like a near nude for me, but with some strength. Great with my coolest colours.
New venture starting slow but promising. Slow is fine given the day job and the small dependent mammals in the household. It’s a lovely art form though! Your pieces are moving to read; I’m passionate about giving women back their own face as it were (cf “God gives you one face, and you paint yourselves another”!) . It’s like givng women a window back into their own beauty.
Am going to get your book. Can’t wait to read it.
Best wishes,
Ruth
Christine, I have a question because I can’t quite follow one part if the logic of your December 30th, 2011 words (at 1:41 pm): It seems as if you might be saying that Kate Beckinsale is a Dark Winter? Sorry, I’ve read your post and the one to which it replies and . . . I’m a bit lost. .
Hello Christine – As a bright winter, I realise that clarity and contrast are utmost. . . In regard to going lighter or darker, as a Winter who looks great in the black/white/splash of bright combination, is it possible to replace the black with a very, very dark (almost black) shade of say green or purple, which is not in the BW darkest shade range. I ask because although anything at all muted worn alone is awful on me, surprising darkest olive green + BW off white + a bright winter pink in lipstick or accessory seems surprisingly good as does a black purple used in the same way. I have a couple of clothing items which I just can’t seem to toss because they seem to work when used in this formula.
Sounds to me like you’re seeing all the right things, Heather, and making the best decisions. Absolutely you can replace black with any dark block. It looks more imaginative, more fun, more lighthearted, more interesting and less usual – all Spring attributes.
I see Kate as a Soft Summer, Erin. There are many similarities between S Su and DW but I don’t think she’s dark or saturated enough to be W.