Kip Is A Light Summer
September 5, 2010 by Christine Scaman
Kip’s family and ours have known one another for many years. As a child, he had flaxen hair and light blue eyes, and he certainly gave a Spring impression, or at least a very yellow impression.
He’s in his 30s now. His hair has darkened. He has a tan at the moment. Combining the freckles, the fact that his mother, and probably brother, are True Autumns, that his skin resembles his Soft Autumn sister’s, and that there are red tones in the hair (and very much redder on other family members), I wondered if Kip was going to be that Spring/Autumn person that we discussed in a previous article and its comments (see the previous article No Summer+Winter or Spring+Autumn Blends).
Draping
We saw right away that Winter was dominating and severe. The blackened sapphire and emerald took over.
In the True Autumn drapes, Kip might have been up every night for a week looking after his young children. The shadows and unshaved appearance were obvious. The lower half of the face was darker, making the jaw look very severe and the face 10 years older. BUT, his eye color intensity was surprisingly good. For those who are new here, you’ll read often that I do not factor the eye color into determining the Season. It simply does not matter. However, I very much consider which drapes make your eye color the most intense.
In the True Spring drapes, the skin was too yellow and the eye color was dull and greyed out. If I could erase the yellow in the skin, there seemed to be an easing of the lines, a more even luminosity, as is usually seen in any Spring blend. The skin looked healthy and very evenly colored, while True Autumn made the skin obviously worse, even in the very slight Autumn Seasons. So, Kip was not going to be the person who can wear True Spring and Autumn colors equally well.
True Summer was interesting. The yellow caused by True Spring cleared from the skin. The skin retained the good effects the Spring drapes created, of young, clear, ideal skin, but could also intensify the eye color to the same degree that the Autumn drapes did. The whole effect was a little flat, though the balance with the person was the best of the 4 True Seasons.
Light Summer’s bare trace of sunlight gave us the perfectly lit skin, without compromising the eyes. Light Summer is the Neutral Season (so blend of 2), that is mostly Summer with a minor influence from Spring. I guess that the reason the Autumn drapes worked so well to intensify eye color was their low saturation, which is the color characteristic that Autumn shares with Summer. When doing the analysis, always focus on the skin. Once you get that right, the eyes will automatically be their best.
In men, the deciding Season always creates the cleanest, strongest bone structure. They do look younger, the skin clearer, but what I see is just plain “handsome”.
Light Summer’s Colors
Light Summer’s are popsicle colors. No, not quite that bright. Rainbow colors. It’s not just True Summer overexposed. The light and clarity of Spring make the feeling of the whole palette much more lively. Any single color may be similar to some of True Summer’s, but the whole person viewed together, just as the whole Colours Book fanned out, is more energetic than True Summer. That clearance of True Summer’s gentle cloud brings a springy feeling, in more ways than one.
The Light Summer is color in sunlight. Compare this to Soft Summer, which is color in shade. Notice the shirt he’s wearing – color in shade. The chair is probably the true color. In sun, it would be Light Summer’s – so a little bleached out, and better on Kip. Still cool and fresh, like True Summer, but just that mention of clear light.
Watch how the color moves in the image below as it changes from light areas to shaded areas. In our physical world, light is reflected from objects in a continuum of light-true-dark, or warm-true-cool. In 12 Tone, or 12 Season, Color Analysis, the Tones progress from one to the next through the same sequence.
Kip’s most remarkable color was his off-white (the color of the Light Summer white drape in the previous article How Light Summer Goes Grey) . Not a browned off-white, like clamshell, which is Soft Summer’s. This is vanilla ice cream, but not French vanilla, which is too yellow. It took a conscious effort to remove that drape because he just looked so extremely right. Everyone in the room just kept looking. The longer a right color is on you, the more good things come out. The longer a wrong color is on you, the more bad things come out.
Summer’s palette showcases Kip’s gracious intelligence better than any other. Far more a listener than a talker, more peaceful than animated, more caring than needing, the personality of Summer men is admired more for their support of others than their call for self-promotion.
Color that’s too cool or cloudy says nothing about his easy smile and sense of humor, the pleasure he takes in physical activity, his respectful appreciation of Nature, or his capacity for adventure. His essence is quiet and easy to be with, but is made for the outdoors. The feeling is relaxed, sea and sand, boats and bicycles, not formal.
Light Summer Clothing
As important as it is to always look at color in daylight, the Light Seasons have to be especially careful to do so. There is no type of dark color that flatters them. In mall lighting, it’s too easy to go too dark.
A soft white shirt and a silver grey jacket would be outstanding. Pure white will take over, reducing the person, and we do not wear clothes to be diminished by them. A man wearing a coat/shirt in too-strong colors makes him look weak, and makes the size of the head look too small for the shoulders.
Spring/Summer men don’t sing to me in plaid, which can look workday and practical. Corduroy, same. Too much texture looks heavy and dulls the fabric. Light colors belong with light fabrics. Uncomplicated cottons, denim, natural linen, lightweight wool, and knits look smooth and balanced. Autumn’s focus is work and productivity. Spring is lighthearted and lives to enjoy life, to play, to have fun.
A light cotton shirt with a colorful stripe in a single color, which I think is called a Bengal Stripe (below from Savile Row Co), cool tan chinos, now that looks good. His temperature looks cool (he needs to, he’s a Summer above all), but there’s that little effervescence that elevates him to another frequency.
Love it in pink and in turquoise.
Purple and yellow
He definitely has a yellow look, though less than in his teens, and yellow in his skin. Any Spring blend needs to get comfortable wearing purples, though Light Summer hasn’t as many choices as the purer Springs. Because purple and yellow intensify one another, and the Colours Book shows you the right purple swatches for your particular type of yellowness, it looks remarkable. The shirt below is at Paul Fredrick. The white is that trace-of-vanilla off-white and all the purples are right.
Women love feminine colours on men. OK, I love them. It doesn’t need to be a mauve turtleneck. One stripe in a tie will get the room’s attention. Women keep looking at the one guy who can wear a cherry popsicle stripe in a sky blue tie. Men respect it because so few men know how to do this and accentuate their masculinity, rather than seem to compromise it.
Before you turn 30
This was a very interesting PCA for me. It reinforced what is easily forgotten, to never drape a person with predicted ideas of the outcome. Never start guessing. Go into the analysis with a blank slate, do the driving, and let the drapes give you the answer.
About finding that Spring/Autumn flow…the instrument I use to measure color, the Sci\ART drapes, are not designed to help me find that coloring. I don’t think it matters.
As a professional community of Personal Color Analysts, our strength will not be in fragmenting ourselves over linguistic and detail. We are already exclusive enough. Whatever system analyzed you, you’ll still look way better than you did before. Wouldn’t a world where everyone had a PCA by the time they’re 25 be beautiful? If a PCA were as automatic a grad gift as a laptop? If PCAs were part of everyone’s life like gym memberships?
Kathryn Kalisz’s passing in January was a loss to our entire community. Too much knowledge is lost when one person passes, unless we share our strengths. As Kathryn once said to me, “There’s plenty of business for everybody.”
Note: I do not own the images above. If you own these pictures and would like me take them down, I will gladly do so.
Related posts:
- Light Summer Looking Serious
- How Light Summer Goes Grey
- Light Summer CE And Being Not Pale
- Sonja is a Light Summer
- Light Spring Looking Serious
Comments
8 Responses to “Kip Is A Light Summer”
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What a fun article! Very nice to see a man featured, and illuminating to read your narrative of the draping process and the thought behind it. Stripes seem especially right with this season; energetic and crisp, not too formal. Even your deck chair illustration has a stripey effect
Christine, have really enjoyed your articles on Light Springs and Light Summer. I wrote to you before when I bought some eyeshadow that I really, really liked…only later I discovered that in the sunlight it didn’t really quite work after all. I was discouraged for a bit and had to work through that again.
Well, I already knew that no pure pink looked that great on me–corals won hands down. I also wore aquas splendidly and didn’t look so hot in orangey colors, blued-reds, or greyed colors. So that seemed to eliminate Autumn, Winter, and Summer. But it was when you said to forget hair and eyes. Voila! (For my hair is a graying, cooling soft strawberry-gone-brownish, often mistaken for all-out redhead in the sunlight in my youth, but called “ash brown/blonde” at other times. My eyes are often bright and then dark, going from grey-blue to green to teal and sometimes steel gray or brown in photos. The article on Linda’s Spring eyes clued me in–we have a similar configuration in the iris.)
It wasn’t until I noticed that a friend had similar warm tones (only she was warmer) that we used my (then) Warm Spring swatch to compare ourselves. Another lady, looking on, said that one of the pinker colors looked better on me, but the orangey one looked better on my friend. (We were outdoors in good sunlight.) Well, that blew me out of the water! So back to the drawing board (because I haven’t got a PCA in the neighborhood). As I say, it was that part you mentioned about skin….
And I realized that in my outdoor pics, the first thing you notice is light. Yes, there is distinct warm in most of them, but there is mostly lightness that hits you. I can’t see it most of the time, but other people have remarked over the years. The problems with makeup counter people and light-toned people, you have mentioned before. People used to say, “You look white as a sheet!” when I was a kid.
I sent off for two different tonal swatch sets–Light Spring and Light Summer (because my kids are summery anyway–one of us could use the one I eliminated). Light Spring–bingo again! A last minute check against the Light Summer (I love those colors)–good, but not the same oomph. Can’t wear them all, but look passable in some. Cannot wear dark colors to any great satisfaction and I find that I look best in the cooler side of Light Spring but cannot quite cross into Light Summer.
Now ALL my correct Light Spring clothes go together well. I don’t like the clothes most stores carry, but have taken to ordering online and gotten a whole new style. The only problem is being sure what I’m ordering color-wise. Have made a few mistakes–you can’t be sure of the tones until you see them. However, a lot of the skirts I’ve been ordering this year are multi-toned prints, so that if one part of the prints isn’t so good, I can pick up the part that works with a top. One of my lightest is a blend of light mauve and lightest coral pink. Both colors look good, but one looks GREAT! And then blend together well…light spring/light summer blends are gorgeous, lively, soft.
So far, it’s a success and actually I always liked those colors better than the Warm Spring anyway.
Delightful to come back from a weekend at the shore with my Light Summer husband and see this article!
I connected so much of what you wrote, and so much from Kip’s photo, to my husband. He was white-blond as a little boy, though his hair’s now a light taupey brown (summer adds blond highlights) and his beard comes in with a lot of red. Tanned, he looks ruddy, as Kip does on my monitor, and fairly dark. You’d have to peek under his arm to see how pasty-white his skin truly is. His eyes are a striking light blue with a yellow ring around the pupil. He’s absolutely dreamy in the light pink, light grey, and lavender polos I’ve bought him. For our outdoor wedding, he looked perfect in a light grey suit with a soft white shirt. And “vanilla” perfectly describes the very best color I’ve ever seen him in. (Of course, he worked on the car in that shirt. 
) His personality’s bigger than I think one would expect a Summer’s to be, though… He’s an ENT/FP (any Myers-Briggs fans here?)
Though I’m not convinced there’s anything to it, I like to muse about how seasons might combine genetically to create other seasons. In our case, Soft Autumn plus Light Summer produced Light Spring.
Rachel,
Thank you for commenting. I believe I am also a light summer, and an ENTP!
I am finding fall and winter hard seasons to shop in, given the fact that most clothes are too dark for me, yet I feel “wrong” wearing pastels in said seasons.
I’m really happy to see more info and photos on somebody in my season. My hair is about the tone of Kip’s, this sort of dark blonde, light brown that’s not too yellow or ash. It was fairly light growing up sort of yellow and golden (never red) but I’ve been dying it since my late teens as it slowly stopped lightening up from my dark root color. I spent less and less time in the sun so I figured that was it but I don’t think any amount of sun can bring it back to that color anymore (I’m only 26). The natural color (one that I can only see a couple inches of as my roots grow out) had tricked me into thinking I would be a soft summer especially since my eyes are a bit soft as well. Definitely a blue softer than Kip’s with more gray and green, plus I actually tan instead of turn red.
In the end, there was no contest between cool-neutral, spring-autumn, and light-soft summer. The best drape on me wasn’t the vanilla white but the teal. I still haven’t found very many perfect swatch matches but there is this one particular purple-blue that’s the 2nd lightest color that I LOVE wearing. First day I wore it, I walked by the mirror at work where there’s tons of windows and full-spectrum lighting and had to look again. My eyes looked bluer, my skin glowed and my cheeks had a soft rosy flush that you’d swear wasn’t natural. It’s an absolutely boring crappy t-shirt from Target, but I’ve gotten several compliments from people when I wear it.
So yay for a Light Summer article!
Oooh PS: I can’t remember if I commented about this before, but the brown drape in the Light Summer group… I swore it was too dark and warm for me and I just couldn’t see the match of it within the swatch. It’s taken me awhile to shop for my browns but it seems that my swatch definitely has browns at a grayer, rosier color than most anything in stores. I’d say that picture you posted of the hoodie was a closer match than the Light Summer brown drape.
So are the drapes only used to get reactions in the skin or is every single color in the 12 drapes for Light Summer supposed to be my color? And if so, what do you think of that brown specifically?
Kathryn,
It’s like magic when the whole thing starts to come together. It seems so easy and obvious that you wonder how you could have missed it before. Like you, I have trouble finding things I like in stores. Living in Canada, returning to US companies can be an annoyance. Eventually, though, you build a beautiful wardrobe that you know is working FOR you.
Rachel,
I agree about the light grey suit and white sand shirt. There’s a photo of Kevin Costner in similar colors and he looks like a different man than the black that makes him look like he’s smoked for 20 years.
Annie,
Do you have the swatch book? Usually these problems come from not fulling grasping the outer edges of the palette. It’s no different than how an Autumn would dress in June. Though some of your darker colors still don’t seem very dark, ON YOU they look quite dark. You also have more coolness than warmth, which is appropriate to fall and winter. Your greys, reds, blues are plentiful. It’s not all pale pink and yellow. I agree that these clothes are hard to find this time of year; it’s a time to build up your wallet, because Spring clothing will be in the stores soon. Right now, you’ll find your neutrals, grays, and blues.
Tora,
Sounds as though you understand your coloring well, one of the best things about a Sci\ART analysis. The test drapes are colored to observe reactions in the skin. The Final Drapes, or Masterpiece Drapes, which is what the 12 Light Summer drapes you mention sound like, are also supposed to look wonderful, each and every one…but, I will say that in any Season, there are often 1 or 2 of those drapes that work less well than the rest. The times I’ve tried to match the drapes to Book, I have found an exact match, but I’ve not done it with every color. The drapes your analyst had might not be precisely the same as mine.
Brown can be a prickly color on Summers in general, and especially if you’re on the cool side of the Season, you’ll do better in grayer and rosier. I agree that yours are complicated, you’d never match them in stores without the Book. You know, even if you’re close, you’ll be fine – still far ahead of where you used to be. On Light Summers I know, that hoodie might be a bit too dark and cool, but would probably be just fine if they dont’ have their hair color too light. It has no exact match in the True Summer Book either. The fact that you understand your coloring and the color of the hoodie well enough to ask the Q you did shows that your instincts will gravitate towards fine colors, even when the Book isn’t precisely matched. That’s what it’s all about.
Christine, the colors are still proving out to be right. The other day I had one of the very best colors on, looked in the restroom mirror at work (which is the WORST lighting), and this one line I can’t stand on my face had completely disappeared! This happened for several days in a row when I wore the right colors. Wow! Like magic. My skin looked completely different.
So, while we are all weighing in, it’s INFP for me!