Lilia is a Dark Winter

October 31, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 17 Comments

We share zodiac signs, Meyers Briggs types, and Season. How could we not have a day of the analysis and philosophy of beauty and self?

Here we begin. Cuteness beyond words.

Draping and Black

Once she had a chance to review the journey of her colour analysis, Lilia asked,

At first, we did the four drapings of black, brown, silver, and gold. We saw that black gave a severe look and was the worst followed by silver and gold which all gave something good and bad, and then brown that felt comfy but not striking.

So why in the world would I wear that black color on me if I know it was the worst on the first drapes we saw. If there is some color I should combine as a basic and then adjust to my Tone, why could it be more the brown that was the best of the four ? (from what I remember but maybe I have a bias in my memory?)

You’re remembering the very first drapes where the categories are still very broad. When I use those first four drapes, I am not thinking in terms of Season decisions. We were gathering information about what your skin does placed next to different colours. Only True Seasons will have definite Yes/No reactions, but they’re 1 person in 10.

We will see better and worse effects with all four of these early drapes. Dark Winter often looks comfortable in True Autumn if you ignore the yellow because they have a little muting and that type of warmth. Their eyes often connect with some Spring colour characteristics – why? Because they find and harmonize with the higher saturation. I think in terms of “skin better with gold than yellow, eyes better with higher saturation” rather than “Winter over Summer”. All four of these first drapes can be equally success and compromise, even the one we might pick as best.

Black wasn’t Lilia’s worst. It was the best in some ways, despite too much shadowing. Summer silver grey was non-existent, diminishing of her and diminished by her. The drapes have an effect on us and we have an effect right back on them. The skin was fogged in, cloudy, yellowish, almost polluted – what Winter colours do to Summer colours when held side-by-side. Winter’s white makes Summer’s white look yellowish even though it’s not, it’s slightly blue-pink-muted. Only black cleared the smog to perfect the skin tone, removed the jaundice of Spring and Autumn, and brought definition to the features. Too much definition? Certainly, but we adjust that later on in the process.

Those first drapes represent the extremes of that pure Tone. Very few people wear them perfectly. I haven’t seen a True Winter (or True Autumn) in forever. Yes, it is a compromise to choose black as the best, but at the first drapes, everything is a compromise unless you’re a True Season. Plus, our eyes hadn’t yet learned all they were going to. They had many more comparisons to absorb. The process adjusts and adjusts. That True Winter black is too blue-black and too shiny but there are many blacks, just like many blues, and so on. Dark Winter’s is a little warmer, a little duller. Extract some Winter blue, hold it in front of a diesel exhaust for a moment (meaning add a little Autumn gold), et voila! Dark Winter white extracts a little of True Winter’s blue and adds a drop of dark chocolate(Autumn gold).

I don’t suggest all black on anyone, even in your best black. It looks Babushka. It makes a person look older. Colour is younger without even trying. Head to toe black is outdated, an urban myth, an energy flat line. But Dark Winter can and should wear black. It is a very basic wardrobe colour on that Tone. Some Dark Winters feel that dark brown or dark blue are more modern than black to wear with other colours and I don’t disagree at all. With black, the pendulum went too far and it’s time to center it again.

On Dark Winter, it’s only black that I don’t love best when it’s shiny. Shine exaggerates. Light gets lighter, warm seems warmer, cold, colder. All the other colours in the Tone are equally good matte or shiny. My opinion only, Bright Winter is shinier than even Winter’s usual high shine. Dark Winter is the least super shiny.

That Green!

I take a lot of heat about this particular green. In the Masterpiece Drapes we show at the end of the session, there are 15 stunning colours for that Tone. About the green, every single woman says, “Are you sure?” She is uncomfortable and squirmy. She declares, “Ok, well, I’ll never own anything in this colour!” Some go out and it’s the first purchase they make (that’s usually the woman who’s given me the most heat over it )

I still only own it as a facing on the collar of a red vest. I don’t remember it from my own PCA. But what did I know? We analyzed my family of 5 and found 3 True Seasons and 2 Neutral Seasons that were the same. Meant nothing to me. We could have been 5 Bright Springs and that would have seemed normal.

In a year, a woman owns an item from about half of her palette. She is comfortable in her more perfect makeup colours, and she pulls out the palette and thinks, “Look at that colour. Why have I never seen it before? Why do I not own anything in that colour?” And the world of you opens up a tiny bit more.

The green is important in the wholeness of you. Every one of your colours is. We get caught up wearing our six best but no landscape is complete with only that. We need our earth and bark, our bitters and sweets, to present our totality. We are a balance of our light and shadow places. The circle of life, the equilibrium that must exist. Your colours can access parts of you that you can’t reach on the day of your colour analysis. You don’t know about these levels and regions of you yet. The colours are looking further down the road of you.

There is a tendency to see these final drapes as 15 turtlenecks. They are wherever you insert them. Your eyes will capture one button on a friend’s coat. A navy coat is far more interesting with a narrow green band sewn into to the cuff or lining, or the whole lining!, than it would be as a solid navy block. The person is communicated more completely, as the multilayered individuals that we are. How amazing is it when your clothing can be that accurate about you?

The One and Only Magic

Lilia remarked,

Today, I wore lipstick and I just saw my lips, no harmony, just biiiiiiig lip color! I went back home and indeed it was a true winter sample. But on the palette it was good and did harmonize well! Also my coat is a navy blue, not as dark as the one in the fan but with more saturation and clearer. Funny how yesterday with a deeper blue/and black, I got complimented each time crossing someone and today, nothing. Seems true winter colors on me are awful and it makes such a difference switching from dark winter to true winter!

No question, it is unbelievable how the little adjustments make a giant difference in how you look and feel once your eyes and heart are sensitized to it. If you can’t quite tell if a colour matches for saturation, look at it another way. Is it too blue? True Winter is where you may find most errors, but they’ll all be too blue.

How close your choices have to be to the swatches is something many women wonder about. Next post: 3 Weeks After Your Colour Analysis.

Undertone

I wonder if colour analysts agree that we don’t meet people and work at guessing their Season before the draping begins. But subsconsciously, we analyze every person we meet – and for me, on every aspect of our interaction. True Winter will wear makeup to the appointment. I’ve only met 5 or 6 and it has not failed. They will find a way. The Lights will say, “Sheer is never sheer enough.” Dark Winter will tell me fairly early on what they don’t like. Lilia doesn’t like any version of purple, from the iced violet that is usually a favorite, to any other version. Burgundy felt much better.

She said, “I showed my PCA pictures to some people, and each time it’s Ooooooh that purple is SO beautiful on you! Dammit! As I see it, it is really a big deal because it’s the undertone.”

Yes, approximately what I see as the undertone of Dark Winter. As you’ll read in my book, I don’t really know what undertone is as a biological layer. Nobody ever defines it in a way that makes sense to me so I do what I always do – I make up my own version till I hear a better one. The book (RTYNC over in the right column) shows the undertones as I see them today, though for some (like Bright Winter), there were a couple of choices (not Dark Winter).

I’ve read that undertone is the colour of our different bloods. That implies structural changes to hemoglobin, doesn’t it? It’s not implausible that it could change its molecular structure enough to alter its colour without impeding its binding with oxygen. Who’s going to fund the research to prove it? What drug could be developed based on the data? Undertone is a bit of an aura feeling I get, though I’d never put that in a book. It’s like the sum total of the glow of the individual. Does that imply that I can see it before the draping? No way. My eyes need to see the reactions of your skin just as much as yours do.

Lilia: So from what I understand, I chose the only colour I hate in the world to be my very number 1 good colour.

Ok, Number 1, it’s funny.

But on a psychological level, philosopher that I am, I’m sure we have an intuition for colour. I’m sure we deeply know and recognize what’s good or not. When I see my wardrobe I can find a lot of consistency with Dark Winter. Why would I have eliminated the best colour on me ?

Christine: Yes, it is funny. And, for me, fun. I love to take you as far as possible from the woman you arrived as. I want to open every window in your mind that you will allow so you can see yourself as you never have. Your choice of words is so good, “I chose the only colour I hate…”, because you did.

Many women wonder why they have aversions to their best colour, even on a larger scale of “Why would I eliminate my entire Season?” I don’t know but I’ve talked about it or around it a lot. We lose our path. We hear other voices than our own from when we were that little face up at the top. We believe compliments to be accurate when in fact, compliments are always always emotionally invested. We don’t love who or what we are. We need permission to be our real selves. So many things.

Lilia: Is there something to fear about being beautiful?

C: Yes, I think there is. One woman said she actually felt uncomfortable being noticed for this reason. Like separating herself from the safety net of her human tribe. Like having to live up to a newer, bigger, fuller, stronger level of herself. When I pray, I don’t ask for cash or prizes. I ask for the health, happiness, and safety of those I love. And I ask that I can be enough to achieve the things I want. Could that be it? Could we feel afraid that we’re not going to be enough for what this new face communicates?

Philosopher’s Beauty

Lilia: Yesterday, I was wearing good colours. I was complimented and I felt SO awkward. That was so unusual. I didn’t expect that effect. I thought that I already had good colours in my makeup and clothes base. I felt that I just needed a few changes to put all of them together and the difference wouldn’t be that much that anyone would notice except me.

ERROR. I discovered there is a “wow” effect. There is a magical effect. (that magical effect that I didn’t have with TW colours today). Now, I can now recognize it very well when “the magic” is here.

C: Those photos we took are striking in a visceral way. Only the exposure and saturation are raised a trace to show the true colours. Often with those last drapes and the makeup on, my heart rate speeds up. It’s very physiologic. The beauty of it makes me light-headed. My breathing patterns change because my brainwaves are altered. It’s not just me, I just have thought about it more.

Lilia: Colours are waves. Anybody who had already knows a little physics knows how waves and frequency work: when you add the same ones together and you have a signal amplified. Adding contrary ones gives a zero signal. I just realized today how obvious it is to link colour analysis with the theory of amplification in physics.

M: Synchrony >> Synergy = More than the sum of its parts. Interference theory.

You get better at seeing magic when you compare closer and farther over the next few weeks of learning your colours. The closer to the palette, the better. With every shopping expedition, you will compromise less.

Reading to Grow Your Soul

Lilia brought this into my world. You will feel closer to who you want to be and how you’re going to get there. From before The Secret took over our co-creation paradigms.

Click on The Game of Life and How to Play It.

If you re-read or remember any part of it because you never heard it said that way, then donate.

Use of Images

The images contained in this article are of private individuals, not celebrities. I consider the permission for me to use them as a privilege. It is my intention to protect these women’s privacy and generosity. If you use any of the photos without permission, I will seek legal counsel. I do not want to have to reduce the beauty and detail of the photographs with watermarks.

This is a learning site. Please do use my words with credit back to the web page you copied and pasted them from. If you mix up my meaning and get the message wrong, feel free to omit any reference back to me.

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Filed under: More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v, Winter Colours
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, colour analysis makeup colour, colour analysis skin tone, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Sci\ART Global, seasonal colour analysis clothes colours, Winter Colours

Contrast For 12 Seasons

October 26, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 14 Comments

Part 1

The video above is here at YouTube.

I need to refine something I said in Part 1. I’m grateful to anyone who steps forward and challenges me. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings, it’s next to impossible to do. I know you’re questioning my ideas, not me personally, so please do as Rachel did and respond honestly. We all learn something.

Rachel heard,

that A) all colors in the palette should work equally well for anyone in any combination. This, in and of itself was easy to understand, but when combined with concept B) if you don’t use the proper amount of contrast for your type (i.e. true winter is a high contrast type, so it needs high contrast combinations) you will be expressing less than your potential.

She responded, “Now, each one of these ideas works fine on its own, but when you put them together, I believe there is a contradiction going on.”

Good points, Rachel. I wasn’t clear in my thinking. How about this:

Part 2

Here at YouTube.

Rachel thought about it and asked,

Maybe what you meant was: stick with your type’s contrast level. If you are a season influenced by winter, that will be high. If you are a season influenced by summer, that will be low. Other seasons: medium. It works regardless of whether you are an exception to the seasonal stereotype. Have I got it now?

Me:

Yes, that’s what I meant – and that nobody needs to even think much about it except Winters.

I can’t think of any Season that couldn’t go to the highest extreme in their palette. Is it necessary to refine them? Only for the three Winters, not Bright Spring or Dark Autumn who also have some of Winter’s colour properties in them.

Also an important point: the size of the lightest and darkest doesn’t matter to establish the value contrast range. A band on a collar, a very shiny piece of platinum, a row of black navy buttons, white stitching…as long as the two extremes are present, the viewer will register them, the range is set, and the point is made. Adjust the size of the lightest and darkest blocks to the overall darkness level you want to achieve.

Would you sometimes need to heighten the contrast level offered by your Tone’s palette? I don’t think so. I don’t know of anyone within a Season who needs more contrast than their colours provide, regardless of the distance between hair and skin’s apparent darkness level. To do this, you have to lighten your lights, darken your darks, or both. We know that the 3 Colour Scales go up and down independent of each other (meaning you can have saturated colour that’s light or dark, warm or cool) but also that when you change one parameter, you influence the other two. To lighten your lights and/or darken your darks, what did you have to do? Add white? Yellow? Blue? In most cases, you’ll alter the colour right into one of the other 11 Tones and out of harmony with your natural colours.

Part 3

A few more questions from readers about True Winter.

Here at YouTube.

Who would wear very high value contrast (light to dark) and very high colour contrast (complementary colours, like the skirt and scarf mentioned earlier or similar shapes of nearly equal size)? A Bright Winter.

Like Dark Winter, she has a better white than True Winter’s so-white-it’s-blue. Retail reality probably means that she’ll just buy the TW white. She is the lightest of the 3 Winters and I find she is better in coal than the dark, dense pitch black of True and Dark Winter. The 3 Winters do go all the way to B&W but I see their pure unadulterated form best on True. Dark and Bright need to adulterate.

Important for me to be reminded that nothing applies to everybody. In our group on facebook, we talk about colour as it applies to different body types, even within the same Season. No two women will apply the same palette in the same way. Partly, that’s just taste. As the ladies pointed out, tapped in as they are to elegance and balance in body line as much as colour, (applying David Kibbe’s 13 Image Identities from his 1987 book, Metamorphosis), women of the same Season but different body line will combine from their palettes differently. As a Dramatic Classic Dark Winter, my colour contrasts are higher, with heavy use of neutral colours. A Theatrical Romantic Dark Winter might find that too stark and minimal. She would wear more colours together at once, using more of the mid-range colours together. She looks and moves in a more delicate and animated way than I do, and she looks right when she repeats that energy in how she dresses, applies makeup, and chooses hairstyles.

Everybody adjusts everything in the way that’s right for them. It’s easy once you know how. One afternoon, you and I together. You will be amazed at the new tools in your toolbox.

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Filed under: For All Seasons, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v, Winter Colours
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, colour analysis swatches, David Kibbe, hair colour analysis, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Winter Colours

How To Match Foundation

October 20, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 12 Comments

Women bring their own foundation to their colour analysis. One in eight has the best colour choice possible for her skin. Seems apt to talk about it.

The Wrong Hair Colour Merry Go Round

If the hair is too warm the skin is too yellow. You will be matched to too warm a foundation. You will look warmer than you are. Your hair colourist will keep warming up your hair, not noticing that your face is getting yellower, redder, and oilier looking. You will keep applying more makeup. Clothing colours will get more and more out of the loop because you feel something is off and can’t tell what it is. Coping with picking right clothing feels overwhelming.

Solution: Wear your correct clothing colours to go shopping. Tie back your hair with a correct coloured scarf till it can be fixed.

Photo: awestlan

The Try-To-Match-My-Eyes Merry Go Round

We do not know our true eye colour simply by looking at it. Uploading the eye photo and extracting the colours can be surprisingly revealing. Likely not one of them will be what you think your eye colour is. The problem here is that you’ve taken your eye out of its context, meaning its surrounding colours in your face and hair. With colour, context is a deal breaker.

Many Light Summers try to match their eye colour in clothing. They can feel that their eye is more than just blue. They can feel that their eye is hazy, not Caribbean ocean clear. They gravitate to Autumn’s teal. That’s more than blue and hazy in its own muted way. On them, this colour looks bigger and darker than they are, like wearing curtains, so they amp up the makeup to match the teal. The young, fresh, sexy appeal of Light Summer evaporates. Dark makeup on light-coloured faces drags everything downward. On everyone, it’s light colour that lifts. Foundation then becomes too warm, dark, and heavy in texture. And on it goes.

Given comparisons, turns out they were close. Their true eye colour is Light Summer turquoise. Not only blue. Hazy. She was so close but got the exact type and amount of heat wrong. How could anybody know unless they were tested in a controlled and correct environment? The apparent similarities are definitely there, but oh what a difference those last little adjustments make in the final image. 10 years on your face or a little more than that.

Often, the Light Summer/Soft Autumn divide isn’t a decision I make till fairly late in the PCA process. Light Summer often wears Soft Autumn warmth in hair, which looks like a heavy hat, like wearing a crochet tea cozy on a shorter-looking person.

Solution: Have thy colours analyzed and take control of thine own appearance. Your Colour Book has your eye colours exactly, all of them.

Photo: plom

Wait a minute here. Did I just say that your 12 Tone Colour Book based on the 12 colour collections derived by Sci\ART founder Kathryn Kalisz contains every single one of your colours in every person all the time?? Surely not. You’re a golden eyed, medium brown haired Bright Winter. Show me those in the Bright Winter swatches. As time goes on and I see more, literally and figuratively, I have come to this:

Digression: Every One Of Everyone’s Colours Are In Kathryn’s 12 Tones

I draped a True Winter man. In the Luxury Drapes (Final Drapes), his wife and I could easily see blue and purple colours within the gray of his beard. We have all seen hair so black it’s blue. The brown haired Bright Winter has unique, special hair very unlike Summer medium brown. Someone might call them both medium brown or ash brown. If the hair is on your head and you’ve never stood beside a Summer medium brown and compared, you might think it’s the same. But it’s not. Put Summer’s medium ash brown hair colour on this head and she looks nearer to death.

I have learned the lesson that colours are never what I think they are. What if the swatch books developed by Kathryn, with every colour fully consistent with every other in all 3 dimensions of colour, were 100% right? About every colour in every person, skin, hair, eyes, teeth, veins, the whole deal.

What if we are wrong thinking that a warm brown eye in True Winter is an anomaly? How audacious of us to know better than Nature and a genetic code we barely comprehend. From the track record of getting things right, Nature is out far ahead of humans. She deserves the benefit of the doubt. What if it’s perfectly rational and reasonable that a Light Summer have brown eyes or red hair, even if we can’t see those colours per se in the swatch book? Humans couldn’t explain rain or reproduction not so long ago.

Nature gets everyone 100% consistent. Every feature. No exceptions. Our entire biology is supervised by one genetic code. Every one of your original pigments are in the swatch books. I’d even extend this to include apparent surface colour of the skin, meaning the colour foundation we buy, whether you appear yellow, orange, brown, pink, or white. It’s the mixtures and how they come out in your body that may not be in the swatch books. But I would bet that you could sit down with your swatches as pots of paint and create all your colours just as they appear on your body from those pots of paint. Lots of ways to make the brown of an amber Winter eye. Brown needs three primary colours and Winter has all three. How our eye looks as an amalgamated colour and what pigments participated in the first place are not the same, I’m certain of it.

You literally have thousands of colours in you that could have been in the personal colour analyzed palettes. The Winter amber eye is not like the Soft Autumn or Bright Spring one. Test them with comparisons. I can guarantee that they won’t be identical.

You know that I write this website because I’m trying to figure it all out too. Convince me I’m wrong. Please. All I want is to understand the truth.

Photo: Xtyn24

The “Why that just disappears into your neck” Merry Go Round

Don’t assume the salesperson knows how to match foundation correctly regardless of how slick he/she is about it. She may have gone to a weekend course. She does want you to look great but she has pressures of her own from higher up. She only has her product line to pick from. Mall lighting is the cheapest they can install.

Holding plastic swatches to your face is not enough. Stripes on arms and hands is useless. One stripe on the face and it’s a match – so not good enough. Maybe holding up plastic discs to your skin is acceptable at the drugstore if there are no samples, but at the department store? The nuances of the pigment mixture and the chemistry of our body are just the beginning of the shortcomings of coloured plastic.

Our visual system is comparison based. This is a given. It is how human brain structure is organized. There is no point in fighting it. If you have a hair or eyelash stuck in your mascara wand, do you hold it up against a black wall or a white wall to see it?

You need 4 or 5 stripes on the side of the cheek and jaw. Wait 60 seconds for it to fuse with the skin if it’s going to. Look at it for another 120 seconds and don’t make decisions. Only notice that the longer you look, the more different the stripes become from each other. Now pick the one that’s hardest to see. Can’t tell? Smear them out more on the face.

If you can’t tell if a blouse is your green, go around the store and pick out a few green things. No need for them to be your Season. The hot minute your eye is given a range, it gets busy because it knows how to do comparison. It will position the colour in your perception quite accurately. Staring and thinking and struggling will only take you so far. It’s like forcing a memory. It just goes further away. Give your eye what it wants: comparison. Then your brain says “This, I get. Now I see what you want from me. OK, no problem. Here you go. Here’s your answer.”

Solution: Insist on several stripes. Do the waiting of 60 and 120 seconds. Remove the obvious Nos. Start again. Ask for samples. If it feels like a selling game authority conflict for a single second, run to your nearest Sephora store.

Photo: bardoin

Who’s zooming who?

The company is not doing you a favour by offering samples. The markup on this stuff is a zillion million %. The company’s bosses live in castles. Do not be too grateful.

Think of it like this. You are doing the company a favour by offering them a moment of your attention out of your day. You are doing them an even bigger favour by giving them the willingness to bring their product into your home and to apply it on your body and offer it yet more attention.

They’re going to recover the cost of those samples in their first next sale.

Ending On A Happy Note

I have a Dark Winter soul sister who brought her gorgeous daughter to learn what she could look like by choosing certain colours over others. When Cheryl (whom you’ve met before in You Know Your Colours – Now What?) and I met, I felt this reciprocity thing, like I was talking to myself (we do not look alike). A common Dark Winter feeling is “I can tell it like it is or I can waste everyone’s time being all careful.” She and I share it in spades. We laugh about it. She brought me this pack of gum as a gift.

It was a week ago and I’m still laughing. When I walk the dog, I hope the neighbours don’t drive past and see this lone woman laughing all by herself. I’m typing and laughing. I love my friend, Cheryl.

(The photo is linked to a site with a lot of other funny stuff. You too could be sitting alone in traffic ROTFL.)

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Filed under: For All Seasons, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, color analysis eye color, colour analysis cosmetic colours, colour analysis makeup colour, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Sci\ART Global, seasonal colour analysis makeup colour

The Best Skin Finish on Autumn Colouring

September 30, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 28 Comments

Autumn light is long, low, and less. Like in the late afternoon. Like the difference between indirect lighting and a 100W bulb in the ceiling. The effect is to emphasize shape and depth, which looks rich and warm. The feeling is safe, cozy, secure, all the reasons why we don’t put fluorescent overhead lights in our homes.

On a face, shape and depth take on a pronounced three-dimensionality – hills and valleys. Up close, it looks an uneven surface, a grainy quality – lines, freckles, fullness in hair, thicker looking skin, a feeling of plush and pile. From a distance, this varied natural landscape depicted in such rich, low intensity tones has great resonance.

We’re going to use the quality of light and shiny colour to advance and matte and darker colour to recede. This will generate movement backwards and forwards to feel like depth and texture. We don’t want the face to look grainy, we’ll leave that to fabric, but we do want the appearance of profound strength. It looks deep, synonymous with complex, wise, and penetrating. I think our brains are much more plastic with synonyms than we know and worth unleashing. It’s amazing what flutters up and out of the soup.

Remember the What and Where subdivisions of our visual system? We talked about them in the Soft Dramatic Soft Summer, a few articles back. The Where system, although not colour perceptive, is extremely sensitive to value contrast changes. It decides depth. We might only be able to recall about 7 or 8 grayscale levels but by putting them side by side, our Where system can discern a multitude of levels. On an Autumn face, we’ll put darker colour on the skin to make the lighter areas seem lighter. As with shading in drawing, or chiaroscuro, this models the illusion of depth and volume.

We know that wearing many layers, along with looking warm and creative on Autumn, looks 3D. Here’s another way for attire: wear repeating patterns. Can be geometric (plaid), natural (leaves, paisley), or brushstrokes (Impressionist painting style). With two incoming images, one for each eye, the brain has to decided which goes with L and R. When the images are multiple and repeating, some get switched. Makes us think we see depth.

At one far end of Autumn’s influence on natural colouring, the Season we call Soft Summer in 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis is mostly coloured with the Summer paintbrush, resulting in a moody blues feeling. Autumn’s gold effects are beginning to co-exist, like the hologram of the previous articles on the Soft Dramatic Soft Summer Part 1 and Part 2.

At the other end, where Autumn also plays a smaller part, Dark Winter is a cool-based (Winter-based) group, like Soft Summer. Here though, the advance/recede is superseded by Winter’s high contrast, making depth and texture of lesser prominence.

What about the 3 Autumns?

Soft,

Photo: ColinBroug

True,

Photo: boogy_man

and Dark, interesting how much temperature changes with light, darks are darker below and you’re looking for a sweater.

Photo: johnnyberg

how does these types of natural colours amplify the many gifts they were given?

Autumn is seldom smooth to look at. This is not a My Little Pony world. Spring’s wide-eyed-wonder is not the rhythm of this drum. Autumn is rope, not ribbon. Autumn is not dewy or creamy or anything that reminds us of smooth. Dewy spices, dewy chocolate, dewy rust, they don’t make sense. Expressed in Autumn’s colours, dewy somehow feels slimy. Dewy curry. I mean, I ask you.

Autumn is hot, dry, velvety thick, and metallic. You could say a rose petal is velvety, yes, but it’s not dry. Worth taking a minute to think about the difference between shine, frost, and metallic. To me, shine is smooth and wet and belongs on Spring. The difference between frost and metallic may be semantic or may be about the colour they’re rendered in, where frost is cold and icy colour, so Winter, and metallic is hotter and medium to dark, as copper, gold, bronze, and their variations. So what’s shimmer? Good Q. Is it very finely ground frost or metallic?

So wear bronzer! Like with Spring, I use the same product on the 3 Autumns, mostly because I travel and want to minimize. Spring’s was a beige based peach-gold. Autumn’s is baked earth, dark tan, a more orange-brown type of gold and a darker colour. I like Rimmel SunBronze 02 as a good colour that’s not very shimmery.

On Soft Autumn, I apply it much the same way, in a 3 shape from temple>just below cheek and side of face>under jaw, but using less than on True Autumn. On True, I use more and let it be both heat and contour. Dark Autumn’s makeup colours are quite saturated and strong and with her Winter input, she is more contrasting than the other two groups. If her hair is warm, I often skip the bronzer and let her makeup stand alone and allow a warmer hair-cooler skin event, always visually intriguing on Neutral Seasons. If her hair is cooler, I might apply the bronzer. You need to know that eleablake did an outstanding job of creating cosmetics for the 12 Sci\ART palettes and their bronzers (12 different skin-accurate shades!) are IMO the best around.

The sentence we began with said it. Autumn is about low lighting. On a face, that means contour! It’s huge here. Take the 3D in you and make it more. Shadows go dark in Autumn fabrics, so should they on the faces. Where Spring uplighted, Autumn shades and contours the valleys. Would I do both? No. It would start looking bizarre.

You can use bronzer or a slightly darker powder than your perfect match. It’s interesting that you can go quite a bit darker than you think and create bold shadow emphasis and once blended, it still looks normal. Apply it at the temples, sides of nose, hollow of cheeks, under chin. There’s a good image here from the excellent book, Looking Younger by Robt. Jones, and below the contour image halfway down is a link to another article in the same blog that shows you Aucoin’s version. Create the near and far that is so much part of Autumn scenes.

Oh, so good. Rich colour, warm colour, strong accessories, gorgeous lips, sensual features, fantastic bones, amazing hair.

Debra Messing Pictures

But when Autumn makes up like a Spring and adds Winter apparel,

Debra Messing Pictures

Coating the entire surface of a brick wall in shine doesn’t help define its surface. If anything, it neutralizes or trivializes it. Besides, the surface isn’t by Nature very reflective of light or full of highlights, so coating the surface with it is just strange, like a trick that you don’t quite get how it works or what you were supposed to see or understand.

However, a dot of shine here and there over velvet matte layers using deep, rich colours brings more dimensionality. Keep the face suede, which makes sense. Add deliberate shine over the iris. Dimension is created better by deliberate placement of metallic over matte products. It is not present at all in entire shiny eyelids, cheeks, or lips.

Best JLO pic I know – feline, exotic. This photo makes me choke up. My jaw drops. Does straight white girl hair and powdery puff makeup look better? No. Does soap opera hair and safe peachy makeup look better? No.

Anyone’s browser having issues opening the JLo photo? Try copying and pasting this link into the address bar:

http://famous-wallpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Jennifer-Lopez14.jpg

Let’s take that makeup to the next level and compare them.

What’s the same

- eyebrows definition without darkness or high contrast

- a dark powder from the inner corner of the brow down the sides of the nose just on the edges of the midline

- eyeliner around the entire eyes, angled down with the eye at the inner corner and up with the eye at the outer corner

- flesh tones – although when we’re in our correct makeup, we’re all wearing flesh tones, but here the traditional flesh colours (beige, brown, orange, camel, gold) are superlative

-squint and look at Jennifer; the bronzer does around the face on the outside in the same way as on many of the cats

- the mouth has a dark liner, medium colour, light center gloss, using layering to create a 3D effect just like Autumn does with clothing colours

- everything about the hair is rave-worthy; Autumn is not particularly light though they’re often dyed that way; the highlight is minimal, just enough red to give us the idea without an entire redhead that can take over our awareness so we miss out on the amazement of the total image; this hair is very much about lowlights just like the rest of the Autumn ambience; I see few natural redheads among Autumns and though they wear it well, I find this looks more dimensional, interesting, and authentic

- her entire face is velvet, not sparkle

- coppered, tawny, metallic hints, hot hot

Never underestimate the power of jewelry near the face to do what makeup can’t reasonably do. Wear it near your face. Make it textured as in bumpy, irregular. Use clothing the same way, with all over shine that doesn’t work on a face or just metallic threads, keeping it layered and uneven, as raw linen.

Use matte eye shadow to look like velvet. The feeling should be like pouring thick cocoa. Remember the movie Chocolat (Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp, rent it, it’s beyond great), that hot, dark liquid that was going to heat you up in every sense of the word? Go for that eye shadow look.

And you knew there were flecks of hot chili in that elixir? Wear a dot of shiny antique gold above the iris, not all over the lid which is less dimensional – like if you put concealer on the light skin and on the shadows, you’d cancel the effect of the product to even out the shadows.

Do not cover up freckles ever. They’re splendid at every age. Believable beauty is always better. They look textured and young.

Smoky eyes are good. Run your darker eye shadow over the eyeliner to fill in the holes, make it look less linear, and smoke it up.

The Skin Textures

We did Springs previously. That went as:

Bright Spring = glass

True Spring = persimmon

Light Spring = petal

So the Autumns could be:

Soft Autumn = suede

True Autumn = velvet

Dark Autumn = leather

3 Autumn Seasons

True Autumn:

Add heat all over the face, you might as well, the skin is that way already. The True Warms look great with bronzer applied as we have heard, ‘where the sun lights the face’. On the Autumn Warm Neutrals (Soft and Dark Autumn), a little restraint may be better. On the Autumn-influenced Cool Neutrals (Soft Summer and Dark Winter), bronzer looks better to me when confined to contour.

Revlon Abstract Orange lipstick is interesting. It’s red and brown and orange, layered and very dimensional. Super good with Arbonne Sunset blush. Made to be together.

Metallic eye liner could be great here in a colour that’s not too dark, just like real gold. Autumn looks best when it’s real, not plastic, synthetic, or artificial. Glinting added to very dark colour sets up too much contrast and goes with Winter.

Soft Autumn:

We’ve shifted from the more delicate muted Summers to Autumn’s stronger muted colours and texture, to skin like suede. Colour is rich, earthy, but retains some Summer grace. Look at Arbonne blush in Dusty Rose and compare it to their Blossom, a real beauty for Light Spring. Arbonne eyeshadow in Smoke and Sand are great Soft Autumn colours as well.

Eyeliners that you thought would be good often go on looking too dark and/or too hot (orange or red). This is my most challenging colouring by far for finding eyeliner I like. At Shoppers in Canada, Essence liner in Teddy costs a dollar. It will be great on many Softs and some Trues. Using eyeshadow as liner is wonderful on the Soft Seasons to avoid harsh lines, enhance the low contrast effect further, give you so much more choice of colours, and let you enjoy some of your darker tones in cosmetics.

Take care with metallic eye liners that they’re not the only thing people see, especially if eye colour is light. Imagine them in the Harvest Field photo above, they’d feel very hard. With the essential muting of the Soft Seasons, iridescence and luster are beautiful, real, and enough. If you’re doing metallics, don’t go dark.

Dark Autumn:

Nobody looks as right in leather, like those bomber style jackets, shearling lined, metallic effects in snaps and zippers. If Soft Autumn is Indiana Jones, then this is the Marlboro Guy. It’s a stronger, heavier, thicker look. Stronger and more defined eye liner works, though still can be very smoked. True Autumn is not high contrast, so lips and brows are more part of the face. On Messing above, the makeup is great, the glasses are getting dark for a True (no idea what Season she is) but they don’t really compete with her face. They’re interesting, smart, explore the edge with confidence, and say “I know what looks good on me.”, which is a fairly unique thing to be able to say.

Use more drama in contrast (Winter coming in) with eye shadow as a darker outer corner, defined brows, and a mouth that stands out from the face. Lips can still be flesh tones, which looks too erased/flat/tired/dead/old/pick your word on Winter, but these are deeper than the True or Soft Autumn flesh tones. They are darker, redder, maybe a little burnt looking by comparison. (I appreciate that in our ideal makeup colours, we’re all wearing flesh tones but I mean it here as the browned colours.) Givenchy gloss in Delectable Brown could be great on Soft Autumn, while the Darks might look at Sensual Chocolate, here at Sephora.

Ideal hair colour for the 3 Autumns is the eye colour or somewhere among the eye colours, an effect very few other Seasons accomplish so interestingly. Gingerbread brown eyes are truly visually compelling. These are the warm dark browns from chestnut to coffee bean. Red works because Autumn’s quite controlled red is increasing towards unleashed when Winter appears full on.

No question, to balance higher saturation, more red in the colouring, and darkness, you need more cheek colour to look vibrant, healthy, and fantastic. Look at Arbonne blush in Merlot.

And of course, lips need presence, especially once these faces reach full power in their 40s and onward. Both Dark Seasons can struggle with all the too-dark-for-daytime choices. As a Neutral Season, Dark Autumn has a warmer and cooler version of all its colours, including red. Oh, to find that saturated-but-not-too-much, red-that-isn’t-rust, warmer-than-cool, doesn’t-look-black-at-night, I-could-go-on…Could it be Arbonne Jam? Try it and tell us.

(For those who live in North America, you may have an Arbonne rep you can Google. My newest great friend, Ramona Robinson, is based in London, Ontario. She can sample and send product anywhere on the continent. There’s no hard sell here. Ramona is a woman who sincerely wants to empower women with better information, health, and awareness in all aspects of their lives. Contact at rjrobinson@rogers.com. Tell her I said Hi.)

Recap: The skin is contoured, setting up lowlights. The features are defined from the skin by colours that are warm and velvety and the judicious use of metallic glints.

This was Spring: The skin is dewy, setting up highlights. The features are fresh, lively, distinguished from the skin by being very colourful, moist, and vibrant.

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Filed under: Autumn Colours, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, Autumn Colours, color analysis eye color, colour analysis cosmetic colours, colour analysis makeup colour, eyeliner, hair colour analysis, lipstick, personal colour analysis, seasonal colour analysis makeup colour

Black and White for 12 Seasons

June 26, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 17 Comments

A reminder that I will not be shipping the book, Return to Your Natural Colours, in the month of July. If you’re in the US, Kerry at Indigo Tones may have some copies. Otherwise, best to wait till August.

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Women often say that they want to wear bright, vibrant colour. On most types of colouring, that kind of colour is the only thing others will see, hear, feel, or remember. The right lipstick for your natural colouring will look plenty bright to the rest of us who look at you. We don’t look at your clothes on a hanger or your makeup on a sheet of paper. Your right colours in hair and clothes look just as vibrant ON YOU as truly vivid colours look on those women where they have a natural presence.

Only the True Winter wears pitch black and stark white and looks complete. Pure black and pure white do appear in all 3 Winter palettes, but my eye prefers the Dark and Bright in B&W if they also wear one of their ‘colour colours’ as an accent somewhere in the ensemble. They could do fine in B&W alone if their natural colouring is very close to that of TW. As a Dark Winter, I don’t wear B&W. I can’t meet the coldness and the sharpness.

Not everyone can be invited to every party and nor would they want to be. Would we rather stand in a room full of strangers or friends? There will be some combination of near white and near black that will look like B&W on you. That’s the whole thing, to get the optical effect of B&W on your natural colouring. Wearing pitch black when it isn’t in the natural colouring looks like wearing sweat pants because it can’t find focus or definition. The viewer has an impression of a bulky blur. Besides, it matches nothing else in the wardrobe.

Stores won’t supply 12 great ‘blacks’. Just practicing the basics for that True Season trio will help more than you can imagine.

Look at the graphics below in natural lighting without sunlight. Play with the tilt of your screen to see the colour’s versions. Don’t go shopping from these colours. Use your Colour Book of personal swatches.

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Spring True: Buttery cream and a grey so yellow it looks brown. At this degree of skin warmth, pure white doesn’t look any better than on the Autumns.

Light: Raw cauliflower white. There is a Brazil nut brown that goes darker than the grey above, but I’m trying to keep obvious ROYGBIV out of this.

Bright: As good as it is on Bright Winter, absolute white is far from the best on this colouring, causing the skin tone and eyes to grey and fatigue, especially worn in a large block. White looks good and adds crispness if the area is kept small and mixed in with warmer, brighter colour to keep the eye moving. The better white is very light, a white that is greyed and yellowed at once. The ‘black’ isn’t black but a dark, clean grey, not earthy or blued. Bright Spring can often manage dense black in small areas, not right under the chin.

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Summer True: This trip through Photoshop taught me that if I pick the undertone of the skin (see them in RTYNC, the book pictured in the right column, they’re not on this website), adjust the saturation as appropriate for the Season, and select the lightest colour possible, I get the Season’s ‘white’. True Summer’s began as clean cobalt type blue and moderate saturation. Many with darker hair tones could go darker in their ‘black’ above, but not too dark. The colour above hopefully represents everyone, knowing that darker tones are available once colour pigments like blue, green, red, and so on, are added.

Light: Vanilla ice cream. There is a grey that goes darker than what’s shown but it is more blue-looking than this grey.

Soft: Campfire smoke. And smoke blocks light, so the whole palette is a little smoked, muting colours. Smoke also reduces transparency. Earrings (like these) made of glass smoked with your palette colours are simply beautiful. Medium pewter makes a great black.

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Autumn True: What applies to pants and boots applies to anything where we default to black. Diorshow Brown mascara is a very close match.

Soft: Light putty. This Season also has medium and dark putty. Compared to Spring, greys are more orange and somehow greener – which makes sense since green is made of blue (Summer) and yellow (added as gold since this is Autumn). Summer’s greys are bluer.

Dark: like the pages of an airport paperback. Books aren’t truly B&W, that’s too hard to read, especially on a screen where it seems to twinkle. But our brains, that are adjusting colours all day long and telling us they’re white, do the same to the pages of a book.

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Winter True: Snow so white, it looks a little blue next to any other white. And black.

Bright: Polar bear, maybe with the slightest yellow peach tint… polar bear at sunrise. Adding that my eye loves Bright Winter in crisp white even better than black. For me, these are the ultimate wearers of pure white. And black.

Dark: One drop of tar fell in the white paint pot, but barely a trace. You don’t know it’s not pure white unless you hold it next to pure white and even then you’re not sure. And like all Winter’s icy lights, this is mostly white with barely a trace of pigment, nowhere near as softly grayed as Summer’s white. So, white can be icy or pastel too, an interesting concept to roll around. Enough of my talking, think about the center of an Oreo cookie before you separate the halves and light shines on the white. Look at Merle Norman’s Ice, best eyeshadow highlight for the Season that I know and we can move on.

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Like an alphabet that makes sense out of sounds so they can be used and shared, the 12 Season (12 Tone) Sci\ART palettes make sense out of colours. Then, it’s up to you to write the poem, the song, the story. It’s up to you to make your house a home.

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Filed under: For All Seasons, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, Autumn Colours, colour analysis skin tone, colour analysis swatches, personal colour analysis, Sci\ART Global, Spring Colours, Summer Colours, Winter Colours

Are Seasons The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems?

June 22, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments

Rephrase

Seasons are NOT The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems

Many are asking this Q in different formats lately. Here’s my take on the A.

What should I do if System A said I was Dark Autumn and System B says Soft Autumn?

Pick the one you trust the most because they’re not the same. Choosing is easier if you could see what the analyst was seeing. It’s much harder, maybe impossible, if you couldn’t. This is partly why we so much want YOU to see it.

If you decide that System A resonated best with you, then stick with their products. Whatever they call the Season, if those were your most harmonizing colours, then stay with those colours. Buy their swatch book and hope it repeats the colours of their drapes very faithfully. Don’t be analyzed by A’s drapes and buy B’s Colour Book, it may not contain the same colours. In fact, you should assume that it will not contain the same colours. Stay with A’s makeup recommendations too because those are calibrated to go with the palettes of the individual system.

I cannot over-emphasize to what degree the whole result and outcome and every decision you make thereafter hinges on those drapes, and they in turn on how exact the palettes themselves are.

Neither analysts nor clients can succeed with drapes from one system, the swatches from another, and the makeup recs from a third. Every little difference gets magnified to become big differences when you’re choosing lipstick.

What are the differences between PCA Systems’ drapes? How can one company’s True Autumn be so different from another’s?

I don’t know what other PCA companies’ drapes look like. I’ve never seen their original colours other than in books. If you can be analyzed in one system and can get the colours from another system to fit into the result, you’re lucky. Some can, usually in the True Seasons, but for some it’s just a colour-by-colour minefield.

What if System Y’s Light Summer drapes, or even just a few of their Light Summer drapes, were actually found in Sci\ART’s Light Spring collection? I think this is probably what really happens. Not my place to say wrong or right, but if you try the makeup for Light Summer suggested by Sci\ART analysts, you will feel uncomfortable.

Why the differences in the first place? Because it happens in every industry that’s unregulated and many that are. Initial philosophies, theoretical basis of the colour groups, desired endpoint, working materials, all different.

Lorraine, who asks the Q below, has always felt close to Soft Summer but couldn’t get the Season to fit just right. She lives too far from a Sci\ART analyst and has done some figuring on her own. She says,

‘I was really lost…until I read the theory of 16 Seasons. I recognized myself in the season ”soft deep winter” on this website (http://www.coloressential.net/2012/04/and-12-seasons-became-16.html) They say that Ginnifer Goodwin is soft deep winter and I find the comparison with Penelope Cruz quite good. [My friend] and me (dark winter VS soft dark winter) can wear the same colors, with some exceptions.”

Those Colour Books were most interesting on that website. They look similar to True Colour Australia’s in design, and it’s a very usable design, but the colours are not the same for the closest Sci/ART 12 Tone (or TCA 12 Tone) I can match it to, which is Light Spring. I couldn’t enlarge the photo so maybe I’m way off. Here is a perfect example of being draped or otherwise identified as Light Spring but another company’s Light Spring swatches won’t be the same, leaving you questioning and dissatisfied when it’s time to use them.

And always, the question remains of what one analyst sees as harmony, or you at your best, while another analyst wouldn’t feel the same way. One person might see Natalie Portman as a Dark Winter, while another feels that palette is too cool and has reasons to prefer Dark Autumn. I’m undecided about her Season.

To Lorraine’s Season conclusion: Very colour perceptive, this is a woman who is probably seeing the right things as much as anyone could. It’s hard to analyze yourself, like giving yourself a really complicated haircut. Yes, a darker Soft Summer could be a ‘Soft Deep Winter’ in some ways. The Seasons share many similarities. Both begin fully cool and add one step of Autumn’s type of heat. The upper end of S Su’s darkness could be the lower end of DW’s.

Now what? How is the palette called “Soft Deep Winter” assembled? Does it borrow from S Su and DW? And whose version of S Su and DW is it borrowing from, because they’re not all the same? Does it use Color Me Beautiful’s Deep Winter and just drop the saturation of every colour? Does it offer up new colours that didn’t exist before in either parent palette, which that would really be the best, so that each Season is distinct from every other? Are the palettes even based in deliberate scientific measurement of colour dimension for all 760 colours (hue, value, saturation (chroma)) or were they eyeballed from a Pantone catalog?

I don’t know the answers here. These are just the Q the consumer should ask herself. Let’s be real and admit that the consumer can’t be expected to sort through all the dialects out there. I’m just trying to move the logic one step further, beyond the theory and into the store. For most consumers, the colour theory discussions sounds like PCA companies are saying the same thing using different words. Sometimes we are, sometimes not at all. The comparison is as hard to judge correctly as it is to know what’s going on behind the scenes in two different hospitals.

The point is this: will the consumer be enabled to make right or wrong shopping decisions? That’s the only layer of data she wants or needs.

There is room for everyone. What I’m saying is to pick a company and stick with it. Don’t put Dell parts in your iMac and wonder why it won’t turn on.

And, Lorraine also said,

I know you are a ‘deep winter’, have you ever thought about being a ‘soft winter deep’? I always thought your colors seemed a little bit hard on you (but very good too… a little like me in dark winter colors) so I don’t know, I am simply asking !

And I agree with that too and think Lorraine has a very discerning eye. I also have big respect for her, that she felt she could voice that truth, taking the risk that she’d be held emotionally accountable. We train others in how to treat us, what lines not to cross, where to tiptoe, the result being that few of us ever hear other people’s truths about us – so I thank you, Lorraine, for taking the risk.

Darkness matters most to Dark Winter, while the saturation and heat of each colour can move up or down a little. (What’s a little supposed to mean? It means all 3 colour dimensions for each Season are fairly tight before the harmony and flattering effect you want is compromised or lost, not just the most important dimension (TMIT). So you need to hope that whoever put your colours together knew about a little.) Many colours between 760 colours of the 12 Tones/Seasons appear very close when compared side by side. What makes them finally belong among the others of their Season IS the others, the harmony they achieve together. Did every colour from another system’s swatch books get measured in terms of its value, hue, and chroma? I have no idea. I know that Sci\ART’s did so I stick with it.

Lorraine’s point is very valid. I own 3 colour Books from 3 companies, to fine tune my knowledge of my colour space. I don’t look as dark as Penelope Cruz. But I can make S Su lipsticks disappear entirely to gray unless the colour is at the high end of S Su darkness (since S Su sat must stay low) and at the low end of DW saturation, as Mercier Dry Rose. It’s not the name of the Season that matters, it’s the colours in it. Lorraine is right that I look too sharp in over-saturated colour. I wear a layer of Lauder Double Wear Mauve under lipstick to keep it in place, and lighten and desaturate the colour a little, without getting anywhere near S Su.

You know, maybe wearing too much colour is my obnoxious side wanting to be heard, and believe me when I tell you that it exists. I don’t know what I look like any more than anyone else does. I don’t look at me all day long, others do. I probably dress beyond my best saturation edge now and again. I go beyond my truth borders in what I say at times too. If I can’t decide what I think about something, I’ll try saying it and feeling whether I can align with it. Makes me say quite a lot that I don’t believe, a lot that exaggerates my beliefs, makes me sound more absolute and abrupt than I am. So, overdoing it with colour is a way of dressing that feels very congruent with how I behave.

I’m not really looking for perfect hair colour. I’m looking for how to explore my highest self and potential and translate that into the language of appearance, a powerful and universal human communication about a whole lot besides wealth. All that happens outside of us is happening inside. If wearing different jewelry makes me behave differently, then can I use that to approach the person I want to be? Yes, as it turns out, I can. That’s change from the outside in. Change can also happen from the inside out – which is why I barely advertise my services. The woman whose colours I love to uncover finds me when the time is right. She is at a crossroads in her life. She knows the past doesn’t hold her answers and she is receptive to the many wheres and hows through which her true path might find her. I get clients that I adore and that teach me more than I could return. That I have had to grow into my clients has been a privilege I cannot describe.

The world is simply our mirror. What we see is exactly what we are sending out there. I use colour to speak truth. Not everyone will or should or cares.

Under the article about the very lovely swatch plumes at Indigo Tones, Denise asks how I shop with more than one Colour Book.

This is a woman by woman decision. Some will find it a confusion. Without a doubt, you have to begin with one accurate Book. You might use only that one for the first year, like I did. Which one to buy is a conversation to have with your analyst. If using your palette best for you means sticking tight to one set of colours forever, then that is exactly what you should do. I don’t want you wearing less colour, safe colour, unflattering colour, or wasting money for one more moment of your life.

I went shopping. Lo and behold, stores didn’t hand me my 60 colours. Well, after a PCA, the freedom of knowing what to never look at again is nearly euphoric. You are in the mood to shop! So, you buy things that look about right because, by all the gods, you’re not going home empty-handed. What you pay attention to gets bigger (like black on light people ) The colours of our world suddenly exist in relation to you, a feeling you go after like a high. It takes on three dimensions, maybe four, maybe more. You want to be in stores and play with your new skill set.

But stores, ay…vendors are suspicious and negative, and not without some reason to be. Women get so literal about the interpretation. This is partly why it fell apart back in the 80s. I don’t want that to happen again so we need a new way for consumers to use their palettes, not meaning allowing wrong colour but simply knowing when it’s safe to relax a little. Also, if you know me from visiting here, I’m very rigid about technique and standards for identifying colours, more so every day, because I’ve seen it go wrong too many times and how easily that can happen. On the other hand, I work at being really fluid and plastic about how we use colour in our lives.

My Colour Books are three interpretations of Kathryn Kalisz’s original Sci\ART 12 Tone palettes, some near identical and some quite arguably outside the borders – which helped define the borders. That exercise has value to a colour analyst, but not necessarily to a consumer. Most people have no reason to own wrong colours. If you want to become a student of colour analysis, exposing yourself to many opinions, inside and outside Sci\ART, is necessary to know where your position will be and why.

The various Books open my mind to new voices about myself. The more voices we listen to, the better our understanding of any topic. Not saying I purchase every colour in every Book, not at all. After a year with the original Sci\ART palette, I knew the limits of my colour dimensions (hue, value, chroma) and you will too. You really will feel your way into it, as many women will attest. You’ll also define and refine your personal taste. Doors upon doors will open.

As usual, it takes me four paragraphs to get to answering the question. How do I shop with three Books? The same way others shop with one. By comparing colours to swatches. By gathering several items of similar colour to the one I’m considering, doesn’t matter if in my Season or not, and comparing to swatches. Colour is so dependent on what surrounds it that we never really know what a colour is without comparisons. And then, how we see it will shift between one comparison and the next. The more comparisons I make, the better I get what colour I’m really looking at. I don’t bring out all 3 Books in stores. I do the comparing at home. I have always learned something from it.

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{All photography: Sonja Mason}

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Filed under: For All Seasons, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, colour analysis swatches, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Sci\ART Global

Between Soft and Dark Autumn

June 17, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 24 Comments

A NOTICE before we begin – I will be traveling during the month of July and so not able to ship the book, Return To Your Natural Colours, that you see in the right column. I can ship them up till June 26. In July, Kerry Stich at Indigo Tones may be able to help, or I can ship again as of August 1.

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I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it when someone asks specific questions. It helps me focus. The article comes together faster. Pinpointing your gaps helps you use your Season palette better so that you own and love your entire closet.

PCA absolutely has to be grounded in sound theory or we’re in a mess. But financial theory and getting your RRSP in order are not the same. I might never be the first guy, but I can try to be the second one. If other analysts have comments to add or just plain disagree with me, I always deeply appreciate correction and much prefer if it’s public, in the Comments section, so everyone can learn.

Sabira has my respect for verbalizing what she doesn’t yet know. That takes time, effort, and organizing the files in your head. She asked some great questions. I fear that my answers can’t be as cut and dry as we might hope…which makes me feel a bit better. Do you find that the more someone knows about something, the more their answer to every question starts sounding like “Well, it depends.” ?Maybe I’m getting somewhere.

I’m not posting palettes because Sabira added a link to the eleablake (the makeup company that creates astoundingly good 12 Season cosmetics) Pinterest pages where you can see all 12 layouts.

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I would ask what I should rely more when finding my coloring. For example my eyes are rather muted, I would say dark teal green or pine, but my skin is not so grayed, so some of the most grayed colors of a SA palette work with my eyes, but don’t work with my skin giving it unhealthy glow. DA palette works better with my skin. Does that mean that I should rely more on my skin tone, than on other factors?

Look at the skin foremost. You just can’t be going around with an unhealthy glow. What would be the point of that? When the skin is right, the hair, eyes, everything else, are automatically right.

Skin and eyes will always accord in the end but eyes are tougher to call because blue eyes will make a connection with a blue turtleneck from any of the 4 Seasons. How do you pick the true connection? It’s not easy for women to do on their own or with friends who don’t quite know what to look for. I often am sent photos of a woman in clothing from what she assumes is say, True Summer…but the colour is actually from another palette.

Don’t look only at what intensifies eye colour. Look at how crisp the outer edge of the iris is. If the eye edge is fuzzy, so are the other features smudged into the face. The natural topography is dulled and blunted.

——

I would ask if there exist some colors that can help distinguish between the two seasons. I mean if there are colors of the SA palette that a DA can’t tolerate and vice versa.

A funny, in fact almost frightening, thing happens when Dark Autumn’s spiced peach is put beside Soft Autumn skin, it sucks all the life and colour out of it. Then when SA’s soft coral replaces it, the flush of health and vitality returns like a whoosh, from the drape up to the hairline.

Same thing happens when L Sp wears Bright Spring’s iced pink. Though B Sp’s seems a “lighter” shade of pink, it drains the life out of L Sp skin. Put the L Sp coral on the person, and you can see glowing alive colour suffuse the skin.

Dark Autumn’s lighter colours are very particular and hard to find. The yellows and greens, also too hard to find. To choose between 2 Seasons, you have to get extreme. Try DA’s strong burnt orange, dark rust, and dark tobacco, against SA’s light flowerpot terracotta, latte, and willow green. There’s no point using grey – DA’s battleship, TA’s elephant, SA’s dark putty, the odds of finding them in your closet is next to nil.

——-

I am not also sure, whether black is a part of a DA palette or no. Because as for me, I can wear black, but it is not my best choice, I need to wear something golden or beige with it to make it work. When I wear black only I can’t look my best.

Sounds about right for DA. It is not in their palette but they can balance the darkness so well that they can cheat it in if it’s warmed up. What’s even better than black are those colours that are so dark that even in pretty good lighting, you think “Is that black?” When you move it around, you see that’s it is darkest navy, eggplant, brown, and grey.

Put a SA in pure pitch black, all you see is the black and an older looking SA.

——–

Question about contrast – if a soft season can have medium-high contrast between skin, eyes and hair, or it doesn’t matter.

Let’s be sure we’re comparing apples to apples. It sounds like Sabira is meaning “contrast” as distance between lightest and darkest, what is most often meant. We’ll stay with that.

There is a wide variation in hair darkness in Soft Seasons (and many others), so there will be different degrees of contrast (hair-skin-eye differences in darkness level). Although the most perfect skin tone, colour, and texture, and the overall harmony are achieved with the same palette regardless of hair colour in a given Season, and hair colour isn’t used to choose Season, there’s no doubt that it plays a role in how others see us.

What I think looks right, an opinion from not-a-fashion-expert, is to repeat what you look like. Try to use the same distances between lights and darks in clothes that you see in your face, always within your correct palette.

The more I see of this, the more I think that spending too much time on contrast just complicates your life. Your entire colouring is inherently set to be in agreement in the exact same way as your 12 Season (12 Tone) colour palette. Your own personal hue/value/saturation all shift consistently and together even if you got darker than or warmer eyes than the ‘average’ for the Season. The thinking is already done for you. The Sci\ART palettes are so genius because they make it hard to get it wrong, to achieve very high contrast where it doesn’t belong. In Soft Autumn, where you have eggshell and medium-dark putty grey for lightest and darkest, you can’t really create a too-high contrast. So, contrast is something to think about briefly but I’d move around my palette with freedom and imagination knowing every colour there looks great on you, and I’d spend my time figuring out my body’s geometry.

———–

What do you think about the concept of flowing seasons – can it be so that a person can take some colors from the neighbour palette. And can it be so, that a Soft Autumn can bу closer to the DA than a SSu.

This is the order of the Seasons in my head, as taught to me during my Sci\ART training (my diagram, not an official Sci\ART publication):

The Season Circle

So SA and DA just wouldn’t share colours because they’d have to pass through TA. They are totally different. Perhaps one of DA’s browned coffee beiges could work pretty well, but most of DA is just too aggressive (too saturated, too red, too dark) to flatter a SA or work with the rest of her outfit.

To my knowledge, the “flow” concept comes from Color Me Beautiful. I’m not familiar with its full meaning or implications, so I’ll talk about sharing colours.

Any two immediate neighbours could maybe share some colours if:

1. Those two Seasons were very close when choosing the final and correct Season.

2. You respect TMIT. A Dark Winter and Dark Autumn could share their darker colours much better than their lighter ones. Light colours on Dark Seasons are less forgiving, so they’re either exactly right or completely wrong.

A True Summer and a Light Summer would share maybe the coolest colours of Light Summer. Maybe. I find True Seasons very absolute, and quite low in their tolerance of neighbour Season colours because the neighbours have warmth, the one thing with which True Seasons cannot harmonize. The sharing works better with Neutral Seasons. Still it takes caution and is often done too freely. Your best palette was chosen for a reason. Strive to stay within it.

————

I’ve always thought that I am SA flowing to Ssu, but when I saw these – http://pinterest.com/eleablake. I realized that those colors I thought to be a Ssu blue-greens are really DW blue greens and some of the colors I thought to be of a Soft Autumn are more of the DA palette. I know that it depends on the monitor, but I have never thought that the soft seasons are SO grayed. I think I had the wrong concept of what is really “soft”. Is it so?

The Soft Season palettes are probably the hardest to figure out on your own, Soft Summer likely hardest. The colours are losing some saturation in the photos and monitors. They appear brighter than this in the swatch books. It’s not your concept of Soft that is wrong. It’s the concept of ‘how Soft’, or ‘how Soft in this Season compared to that Season’. Dark Winter is softer than Bright Winter.

People don’t look at your clothing colours on a screen or a white background. They look at them ON YOU. On a Soft Summer, those soft colours look connected to her. She looks healthy, vibrant, and defined instead of disappeared. It feels comfortable and right to look at those colours when SHE wears them.

On a billboard, we might choose other colours, but we don’t see other people as two-dimensional blocks of isolated colour. We see them as a total image, like an organic hologram, not separate from what they wear. We are more beautiful when the colours we wear are an extension of ourselves and have a logical reason to be placed next to our body.

————

I am still confused with the terms “soft” and “muted” – what is the difference.

For our purposes, there isn’t one. They mean desaturated, closer to the pot of grey paint you started with before you began adding colour pigment. If the colour appears dusty, heathered, greyed, then it is called muted or soft.

Most important to always remember, colour is relative. Closer to grey compared to what? Wedgewood blue or electric sapphire? Compared to Bright Spring, True Spring is soft, but we don’t call True Spring’s colour low in saturation or muted.

———

I started to think whether I can be a DA, because my worst colors are pure white and summer light pastels. Light pastels give me either yellow or grey unhealthy glow for my skin.

Sounds right for DA. The skin looks like concrete in Summer pastels.

——-

I also appreciate this post very much

http://12blueprints.com/3-great-colours-on-the-12-seasons/

But it make the things for me much more complicated :

As for a DA the 2nd and the 3rd are my best colors indeed, but I am not sure about the fist blue-purple. As for a Soft Autumn – I look good in brown and soft warm yellow, but the medium green is not my best choice – it is too light and too grey. As for neighbour seasons – I can wear Dark winter grey and maybe red, but I am not so happy with red – my better red is definitely warmer. Yet it is an “ok color”. I can wear SSu pine green – it works with my eye color, and so does TA teal, but other shades of a Soft Summer are not my best choice usually, and True autumn is too warm for me.

Like 19 people out of 20, you’re finding confusion in interpreting colour. How do you put it all together? I’m afraid that only a small minority can get it right, even from photos sent to an analyst. Plainly said, it just comes out incorrect too often. That’s not the analyst’s fault, it’s the medium.

When you saw the colours above, error #1 came in because the screen didn’t show them right. That error will carry forward just like in algebra, in every calculation to follow. Then you tried to match them with what you had, error #2 because that was off a little. If it were easy to find right colours, we’d have drape sets by the truckload to sell you. Now we have error #3, where you decided what works on you, but I bet that for some of your choices, I might come to a different answer. And on it goes.

Between any 2 Seasons, you’re always juggling 3 parameters of colour – warmth level, darkness level, and saturation. So maybe the saturation of Dark Winter works well, but not the warmth level. Maybe the coolness of S Su is what works, it’s kind of like DW’s coolness level after all, but its darkness level is way off and its saturation is off by a tiny bit. And on that goes.

———

I also tried to compare how different greens intensify my eye color – there was no clue also, my eyes are not so dark (but I am not quite sure how dark can be blue-green eyes, I would describe my eye color as pine green in general) and change color that is why I can’t wave goodbye to soft seasons. I tried blue green and olive – but they work both I think, because my eyes have blue green background with an olive sun around the pupil, so when I wear olive they are warm green, when I wear pine they are pine green, when I wear teal they are teal green. I know that every season can have every eye color, but with different shades. So I have a question can that be that a DA can have pine green eyes or pine is more a soft color?

Right, so you may find blue, green, or brown eyes in any Season but they won’t be same version of those colours in terms of warmth/darkness/saturation. Some are less common, like blue-eyed Dark Autumns, but it can happen, perhaps as a dark teal that appears blue.

And yes, if you have green in the eye, it seems to connect with any green you wear to some degree.

When you say ‘pine green’, we probably have a different colour in our heads. Even if you sent me the colour, I doubt that it would be the real colour of your eye. We usually don’t know our true eye colour till it is placed adjacent to our most harmonious palette. To go from eye colour to a Season decision will lead you wrong. To go from Season to “Wow, who knew I had those colours in my eyes?” happens all the time when a woman is correctly draped.

————–

Filed under: Autumn Colours, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, Autumn Colours, color analysis eye color, colour analysis skin tone, colour analysis swatches, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Sci\ART Global

The Romantic True Autumn Part 2

April 4, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 19 Comments

These articles about wearing your own colouring and your own body lines borrow their colour palettes from the 12 Tones or Seasons of colour collections by Sci\ART founder Kathryn Kalisz, more accurate than any other I know, and the body line categories from David Kibbe’s fascinating and brilliant book, Metamorphosis.

In Part 1, we talked about who the Romantic woman is inside. It is that essence that we want to project as faithfully as possible because therein lies true beauty. We met Roseanna, our very beautiful model, in the previous article, with sincere thanks to Maytee Garza for the Sci\ART colour analysis.

In trying to get a sense of the body to choose clothes for, because Dolly Parton was too extreme, I thought of Linda Ronstadt as an example of this very sensuous hourglass figure. She always seemed lush on film, especially as her career and body matured. But I was in error. Look at this fantastic collage Paisley made:

When I opened this, suddenly all I could see was Yang straightness and angularity except for the huge eyes (and she’s 5’2″), like a little spider. I so didn’t get this before. This combination of extreme Yin (huge eyes, small body size) and Yang describes a Gamine. Smart women whose understanding of body type are light years beyond mine suggest that Linda is a Soft Gamine – so a Gamine first, with a trace of Romantic. Happy to hear I got the R part right.

When Kibbe said hourglass, he meant hourglass. He meant tip-to-toe luscious. Carrie suggested Christina Hendricks, no doubt a perfect choice. I can see that Roseanna is closer to Christina, with fuller lips that balance the size of her eyes better, where Linda’s mouth is smaller. She gives a more womanly impression than Linda’s ethereal, waif-like proportions.

Christina Hendricks Pictures

Suddenly from these photos, who these women are inside comes clearer. Colour and Kibbe are the same. It’s all in the comparisons. What you can’t see about a garment, a swatch, a lipstick, or a body’s lines can be sweet-talked into revealing its truths by placing it besides something else, anything else. The closer in colour or line the two things are, the more their particular dialects are divulged. It works both ways. Seeing beauty as how close you can line up to the 19 year old blonde model seems to really just emphasize the differences. What’s the point in being her? That’s cookie cutter stuff. You are who the world wants to see.

Getting carried away again. Let’s look at some clothes. Costume museums would have many of these outfits, the teal suit on the stand in Poly 4 being an stiffer exaggeration. Frothy fabrics, even florals, felt out of place, better placed in Theatrical Romantic.

Here is Poly 3:

Romantic True Autumn 3 by christinems featuring a grey clutch

- Framing the face matters greatly when a choice is being made among details, but the hourglass is essential. Simpler necklines like the grey cardi-T top need a necklace or a hat or some accent around the face.

- Flowing means not stiff, tight, clingy, or straight – because one could think of curve emphasis as tight but this Yinnest of people is indirect so I avoided anything that felt remotely overtly revealing or even provocative. Perhaps the grey cardi-T needs more draping or something worn over it.

Poly 4:

Romantic True Autumn 4 by christinems featuring a green blouse

- These clothes remind me of the power that comes from suggestion, like a hypnosis rather than grabbing. An old-fashioned attraction rather than the modern version of seduction, the line between come-hither sparkle and the modern version, glitter, needed to be addressed. When I looked for R clothes, I held a face and body without a single masculine element. TR is similar, only more pointed, and glitter works better there, I felt. TR feels also a little more girly, girl being more Yang than woman (who is R) in that way of tomboy and still undefined sexuality (maybe why ruffles seem better there too). Could you agree? Glitter feels Yang to me and belongs with the Flamboyants and Dramatics.

- Patterns appeared to distract, distort, or just get in the way of a bone structure as delicate as Roseanna’s. The 3 colours at a time Colour Equation (this comes from the blue book, RTY Natural Colours, just in the right column on this page) depends on the woman and the print. If one of the colours is from the hair, the eyes, a neutral colour, or a colour elsewhere in the outfit, any of those would reduce the colour busy-ness and perhaps allow the majesty of this face and body to take center stage where they belong.

- Waist definition means a physical tie or belt. Using a print to create an hourglass (like the long dress in Poly 5 below) or just having some ruching bunch up at the side waist seam isn’t enough unless there’s an actual waistband. An interesting thing I learned from Susan is that a horizontal colour block at the waistline can exaggerate a waist. The swirling antique skirt at lower left Poly 4 is an attempt, with a cardi to the left of it (not TA colours) to show where I was going. I wondered if the sweater floating around, with the waist definition from the tank, could look suitably allusive to the hourglass , but maybe it looks sloppy. He said short/tight/clingy so I guess that’s my answer.

- The purple dress, how I love bronzed purple on Autumns, has the curved neck, the hourglass, and the flow without flop in the skirt that allows the curves of hip and bust. I had some Oscar de la Renta feelings but he can be too light and airy. This is looking more John Galliano for the simple abandon to ultimate curves.

And Poly 5:

Romantic True Autumn 5 by christinems featuring a tie front cardigan

Please help me with those dresses 1 to 5.

- does off the shoulder work, as 5?

- must a skirt be swirly as 4, so is the skirt of 5 too straight?

- what about the V-neck on 3? are rounded necklines much better than V?

- does 2 need more draping?

- is 1 too busy? at some point, all those swirls in the skirt form a multitude of vertical lines that gives a Grecian column effect? would you agree or no?

- the brown skirt below, is it too flat at the waist and too floppy in how it falls? I haven’t quite understood the line between Skater Pouf and droopy looking without some gathering at the waist.

Hiding this body under a trench felt very Mata Hari in a good way, a draping classic camel. The power of suggestion is who this woman portrays.

Angie

I told you about Angie, my beyond wonderful facialist. I feel she’s a Romantic. Here is her face. (She is about 5’4″ or a bit taller.)

As you see, Angie is so beautiful, it’s almost distracting. Our conversations are more productive because I’m lying down with my eyes closed. She wears multi-stranded short necklaces with huge pearls all swirled around each other and looks fabulous. Her saturated darkness brings much intensity to her very curvy body, like a union of opposites. In our existence, there really is no right and wrong, no good or bad, no beautiful or ugly. Everything flows into, through, and out of everything else. Though we hold beliefs (very limiting beliefs) about these based in many life experiences, we are equally Yin and Yang. Conceptually, Angie seems to me that individual that closes the circle between the Yang Dramatic and Yin Romantic positions at the far ends of the Kibbe scale. That her many gifts would be placed in a body that resides at one extremity of colour and the opposite pole of line feels somehow rational or obvious.

As Susan showed us (on facebook), women of dark colouring can seem more dramatic than they are. They still look better if they dress in line for their body type. The drama of their colouring is expressed simply by wearing the palette, or Season, that holds their natural colours. This would feel very complete to be and to look at.

In the last two years, as we took the Colour Ride together, we learned this: It takes scrutiny that gets uncomfortably close to home. It takes many photos, conversations, and walking on shaky ground. It means taking the lid off your pot and examining what you most want to avoid, the beliefs you have about what looks good and looks bad and the value you’ve attached to these. Your hot spots and trigger points will try to stuff the lid back on. Talk yourself out of that or you’ll still be in the role of victim, a weak position that doesn’t tell the truth about the strength you know you have, the strength it took just to ask the “Who Am I?” questions.

I have said and strongly believe that we are Beings of Light. I mean that as much literally as figuratively. See yourself that way. Keep moving towards the hottest, most intense part of your light, even when the waters feel roughest. Don’t let yourself turn back on what you started. Take the time to be grateful for the clarity you will find at more levels of you than you ever expected. Notice that your pain, physical and psychological, has lessened. When you love your so-called good equally with your so-called bad without conditions on that love, you find the confidence to just love you.

Filed under: Autumn Colours, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, Autumn Colours, colour analysis swatches, David Kibbe, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Sci\ART Global

Dark Autumn CE and Apparel

February 13, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 38 Comments

The previous post was Dark Autumn Landscapes. In 12 Season colour analysis, the Dark Autumn group has a natural colouring that is mostly defined by the properties of the Autumn colours (dark, warm, muted), and importantly influenced by a smaller Winter effect to darken more, warm less, and mute less.

The Look

Winter does more than that. It inflicts intensity and complications (which is different from Autumn complexity) on a warm, natural, functional, undemanding (Autumn) group of colours. I said a lot last time about choosing dark colours that are still fathomable and knowable, glowing and rich as Autumn is, instead of black which is too Winter in every way. Black should be occasional from head to toe. Even in footwear, the dark bay Hanoverian horse is better than black. The shadows are black but where the light strikes, it’s brown. If black is necessary, matte is better.

Photo: Brunatka

The dressage photo above says a lot to me about the intersecting line between Dark Autumn and Dark Winter. Animals tie us back to our own earth origins and many are necessarily Autumn. The horse is Autumn. The rider’s outfit cost thousands but if you stood beside her, she’d be dusty and smell of hay. The white bandages, saddle blanket, and breeches are Winter’s but the picture is about the horse. The animal is not black. He is darkest brown.

Winter doesn’t only mean verbs like ‘inflict’. It really never graces, embroiders, or enhances, and it barely embellishes. It bejewels. The rich texture of True Autumn becomes luxurious texture. As Nana said about all Autumn, you must feel it to know it – fur, suede, velvet, raw silks. The photos in the previous post were chosen because they had texture – tapestry, fur, roughness, or the scaly skin of the cobra in the music of the bellydance. Texture expresses heat just as colour does. Absence of texture feels colder.

Autumn is close enough to touch while Winter has receded out of arm’s reach. Winter can feel more modern, like a 21st (or 23rd) Century city. Dark Autumn speaks of old luxe, dignified though not monastic. Vintage-antique (the Chanel cardi with handsewn silk flowers and bronze piping) works better than vintage-kooky (the daisy skirt).

As they bridge rural and urban, old world and new, tradition and Winter’s yet unwritten edge, estate and city streets, their scope of looks is enormous. Buckles, zippers, chains, jackets with metal buttons. Riding boots (with breeches, suede knee patches and all), cowboy boots, cowboy hats, tough chic, biker, army. As long as the message expresses strong, work, utilitarian, muscular to some degree – because that’s what the colours say. Then add in Winter’s majestic and serious. Pouffy, polka, bows, round collars, to me, makes no sense. The colours are of Nature matured. It looks inconsistent and scrambled if styles are the opposite, as if the colours, the cut, and the person are all moving in different directions at once. Unstable.

Autumn is honest so keep to the natural look of things. No pink leather or leopard shearling is what I’m saying. This is the Marlboro guy (actually, he’s True Autumn to Indiana Jones’ Soft Autumn). They borrow better from the guys (RayBans, neckties) than from the theater (cat eyes, glitter gloves). Brown is the color of work, countryside, and common sense. A very difficult colour to get right but so worthwhile since it is Autumn’s black.

Halle Berry Pictures

See how his white shirt and the white wall are greying her face and lips? Do you get the feeling that if those were replaced with cappucino brown, she’d go all five-star dark golden?

Down below…now we’re talking. Pageant Queen makeup has no place here. Pink isn’t right regardless of complexion depth.

Halle Berry Pictures

Strong flavours. Mustard, spice, vinegar. There is nothing nothing wishy-washy here. A T-shirt and pants? I hope they were free. This is the legging and the dark cognac equestrian boot, the tribal print scarf and ethnic earring, the leather vest, the heavy medallion necklace and the oversize belt, the bronzed burgundy suit jacket. Like a wine cellar, it’s a Season that acquires itself over time. You should hear the drums, taste the wine that fills your whole head, and feel the heat of the forge.

Fabrics don’t have to be completely stiff or lines utterly straight. We’re dressing womens’ bodies after all. Drape is better when it’s not overdone and the fabric has some depth, like heavy velvet curtains.

Wear prints like stained glass. Patterns are pronounced, definitions between colour blocks are quite distinct and strong, and colours are prominent. A Rubik’s cube geometric is too repetitive. An element of antique, abstract, indigenous, or unrestrained is good.

Colour Equations

This section is taken from the Dark Autumn chapter of the book, Return To Your Natural Colours.

One very light colour + one medium-dark to dark colour + one medium to dark colour as accent
Two medium-dark to dark colours (or neutral colours) that are different
One light, medium, or dark neutral + one dark, medium, or light neutral + one colour as accent
One medium-dark to dark colour + one light, medium, or dark colour + one colour as accent
Little use of complementary colours, in small areas only
Overall medium-dark to dark effect

What that looked like in my head:

Translated into clothing:

Dark Autumn casual by christinems featuring wide leg pants

Dark and cool recede. Here, with dark and warm, a push/pull visual effect is created that adds tension (Winter’s complications) and interest.

If you think about it, you can see some clearing and cooling. Previous fluidity is beginning to set and stiffen. We have to add in the person, her warm chestnut to warm black hair, perhaps her faint red highlights, her bronzer and flesh-tone eyeshadow surrounding her dark chocolate eyes, spiced peach lips, deeply coloured stones in warm, golden settings, the purse and shoes, to fully appreciate the dark warmth. The viewer has a lot of colour to integrate.

Icy, cold colours make sense frosted. Muted colours don’t. Muted colours are gentle and calm, not metallic. Dark Autumn colours are barely muted, so gentle gets replaced with assertive and maybe even a little pushy. Sometimes, we worry that dark=power and light=weak, which may be true in dictionaries but it’s not how others see us. What others see is probably dark=force and light=ease (but not pushover). Dark Autumn colours wears metallic well in their warmest clothing and cosmetic colours since they convey the heat that smelts metal from ore. Metallics in their colder range are less successful.

Was your first thought when you saw the Polyvore, “I was expecting tribal and spicy. This looks pretty normal.”? It has to be normal enough to wear to the office. Try putting it on a light, sunny blonde and suddenly, if it’s not spicy, it’s at least truly weird. She’d look like she decided to wrap herself in a Bedouin tent. Your personal power is among the wonders of this world but it only works for you, and hers for her. Power fizzles like a wet match when you try on someone else’s.

So, you know your Season, you’ve been buying the right colours in clothes, is there another step? Always. Combining your colours in absolutely stunning combinations is another level. I am thankful to Stephanie, source of so many awareness expanders, for introducing me to Shigenobu Kobayashi’s books. In his Color, Image, Scale, he takes a big selection of colours and shows you twelve truly gorgeous 3-colour combinations with each one. Isn’t it interesting how 3 and 4 in the graphic above feel very different, beyond just temperature, simply from the change in accessory colour?

Whatever your Season, unless you’re incredibly creative, I doubt you’d come up with some of Kobayashi’s pairings on your own. I assure you that I wouldn’t. For Dark Autumn’s most striking use of complementary colours, insert a complement between two similiar rich colours in your palette. It looks fantastically good. The split complementary colour scheme is worth getting to know too. You pick three similar colours (analogous, colour wheel neighbors) and then add the complement of the middle one. It is worth scanning your colour analysis swatch book into a computer, or a photo of it, and using a computer program (Google it, there are many) to give you the complements, finding them in your Book, and writing the pairs on the back. Getting the complements exactly right sets up much more vibration than guessing and only being close.

Many Dark Autumns are darker than Halle Berry. How about this woman, wearing Dark Autumn’s version of white? From the clean whites in her face, you’d swear she must be wearing white, but white will grey her. It takes this colour to do what white does on a Winter face. How cool is that?

Jessica Alba Pictures

A straight body, straight across the shoulders, they walk stiff and straight, not Summer’s rolling walk or Spring’s sashay. Rectangular body, linear. Similar lines in the clothes.

Comfort colours, which are often food colours, are staying in True Autumn. Dark Autumn is wild and hot and passionate > red, of course. All the reds and oranges work. Complements also raise energy, with great opportunity to use them in dark and mysterious ways, as dark olive and burnt orange/red orange/browns (dark orange).

Something about dark grey can be very warm – as Bobbi Brown was thinking when she named her eyeshadow Hot Stone. MAC Copperplate eyeshadow is a heavy good grey for Dark Autumn. I used a dark grey blouse to cool the leopard skirt. A big thick grey block can be too heavy and stuck. Add a necklace, a jacket, the coolest bag and watch, maybe the leopard skirt. Give the eye somewhere else to go. Take care with animal prints. Buy the suitcase set or the wallet. Animal prints are like leather pants, they can work against you all too easily.

Jeans are good. Keep them dark without a whole lot of orange stitching.

Dark Autumn dress by christinems featuring a cowl neck dress

Winter brings red and more black. Some of its blue is cooling the colours but you’re not seeing it as blueness yet.

The colour of Eva’s dress isn’t dark per se. For a light colour, it’s dark though. It has weight, substance, density, and naturalness. Maybe the colour is a little warmish and would suit a True Autumn more perfectly, but I give it to her anyhow for daring to be different so successfully. See how Alba’s above is a little cooler, a little glitzier, perhaps less burlap? The whites of Eva’s eyes aren’t quite as clear. Who cares, Eva took a step towards Eva and away from cookie cutter.

Eva Longoria Pictures

Facebook Family

Colour is one half of a most beautiful appearance. Style is the other half. In the late 80s, David Kibbe wrote a book called Metamorphosis. He outlines 13 body types and goes into great detail about every aspect of appearance pertaining to that body type. Like Sci\ART’s 12 Tone Season system, Kibbe’s is a logic system that works for me without being overwhelming or impractical. Yes, it takes time to understand and implement but when it’s right, the result is incredible. Geometry comes out of the features of your face like colours do when your palette is right. The book is so good that we talk about it a lot in our Facebook group. The next section may seem confusing without having read it.

The Dark Autumns I have met have been some type of N, C, and interestingly twice, G. They look like they have black in the way that they look like they have drama but they are more square than angular and sharp. The clothes and fabrics above are all structured because I have those women in my head when I select clothes.

I ask myself, what does a Theatrical Romantic Dark Autumn wear? I searched and searched and found one I liked. Those who read RTYNC know that for me, certain colours make sense in shapes that evoke feelings and patterns we are familiar with from Nature. Of course, there are as many versions as there are women. We all own more than one cookbook. None of us owns a cookbook from which we make every recipe, even from the very rare book where we tried them all. All I’m saying is that colour is more than just colour, the same colour on me and on you looks and feels totally different to the audience, and we all have a different idea of what looks good.

I looked at that dress (off shoulder, center, bottom row) for a long time wondering if something so filmy makes sense in a food and earth colour. How do you feel about it?

Einstein said “Imagination is better than Knowledge.” Turns out it takes a lot more imagination to be yourself than to be someone else. I love about Kib and colour that both only want you to stay true to who you were meant to be because you’re already her. You really can’t not be her, ever. Your roots grew a tree that is perfect and like no other. Forget cookie-cutter. Forget “I must be blonde or size 6.” If you’re clinging to those, you’re probably neither and people can see that. Why force your opposites to fit you? Knowledge of your colours and the essence of your body type is where you start. Trust the process of finding them. From there, imagination lets you interpret what hangs from your branches infinitely, always holding the truth of your tree. Renata chose the very adept words ‘emotionally grounded’ to describe how knowing your colours and your style feels. So right.

Filed under: Autumn Colours, More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, Autumn Colours, colour analysis cosmetic colours, colour analysis swatches, David Kibbe, Neutral Season, personal colour analysis, personal colour palette, Sci\ART Global

True and Bright Winter Landscapes

October 1, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 25 Comments

Imagine leaving the house at 6 am and walking along a street where you live on a freezing cold morning. What kind of things might you notice?

1. Tightness. Your skin, the ground beneath your feet, your emotional range, and every texture around you is compacted. As that happens, things becomes smoother, shinier, stiffer, harder. Fabric is smooth, not rough. It can go from uniformly smooth for True Winter to so slick it looks wet for Bright Winter, like patent leather, shimmer, a wet seal. Dark Winter was crocodile (textured danger) and its best black was matte. True Winter is shark (monotone danger) and its best black, its best everything, is featureless, constant, and even. Seals are the least dangerous, the most cute, and the most quirky. Makes sense, Spring is on its way.

In 12 Tone seasonal colour analysis, True Winter represents the natural colouring of people whose inborn pigments are

maximally cool, without the slightest heat from yellow, gold, orange, beige
quite dark to black
icy light to white
highly saturated pure colour, not foggy or dusty, not even a speck

The colours that pre-exist in Bright Winter‘s skin are similar to True Winter and influenced by the mixing in of a small amount of Spring’s yellower, lighter pigments. They are

not max cool; the earliest sunbeams of weak pale yellow shine on them, so it’s a Neutral Season, with a warm and a cool version of most colours
quite dark to black, but that sun lightens them a bit
icy light to white
highEST saturated pure colour, powerfully pure pigment

2. Darkness. When you started your walk, light was absent. For the most part, you couldn’t see colour at all so the shape of things became really important, like the shack on the frozen lake. This is True Winter. Form matters. This person looks good in solid blocks of single powerful colour set off by neutrals, especially black and white.

To see a colour, it had to be brilliantly strong. Often, it appeared alone, like the last leaf on a tree, the single red berry on the shrub, the blue deck chair left out after the snow fell. Use one colour whose importance is amplified by its aloneness and empty surrounding. This colour doesn’t go ping, it’s not a series of taps, it’s one solid punch to the gut. The wind is knocked out of you. You’re pushed back hard, you have to react strongly, the colour’s violence gives you no other choice.

3. The night is the constant in a world that keeps changing. Regardless of species or century, we are forced to pause and submit to life’s right to balance light by letting darkness pour through and around it. Like state and ceremony, True Winter is timeless which is why trend looks so odd on True Winter, even the young ones. These are old soul types, for whom mermaid hair, beach hair, and mapped hair were not intended because they are defined by a specific moment in time. True Winter doesn’t heed time or any other man-made thing. Mind, the shape of the haircut is very important.

4. Dark colours recede. They seem out of reach. You behold but you don’t come close, like the Ave Maria. True Winter is the single star, glory only known from afar. Like Cher, she was probably a grownup even as a kid. I could never see Elizabeth Taylor as a Bright, one, because I could never see any heat, but secondly because she was so classic, so untouchable, old world glamour, not at all cute.

Bright Winter is the star shower, or maybe the shooting star, still Winter’s oblivious indifference, still unto itself alone, but a friendlier feeling. More approachable, maybe it cares about you just a little. The carefreedom of sprinkles is still far, far away in the Spring group, but there’s a distinct lightness of being coming in. Let sweetness creep into clothing but with a lot of control. That’s what Winter likes best, even over power.

Mod can be more of a Peace&Love Spring esthetic, but Winter can fake it really well if their character takes them there because colourblocking looks so good. It reminds of the glamour of old James Bond movie stars. Bright Winter can be incredibly cool, the white tuxedo jacket, the black pant with the sequin stripe down the seam, the choker with the red rose pinned to it. These are people who hold a lot of red and a little of Spring’s magic and movement. Below, the BW undertone (as I see it) and why the palest golden gloss in lipstick looks so good.

5. The sun is rising as you make your way home. Your lashes are still frozen together and every attribute of coldness still applies but you feel less guarded, more expectant. Stop reading and think about what the faintest sunrise feels like compared to the complete darkness of night. Have you ever watched the sun come over the horizon or anticipated seeing it as the horizon began to lighten? Every living thing turns towards that light and feels the surge of hope down to their bones. Energy skyrockets to fuel the day. The colours around you take on that faint yellowness. The styles you wear express that optimism. This is Bright Winter.

6. With more light, you see more detail. Much of this world is based on frozen water and we become aware of the delicacy of ice. Frost looks like lace. The sun glinting off the snow blanket looks like glitter on fabric. Bright Winter is that, but the hardness is still here because we feel that words like shatter are appropriate.

True Winter’s ice is a solid block, very little detail. No taste, no smell, no motion, forbidding, uncomfortable, uncompromising. Minimally interactive, unforgiving, it just is, always has been, always will be.

5. You don’t go to the gala every day, or at least I don’t. But both these groups should dress like they might be. Adding a shot of luxe only looks better. It’s hard to find this apparel on a budget, hard to find stuff you can throw into the washing machine, hard to find non-slouchy clothes in these powerful colours. So much is made to blend with the crowd, using textiles that don’t hold a dye. And then to find a shoe with some reason for being besides shredding sheets, explaining the delay for this post.

The Bright Spring and True Winter are the only Seasons where I will agree that shopping is a challenge, both makeup and clothes, unless you have significant disposable income and time, or you go to the opera every day of your life, or are willing to wear horizontal stripes till friends ask you to stop. What they have to suffer through to come up with one outfit… no wonder they all wear black or revert to Summer and Autumn. Dark and saturated clothes are made so flamboyant, like the designer couldn’t get stopped with the details and the stuff, the ruching on every seam, the bells and whistles, like life is a Christmas party, glitter required. This obsession interrupts True Winter’s unbroken, inviolate quiet.

6. Learn your purples and wear them. The Winter Season is based on red and darkened with a lot of blue, a lot. The result is a huge purple group. True is bluer because it’s darker, so more royal purple, blue purple, red purple, pink purple, and cold fuchsia. BW is a lighter Season with there’s less blue to darken it, so less blue purples, but much more red, red purple, and pink purple, sugarplums and candy canes. True Winter left, Bright Winter right.

True and Bright Winter daytime by christinems featuring a color block dress

7. Tailoring. Cozy on Autumn looks like schlumpy on Winter. It’s fitted and it’s perfect, period. Winter doesn’t compromise. This is for whom all those black, tuxedo, and dark pinstripe suits were made. The transformation of Anne Hathaway’s character in the movie The Devil Wears Prada is perfect illustration of True Winter’s potential and how I see that woman at her absolute best. This trailer shows the before. She’s everywoman. She is wearing jewelry, lipstick, clothing, but she might as well not be. The woman at the end is a unique entity who has heard the beat of her own drum.

Always with the high contrast, the shirt is white or icy. One can never overdo contrast on Winters. Big, big, big distance between the lightness of the light block and the darkness of the dark block. Not every colour is at the dark or light extreme, of course. That’s not the most important thing. For True Winter, the crucial thing is to not see one degree of heat.

8. The superlative True Winter look remains black and white in a quiet, symmetric layout. Add one colour and consider that the lipstick is enough. Know when to stop.

9. More makes these two Seasons the same than makes them different. All Winter is very formal, but True the most. Leave raw edges to Autumn who does that better. There is no boppy feeling, no schoolboy/girl effects, no Peter Pan stuff, goodness mercy, Wonderland is Spring’s eternal youth playground. True Winter is very grownup, no tiny pockets sewn here and there, no cutesy stuff, these bodies don’t move that way, nothing loose and falling off. What would the Ruler Of The Kingdom would show up for work in, even with the ruby silk-lined cape? Do I even dare say the word Dracula?

10. True Winter faces don’t move much when they talk, no big eyes and big expressions. Jewelry and hair should be that way too. Keep your hair still, or at least don’t touch it all the time. It may look graceful and ladylike but that’s not your deal. It detracts from your power. True Winter is unspoiled, almost sacrosanct. Surfaces on the jewelry are smoother, though the facet of a precious stone isn’t out of place, like the face of the iceberg. The scale is unbelievably big. Much of the jewelry could go to both Seasons, but for True, I looked for glacial coldness and hardness first. Or do I have it backwards? Is this fire so hot it burns white? True Winter left, Bright Winter right.

True and Bright Winter jewelry by christinems featuring a clear necklace

11. Hold on to the most important thing for your colouring to look its best. Bright Winter’s is purity of colour, colour taken its most extreme possible level, blinding colour. The blues are bluer than even True Winter’s. Pure white pants are too blingy for anyone but the Bright Winter, and every other item should be dark.

12. Bright Winter also has Spring’s youth and irregularity. Patterns are more random, colour shots are added more spontaneously, though in small areas because Winter’s muscle is still strong. One line of purple eyeliner is plenty.

Spring is younger than Winter. Where Winter was never a child, Spring is always a child, the magnificent paradox of the Bright Winter. Youth brings in the modern. True Winter is classic glamour, Bright is modern glamour and textile but still formal and way more serious than frolic. Bright Winter’s jewelry is not crystalline or bead, it’s still sharp enough to hurt you, we draw points on stars for a reason. That bejeweled snake only looks pretty.

13. Spring brings in more fun. The dazzle, the glitz, the ruffle. True Winter is the crowning ceremony, Bright is the party after. Bows and bells can work and should be all-out fabulous, not prim, sweet, small, fussy, or anything else Winter isn’t. The Stars and Stripes is the magnitude we’re after.

True and Bright Winter evening by christinems featuring jay godfrey dress

14. If Dark Winter is the Russian empress, then Bright is the Manchurian empress. Asian effects look good on many, especially with those with that eye shape and colour. Chinese Dragon colours.

Those with transparent bottle green and turquoise eyes will work other effects. In a discussion on facebook about how Winter faces look good when all the features are very distinct on the face to respect the enhancing power of contrast on this colouring, we thought that bold lips with lighter eyes is another way to introduce that contrast. Bold lips could mean dark, to work the light-dark contrast. It could also just mean vivid and bright, the Bright Seasons being the natural home of the colour pop.

Note that we visit here because we all agree that it is more beautiful and more relaxed for everybody if your work with yourself rather than against. If you have pale brows, be grateful for the gentleness and flexibility this gives your overall look. If you feel crazy in scarlet lips, get to know Dior Addict or the many other sheerer lines of lip colour. Karla Sugar comes through with one of the most accurate photographic representations of Addict lipsticks, or any makeup, that I know, here. You might try Perfecto and Fashion for True, New Look and Rose Shocking for Bright. Wish there were more violet purples, please do share any with us that you love.t

For those new here and hoping for more on seasonal cosmetic colours, you may be interested in the recent post How Winters Intensify Eye Colour.

15. Mechanical stuff looks good on all Winters, silver better. Zippers, snaps, jewelry. Really, nobody does this as well. It’s too hard and cold for the Lights, Softs, Warms. Consider that the Darks and Trues wear orderly items better, like zippers. Bright has more hip, more flash, they’ll wear aviator glasses, heavy silver wire, grey to black lenses, an extra wire across the bridge for weight, and a black bar.

16. Last words : all black outfits = shooting blanks.

Filed under: More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v, Winter Colours
Tagged: 12 Season Colour Analysis, 12 Tone Color Analysis, colour analysis cosmetic colours, lipstick, Neutral Season, personal colour analysis, seasonal colour analysis clothes colours, True Season, Winter Colours

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