Sonja is a Light Summer
November 1, 2009 by Christine Scaman
Many of you know my sister, Sonja, from A Greener Tea. Sonja could never find the common thread between the colours that look best on her. Cool and warm colours both worked sometimes. In certain deep blues, she wasn’t sure. She hasn’t the time or the interest to invest in worrying about her appearance too much. She doesn’t wear makeup and probably never will.
Clothes that don’t speak the truth about us cost as much as clothes that do. When we communicate accurately about ourselves, it feels surprisingly peaceful. As a PCA progresses, when we begin to identify the perfect colours, there are two expressions that consistently come into people’s eyes. One is ease, a complete absence of tension. The other is humour. The eyes look quietly joyful. In men, I see either this inner satisfaction come out, or a more um, predatory ?, outward expression of “How YOU doin’?”
Summer with a hint of Spring
Within the first 5 drapes, we had established that any dark colour, warm, cool, soft, clear, didn’t matter – all of them were not flattering. Sonja disappeared. All your eyes could see was the overpoweringly dark drape. Her skin had virtually no colour. It could not compete with the drape. The overall effect was of aging, fatigue, and a weak presence.
We found her skin to be predominantly cool, but needing a little pale yellow light to be well balanced. The Light Summer was right. In 12 Season colour analysis, this is one of the neutral seasons, blending a trace of Spring with the Summer base. This is a surprisingly different palette from True Summer, given that the seasons are neighbours.Just as their colours are very different, so are their energies. True Summer is Light Summer’s next cooler neighbor. These are the Grace Kellys and Linda Evans of the world. True Summer is refined, conservative, mannerly, sophisticated.
These are more cheerful, energetic colours, but it’s no spice market. These are more like popsicle colours. There are warmer and cooler options, but none of the colours ever gets extremely dark. They are the June Garden Party colours. The summer holiday.
Think of Princess Diana. A sunnier, more activated personality, but proper nonetheless. Where the True Summer’s energy is in feminine details, sheer fabric, lace, and pearls, the Light Summer is sportier. She can still be relied on to behave and contain her reactions. Her soothing voice, understanding manner, and unfailingly decent conduct may cause her to be the sounding board for many a rant and rave that she did nothing to incite.
These colours do not compete with who Sonja is. She looks relaxed and calm wearing these tones. If she wanted to wear makeup, she wouldn’t need much. These women often shy away from makeup because they’ve been put in colours that are too bright. Someone got the idea that a “pop of colour” would liven them up. There are no pops of colour in their natural blueprint, so painting one on their face feels ridiculous. They’ve been put in eyeshadows that are too earthy, eyeliners that are too dark, and blush that feels silly. They need LIGHT fresh cool colours, halfway between soft and clear, with a little pale yellow sunlight.
Hair
Everyone wants to be a blonde or have blonde highlights. Fully 75% of those highlights were put on heads that should never have them. Light Summer women actually look great as long as it’s not overdone. The colour is like this child’s. The base colour shows through, because a whole head of blonde looks completely flat. The highlight is a cool beige, not very yellow at all.
Sonja adds streaks to her light ash brown hair. She knows that she can go very light, to a light creamy beige. When it shines, it looks almost silvery, very good with the cool skin. A common mistake for these women is to have golden highlights. The yellow in the hair doesn’t calm the skin. It fights with it. It flushes the nose with red. Unless Mother Nature gave you that colouring, don’t try to work gold from a bottle. There is no gold in your Colours Book, so don’t wear a hat hair in that colour.
In Sonja’s Words
I hate shopping, primarily because there is too much choice and it boggles my mind. Having the little color book with me is great because it is like I have a personal stylist in my pocket. I whip it out wherever I am and I know that if the color matches, I am safe to buy the item. I actually get compliments on my color choices now.
It also allows me to reduce the amount of clothes in the store that I have to consider. I bypass entire sections if the color is not one of mine and so I can narrow the field. This helps me shop.
Plus, of course, I feel more confident knowing that I will look good. Now, if you could only make me thinner!
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12 Responses to “Sonja is a Light Summer”
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[...] 12 Blueprints and see what happens to the True Summer base when you blend in a touch of Spring, in Sonja Is A Light Summer. Colour is so deeply embedded in human psychology that we feel it more than we see it. Nobody is [...]
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Christine, as always, I enjoy your observations and teachings… be blessed today!! karen
Thank you, Karen. I will carry that blessing with me. Lovely to see you here.
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Yes! I am just like Sonja! Would love to know what good colors/makeup are..and I can share my thoughts as well…once I tend to my crying baby, a Soft Summer.
Annie,
Specific product info usually gets posted on the Fb page – and I’ve seen you there, so keep checking in. I’m going to try to put up some clothes and makeup for Light Summer today.
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I am trying to decide whether I am a soft summer or a light summer. I don’t feel particularly “velvety,” as I’ve seen soft summers described. I don’t do dark well at all (like a light summer), but I do like the the lighter muted colors of the soft summer. For instance, gray heather is good; charcoal is not. Maybe I’m just on the lighter side of the soft summer? Eyes are muted greenish with a little blue sometimes.
Margie,
This is a fairly common confusion. The only way I know to sort it is with the drapes. Velvety is not a term that comes to my mind for Soft Summer, though I can certainly see it in Soft Autumn. Your preferences are towards Light but our preferences can be equally accurate and misleading.
Thanks for helping me with that “velvety” description that I’m seeing on other sites. The more I read, I’m thinking I’m more soft than light, although my skin tone seems/feels a lot lighter or more delicate than Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie, who I keep seeing shown as prototype soft summers. Their coloring seems more intense than mine, but of course I’m seeing hollywood editions. I think I must be on the light end of the soft summer spectrum, not so close to the soft autumns.
I read in another of your posts that soft summers have pink in the rims of the eyelids that can make the whites of the eyes appear very bloodshot with the wrong makeup. Is that soft summers exclusively or is that all summers? I have always been aware of that for myself but have never had anyone else acknowledge it, so thanks for validating that! I’ve tended to avoid brown and plum eyeliners because they would intensify the pink rims rather than the green eyes. I have finally found a cocoa brown eyeliner from Clinique, though, that does indeed work, and a greyed plum eyeliner from Estee Lauder that works pretty well, too, although it smudges off pretty easily. For years I tried the khaki eye pencil from Clinique, but it did very little for me. Seemed to just fade into transparency.
I draped as soft summer, and I think the “velvety” gets at, as in say Lora’s description, is a sort of sueded, muted, nubuck quality, especially to the eye colour – nothing primary or secondary or even tertiary about it, a sense of complexity to the tones. It’s best seen in indirect daylight. When I saw the word velvet I first think of very dense, jewel-toned dark wintery colours, purely by association as this is what you tend to see at the fabric shop or in evening wear, and that’s not what we’re about as soft seasons. Velvet in this contxt is more about that subtle texture, like upholstery that’s been sitting about and weathered gently.
I see it more in the colours of soft autumn palette than in the soft summer one, but I see it in my colouring as a soft summer, if that makes sense? And for what it’s worth, I saw myself as a soft autumn for a long time (suspect I’m in some odd overlap of the curves, with undertones more on the summer side but with a lot of soft autumn in the execution, which probably won’t make much sense to anyone else
).
My sincere apologises for some truly dreadful typos, here as everywhere – English really is my first language, but I over-edit and do it badly, hence the grammatical disjunctions.
Me again. I think I am a light summer after all, not a soft summer, now that I’ve studied up on it some more, read comments on the FB page, looked at Rachel’s website, etc. The questionnaire and charts on Irene Riter’s website were very helpful. I was thinking I wasn’t “light” enough to be a light summer, but now I understand light summer really means you are on the brighter side of summer, not necessarily lighter in terms of pastel, which is what I had in my head to begin with. I’m much more comfortable and confident now that I have a pretty good idea of where I fall. Summer influenced by spring seems right in every way.
This article makes me feel I’ve come home. When I was a child I loved colors such as are shown in the garden landscape here. During my adolescence I developed a preference for dreamy pastels, lavender et al., but now I’m enjoying the clearer, happier colors again–and feeling vindicated by this article, which is the best explanation of Light Summer colors I’ve read.