Soft Autumn Landscapes in Clothes and Makeup Plus Blue

September 2, 2011 by · 40 Comments 

For those here for the first time, in 12 Seasons personal colour analysis, Soft Autumn is the type of natural colouring or Season that is mostly governed by Autumn’s personal colour palette, with a small but important influence from Summer.

In the previous Soft Autumn Landscapes, we thought about how perfectly Kristin’s photos of Belgian scenes depicted Soft Autumn’s palettes and colour language. How does this translate in your appearance? How do you take the beauty of how you already are and elevate it, level by level, by repeating it in perfect harmony with the original?

Very muted means nothing bold, cold, hard, sharp, super-shiny, super-sleek, super-anything, severe, or strict.  White and black, both extremes, are outsiders. I hope Kristin will forgive me if I show you white and black on SA using her photos. Does your eye anything else? All the good, easy feelings go away and you feel the tension of being expected to deal with the white dot and come up with a reaction.

Though I always expect to feel more tension with black on this colouring, since SA is the light side of the Autumn group, I’m actually more uncomfortable with white. Perhaps that’s because Autumn in general goes to a medium-dark place. More so, stark white feels a bit painful because the inherently muted colouring makes the white absolutely sparkle so I feel I have to squint or look down.

What’s worse, to balance the clanging, insistent white, the person just gets grayer. When you force two things together that don’t belong, they both seem to go further in the bad direction. Something has to give to keep the balance. The white glows more and the person mutes more. On a Winter person, they can subdue that white to be just white, not phosphorescent-where-are-my-sunglasses-I-can’t-see-the-woman white.

Clothes 

Colour schemes are not necessarily analogous or monochromatic, but rather depict easy, easy transitions. The very low saturation (meaning high degree of grayness) unites the colours, enabling the gorgeously unrestricted flow for the eye from one visual element to the next. Without extremes of light and dark, contrast is low.

I like feminine and masculine combinations a lot in this and Soft Summer.  When magazines put lacy tops with denim jackets, I always see it best in the Softs. Summer is inherently female. Autumn is not really masculine, but they sure can pull off a suit and carry a briefcase. There is often a squaring of jaw and a straightening of brow, which is why they look so good with square handbags and jackets.

I like complements on this group too. With the simultaneous warm and cool presence of Neutral Seasons, you often see a blue-ish eye and orange-ish hair.

Soft Autumn Landscapes
Soft Autumn Landscapes by christinems featuring floral tops

The coral sleeveless top: The beading is not in high contrast to the top and it’s muted, not sparkly. Peanut shells (a big SA visual for me, in texture, strength, fibers, and colour) do not sparkle. Brown is not too hot, quite grey, and not extremely dark, so Nutella brown. The fabric drapes a bit (Summer grace) but has some structure (Autumn substance). It’s not gauze.  We’re aiming for a medium overall darkness effect.

The leopard cardigan: It’s quiet, not a Hawaiian print, geometric, or outright floral. You’re not wearing the whole animal, which would smother SA in the drama. Muted animal prints work well to convey the strength and texture that so defines the Season, but this is controlled and cooled, very neutral. I’d add a more substantial belt to add strength through natural texture (Autumn).

The twinset: The jeans are browned. The peach brown tank is browned, nothing candy or blossom about it, which would be Spring.  Summer brings femininity and flowers are great, but not a profusion of blooms. The octagonal shapes remind of flowers, but with more structure and rigidity. On a Spring, this would look like, I don’t know, a medieval church? Too ordered, which on them proceeds to, > recurring > mechanical > heavy > clunk. A Dark Autumn can take medieval weight all the way to heavy, leaded stained glass and just look better.

Brown cardi:  there are vines (Summer) in an earthy (Autumn) colour.  To balance the waviness, the skirt has more sustenance, more grounding and squaring.  These bodies tend to be more squared than rounded, though some have very womanly Summer bodies.

The blue top and the grey Bermudas.  A reminder that all Neutral Seasons have cool and warm versions of every colour, of the importance of neutrals, and a segue into the next section.

To see an evening look, Soft Autumn Darkness Adjustments shows some choices.

Blue

Ashley asked for us to talk about the boundaries of Soft Autumn blue. Blue is inherently cool and has more options in the cool Seasons. By the time SA rolls around, Summer is leaving us and taking its signature blue with it. Once the warmth of Autumn gold or Spring yellow start mixing in, blues turn quickly to teals and then greens. A small amount of gold makes a warm, muted blue. When Summer’s blue and Autumn orange mix, colours mute more by the effect of complements. When we get to True Autumn, Summer’s blue is gone so some of the graying by mixing complementary colour lifts and colours are clearing again.

SA’s should look at Territory Ahead.  Very Mesa, desert, glowing clothing. It’s not necessary to look  like an ad for Frye boots, but there are some great building blocks here.  Susan pointed us to this skirt. The tone-on-tone adds interest and the flowers are brought in as texture (Autumn) rather than floral bouquets. There are some great blue options there too.

In the picture below:

Soft Autumn BluesSoft Autumn Blues by christinems featuring a long sleeve jersey dress

 

Across the top, SA blues. On the left, that’s about as light as blue (or any colour) gets. The darkness range really hugs the medium section of the scale.

Across the bottom from L to R,

- the blue tyedye long dress is Soft Summer, still foggy but distinctly cooler, a little fresher

- the purple dress is too pink-red, Autumn really isn’t a pink person in the ballet pink sense; with Summer blue leaving, they have few purples till Winter red reappears in Dark Autumn, the ochre yellow base of the Season complements purple, so what they have is very  muted

- the one next to the right (so 3rd from L) is better

- the last from L, blue with embroidery and gathers on right side seam is probably darker than my Colour Book shows, but I wouldn’t mind it, it has the required dullness and neutrality (at least in the photo) ; I would not go darker, depending a bit on the darkness level of the woman

Makeup

Not hot and not dark, which go to bloodshot and obvious too easily. As quiet as the colours are, they are very medium in darkness. From the blue selection above, you can see that the range of darkness for colours isn’t wide. The same goes with makeup.

Eyeliner: Nutella again. Lauder Softsmudge Brown is good. Rimmel Sable is warmer and works on some, too red on others.

On some Seasons, strong dividing lines between colour elements look right. That’s not the case on the Softs Seasons because that is exactly opposite to how Nature made them. Smoke the liner with a little eyeshadow over top if you like, to enlarge and define more in a diffused, blurred line sort of way. Darkening the line might backfire and just close in and take over the eye.

Lipstick: Bobbi Brown makes about 9 good lipsticks, as Rose, Soft Rose, Tulle Rose, Italian Rose (darker).

Again, not too orange, this isn’t True Autumn heat yet. Still a fair bit of pink. Like the roofs in the top photo, there is also a fair brown element. I start with the terracotta flower pot visual and adjust the colour to suit the individual woman from there.

At Aveda, looking for some boundaries, I wondered about not pinker, more saturated, or darker than Aveda Wild Plum or Lychee Luxe (bit sparkly, be careful of that in makeup, same discussion as with white above; matte is your best buddy). Their Rayflower could be a flesh tone. Any SAs who try these out, I’d love some feedback.

Also, Rimmel Heather Shimmer or Revlon Colorburst Soft Rose.  I like definite colour. If it’s too skin tone,  the lips disappear into the face, which works better if you’re under 20. The really light lips look best on the Light Season faces (same discussion as black above).

Eyeshadow: Aveda’s Gobi Sands eyeshadow and Clinique Double Date. These colours are not that hot. The stones and wood above the white dot in the photo at the top are right. As a Neutral Season, there is a warmer palette too, as MAC Soba.

Blush: Aveda Peach Lights looks like a contender (all feedback welcome). MAC Buff (bit pinker) and Clinique Mocha Pink are good too.

A Park in Paris

An inspiring closing note that another Susan shared with me for you to enjoy (and on behalf of all of us, I thank her). This is the Parc Luxembourg in Paris. How you feel sitting on one of those benches, surrounded by those colours and textures, that light and temperature, that’s how looking at Soft Autumn should feel. Could you feel yourself relax? Listen to those feelings. They’re real.

Soft Autumn Landscapes

August 26, 2011 by · 16 Comments 

It means a lot that so many of you feel the same recognition and reinforcement of colour by seeing it depicted in natural scenes that I do. Kristin sent me some photos of Belgium that spoke to her strongly of Soft Autumn. I can see that she and I are on identical wavelengths about this Season. I thank her for sharing these very evocative images with us.

In Dress For Your Landscape: True Summer, we talked about how certain colours, shapes, textures, and textiles all go together for a reason and why some just never belong. When the natural presentation is familiar and real to us, every element elevates every other. Colour is information, in landscapes or on people. We evolved to see, hear, smell, and feel certain information together and understand it instinctively. We each emanate a natural landscape of colours and they look so right when we don’t add in all manner of discordant notes.

In 12 Season personal colour analysis, Soft Autumn describes the natural colouring of a person whose inborn colours mostly resemble the True Autumn Season, but are cooled and grayed a bit because of the small influence of Summer’s medium muted blue. Because contribution is coming in from a warm and a cool True Season (True Autumn and True Summer), this is one of the 8 Neutral Seasons.

Even in these photos, the colours are telling you so much about the time of day, the position of the sun, the temperature, the time of the year. If you took pictures of a leaf on a tree in your backyard every hour for 24 hours, it would never show the same green twice. That’s what the Seasons are, essentially. They are the progression of the changing perception of colour in different lighting as the planet changes position relative to the sun, on a daily or yearly scale, through 12 steps.

Kristin said,

I like how these pics have both Soft Autumn colors and a soft Autumn character.  Feminine and elegant, with a pleasing earthiness and quiet strength.  These pics helped me “make sense” of this palette and made me excited about wearing it.  Honestly, my first impression was that Softs were a bit boring, (too neutral, too muted), but I see now that this palette can have a very pleasing, elegant glow.

Every part of these landscapes fits so well.

– The late afternoon, warm, comfortable light makes every colour glow with heat that is more full-bodied, not bouncy like Spring’s. Soft Autumn is Amaretto sliding down your throat, not whisky, not Sprite, and not green tea. The nectar, not the juice.

– The more solid substance of the stone walls and their rough surface says Autumn’s more robust strength. Do you know those Old Village paint colours? SA is much like that.  They always have names like Colonial, Williamsburg, Chesapeake, you know.

On any of those pages, choose any Options&Price > Paint Sample Boards> View Colors  (in red in the Online Purchase box). You will see an assortment of (mostly) SA colours, and certainly SA feelings. Architecturally, it feels like beautiful barns and covered bridges. Ralph Lauren ads and luxury Land Rovers, not Testarossas. Autumn is practical. They look real and right in clothes you could actually get something done in.

– The presence of water tells of a Summer component, but it’s never the bigger role. There is a drier feeling. Spring and Summer colours feel wetter, from petal to mist to fountain to lake. This landscape looks gorgeous with one element of water – a wavy line in a print, a scarf design, a leaf.

– This is mellow warmth, so think of every meaning of that adjective. To mellow out means to relax, to destress, to settle in, and contemplate another day. “I worked at this” looks are never less right. Soft Autumn looks like real life. She usually doesn’t look very different with and without her best makeup, compared to many of her sisters.

– The colour span is medium. Not real hot or cold, sunny or shaded, dark or light. Similar types of colours flowing together.

– This is not Spring’s hedonism. Soft Autumn is more homespun than hippie, though there’s a similar type of crunchy granola freedom about both. Here, we have a more organic seduction, as earthiness can be quite erotic. If you’re over 45? 50? and you remember Neil Diamond’s early material, the jeans, the long hair, the gravel in the voice, you may know what I’m saying.  Hot August Night, you know?

Too often, the expression of passion through quiet is misjudged to be low, but that’s not so. Leave flash to someone else. Believe that others fully sense the extreme physicality of understated heat. We feel so grateful for the absence of force that we give more of ourselves back. Nothing rattles our cage, no visual element is aggressive, not a single one. We feel less guarded or inhibited, more open to reveal, more receptive to consider, more willing to play, I’m not using these words by accident. Soft Autumn is the most smoothly sensual Season. Everyone is highly tuned to getting the message the way Nature made it, whatever your variation. 10 million years of evolution gives us no other choice, when flash was just getting started.

In a wide V-neck, broom yellow sweater, knit loosely enough to see some skin, a mid-calf stone gray skirt in a cotton knit heavy enough to cling and move over curves, a favorite leather belt slung low over her hips, vintage brown equestrian or Frye boots, and a natural stone pendant around her neck, Soft Autumn is as much invitation to light someone’s fire as anyone can be when colour is working with them (because the definition of colour wealth is like the definition of financial wealth, right? “Your money is working for you, not the other way round.” Just substitute the word colour.) No blingy thing could raise the attraction and neither would a jeweled boat in one of those canals or a flying carpet going past the steeple below.

– We feel unthreatened and heaven knows there’s value in that. Nothing is asked of us.  I have often thought that I like myself best in this company, probably because it is so undemanding.  There’s no pressure to adjust to anything sudden or extreme. The contentment of sitting at a cafe, sipping a latte, knowing I don’t have to be anywhere, I couldn’t feel more ease. Soft Autumn’s landscape is almost hypnotic, lulled by the steady rhythm, but entirely without the innocence of a lullaby.

– What Kristin captured here is really important. She didn’t send maple trees in October, a jaguar, or a pumpkin patch. This palette has definite coolness compared to the True Autumn parent. She has a great perception of Soft Autumn. The tendency people have is to see it as warmer than it is, but since it’s primarily Soft, it is more gray than orange or yellow. And she even got the grays right! Quite fabulous.

The words got away from me again so we have another To Be Continued post. In the next section, how to translate the landscape in clothes and makeup, and some talk about blue.

Our Eye Album: Autumn

July 18, 2011 by · 11 Comments 

Are you starting to see certain patterns repeated? And also that in every Season, there is variability in colour and line pattern?

Soft Autumn

I have to talk a little, I can’t seem to stop myself. The Soft Autumn eyes above and below, notice how the colours are soft, meaning quite greyed. There is heat round the center, but it’s not intense. It also happens to be the same colour as the freckle above and is a terrific colour for hair or highlight. Your best, most real and natural hair colour is often in your eyes, unless they’re blue, of course. Look in there and find it.

 

A most interesting colouring below, from a woman who knew herself to be a Neutral Season, but with her dark hair, expected a Dark Autumn result from the draping. Soft Autumn can be quite dark, but we forget because most lighten their hair. On some it looks better, but not all.

True Autumn

Very muted and very warm, says Autumn to me.

 

The eye above is True Autumn, with Dark Autumn below. They’re similar in that the heat (orange-brown) is now clustered round the pupil, an effect that gets stronger with more Winter. Though photographic conditions are different, the orange of the eye above seems hotter than the eye below. Dark Autumn is cooling off, since it contains a small portion of Winter, and the brown is more neutral.

With the orange-brown gathered near around the pupil below, this eye suggests a person whose colouring is closer to the darker side of Autumn. Compare the patterns with the top eye in this True Autumn group, which has the line-free ring that surrounds the pupil and the lighter and cooler colours, probably signifying a person closer to the lighter side of Autumn, or Soft Autumn. In both cases, the skin is still perfected by the True Autumn palette so they are both True Autumns. What seems fairly consistent among True Autumns is that the degree of contrast of the eyes relative to the entire person is medium, completely consistent with the degree of contrast in the overall swatch collection. The colours of skin/hair/eyes stand out from one another more than they  do in a Summer face but less than in a Winter face where eyes are usually more intensely coloured and so seem more distinct from the face. In a True Autumn, the eyes are more part of the face. The overall appearance is fairly blended, still a medium saturation and darkness group. What sets them apart is the maximal warmth of the colours.

 

All the eyes above have little definition of lines and spokes in the iris. As Winter comes in, more of these lines become evident, as can be seen in the Dark Autumn section below. Notice that the hazy smudged line patterns (or near absence of them) is becoming more defined in the Dark Autumn eyes and the colour is beginning to clear.

 —

Dark Autumn

Brown eyes exist in every Season. I love them in Autumn, the Season that perfects repeating hair and eye colour, a very magnetic combination. Brown eyes are also harder (for me) to deduce line patterns. I see the spokes of Winter coming in below. I see heat as orange over yellow, and muted over beer bottle clear (might be same colour as a beer bottle, but without the transparency you’ll see in the upcoming Bright Winter eye). The beauty of this eye colour with this skin colour is quite remarkable, as the bronze intensifies at every level of appearance. How unbelievably gorgeous are the colours Nature put in us?

The eye below belongs to a woman who has been analyzed as a Dark Autumn and a Dark Winter. These distinctions can be very tough in some people, even in when draped in person. You are seeing such improvements in both Seasons that it’s tough to decide which flaws (because those are there too) will be the deciding choices. I make my decisions based on certain parameters, but a different analyst, a different day, could come out different. Someone who straddles 2 Seasons this closely has big play in flattering colour. If I were her, I’d own both Colour Books. She has great flexibility within the boundaries of those 2 Seasons.

I gave this eye to Dark Autumn because the Winter lines and shapes are not as clearly defined as in many Winter eyes. There is still some muting of lines and colours, feels more Autumn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soft Autumn Darkness Adjustments

June 24, 2011 by · 24 Comments 

Every Season makes darkness adjustments for hair colour one woman at a time. There will always be individuals who don’t look right in the median colour, and fare better along the outer edges of the curve. I love hair colour that looks believable, like it happened by itself, and that flatters the skin to the utmost. This is when the viewer feels most relaxed.

Depending on depth of complexion, personal taste, and occasion, cosmetic darkness is adjusted too, though always staying inside the personal colour palette of the Season, and aiming for the same goals as with the hair.

In 12 Tone personal colour analysis, Soft Autumn is the name given to the type of natural colouring that contains colours mostly characteristic of the Autumn group, but cooled and grayed by a smaller measure of Summer.

In previous posts on Soft Autumn hair colour, I showed a coppery apricot colour as being quite lovely. In every Season, many hair colours are not only possible, but better and righter.  Sometimes the freckle colour is the perfect highlight, even in the Dark Autumn or further out in the Autumn family, at Dark Winter.

Soft Autumn is a typical Neutral Season in that they have a range of warmer and cooler colours, but none fully warm or cool. The value (meaning, Light>>Dark) range that perfects the skin has some movement too, though never extends to extremes of either one for the Soft Seasons.  What this woman strives for most importantly is very muted, soft colour. Muted and warm, that is, because maximally muted (greyed) and cooled belongs to Soft Summer, peanut shell and misty mauve respectively.

The element of coolness means that they are not especially orange-tolerating.  Hair and freckling can skew the perception. The woman above (all 3 photos) has many apricot brown freckles. She adds those colours to her hair, giving a warmer appearance, as you see in the lower photo where natural medium warm brown and apricot highlight are visible.  She can wear soft golden-oranges beautifully in makeup as long as they’re not very dark. Regardless of hair colour, darkness in makeup is a caution point for Soft Autumn, often appearing darker than expected from the pencil or tube colour.

Some Soft Autumns are harder to imagine in apricot, like Kate Moss, who does not seem orangey at all. (I only know she gives a Soft Autumn impression). Though the blonde that Charlize Theron wears well never flatters her, and warm blonde does, she is neither very orange or dark. Some of these seem almost too orange. She can do more darkness and warmth than we usually see and look far more interesting with less paint. This feels just beyond the upper darkness limit where colour is being pulled from the skin.

Kate Moss has smaller, sharper features and wears darker hair better than what we normally see, but does not do very dark so well.  This is a good gallery. 6 and 8 seem very good, while the rest make your insides tense up. Or, go back even farther.

The less well blonde works, the more Autumn presence there may be. Kathie Lee is a good example of a woman who was beautiful with deeper, warmer hair colour.

Google Kelly Macdonald. Though you’d think she’d be better in the lighter warm brown hair, I prefer the darker. Many have a naturally quite dark hair colour. They might be expected to be darker Autumn, but they’re drained out by those drapes. On Kelly, orange hair is overheated, not as good as a more neutral brown.

On Kelly, we again see those sharper features that are more often seen (by me) in Soft Summer, where the facial architecture resembles Candice Bergen’s who is probably a Summer of some sort. Soft Autumn usually carries more squared, slightly blunted features like Claire Danes, but there is interchangeability in this. Is that to go with Autumn’s blunter personality? I never said that. I would go as far as direct.

I wonder if so many models are Soft Autumns because their very medium-ness of colouring makes them versatile and that particular bone structure is so pretty when it shows up in this Season. Molly Sims, Drew Barrymore, Gisele – it’s in the fine nose, high round cheekbones, defined jaw, and feminine mouth. The example of Rene Russo came up on Facebook recently, and I can’t think of a better illustration of this combination of facial geometry and colouring.

Candice Bergen Life Magazine, USA, July 24, 1970

 

There was a request for a formal look for Soft Autumn. I visited my latest happy place and made this. Our Polyvore craze has been a great thing. In practicing to be my own Season (Dark Winter), I didn’t realize how capably I had learned to exclude everything else. Now, the DW imprint is strong in my head. It is high time to reopen the windows to register the many choices on the shopping landscape.

Soft Autumn formal 1

 

Soft Autumn formal 1 by christinems featuring slouchy tops

Maybe you will think, those colours are all too similar. When I do this, I’m essentially following the guidelines of your natural colouring, how it feels to look at you. I dress you as you already are, to be consistent with the light you already emanate. On Soft Seasons, there are no big jumps from one colour to the next. Transitions exist, but as the eye moves from the skin to hair to eyes, it doesn’t encounter anything bold or sudden in the colours themselves or how they are combined.

The purse is the warm hair highlight. The lighter woman might choose from the right side, the darker from the left. The darker shoes could be worn by any of the three Autumn Seasons. The metals are not very hot. I love wood, shell, and muted bead on Soft Autumns, in keeping with the female-earthy feel.  Natural fibers and textures are fabulously good on them, which drew me to the linen-and-flax feeling of the jacket, but it might be too casual for this ensemble.

Pearls? I love femininity on Soft Autumn. In this regard, Summer leaves a strong trace. The curve-hugging rippling fabric of the dress…. But everything is very medium. There are no extremes, the swatches all hug the center in Warm>>Cool (but tipping over to warm) and Light>>Dark. Only saturation is low and soft.

Colouring hair may enable wearing warmer or cooler choices from the Neutral Season swatches, but you’d still stay within that Season’s own colour menu or the skin’s perfection will pay a price. I do not believe that anyone can convincingly and flatteringly colour her hair to take her outside her Season. I know for a fact that many will disagree. OK.

Recreate the light you already cast. Make the wavelengths you add be synchronous with the ones you are. To the viewer, it feels effortless as floating.

Choosing The Best Grey

April 18, 2011 by · 9 Comments 

First thing I ask myself when I’m trying to put a grey into a personal colour analysis Season is: “Does it contain any colour other than B&W?”

If I can only see black and white, it’s Winter. Winter’s greys can be the lightest light, colours known as icy, or the darkest near-blacks. If your eye doesn’t pick up anything other than some rendition of black, this is a Winter colour.

Grey is a most underused colour and the most important neutral colour. Grey can be your lights, mediums, darks, and neutrals. It is more imaginative than black, what isn’t, and makes an outfit look much more interesting. It’s elegant and sophisticated and far more slimming on most people. Grey is also wildly underused in eye makeup and suits more types of skin than brown. The drawbacks may be that there are so many versions, but there’s only one good ol’ black. The worst thing about black is that it’s so easy.

Grey can take on a suggestion of the colours around it, so it looks purplish as eyeshadow if lipstick or clothing is red or violet. For this reason, getting too particular about placing greys to a specific Season within the 12 is not something to worry about. As long as you can place it among the 4 True Seasons, it will adapt nicely with the rest of the outfit. The Neutral Seasons stick quite close to the parent True Season’s greys.

Winter’s greys are usually pretty easy. The might-as-well-be-wearing-nothing effect that does Winter no favors happens when the grey (or any color) is gentled. You know that generic soft heathered grey used in men’s T-shirts? A Winter will dominate that colour entirely, and the shirt will have no character at all, like a big blank space. It looks like underwear or pyjama wear. Along with being made of B&W, there should be a definite sense of sharpness, like a knife edge, or darkness, like a charcoal. Winter’s taupe, at the bottom of the graphic above, has that Winter redness that comes out of it, giving it a sharpness, making it unlikely to strike you as soft.

Soft Summer greys.

Summer’s grey is easy to pick out. There will be a wash of blue, pink, or mauve. Even the taupes, which go from grayer oyster to Portobello mushroom are pinkish.

If it’s brown or green, it’s Autumn’s grey. Autumn has more colour in their greys and taupes. The greys are more obviously greened, like camo, or oranged, which makes them look heavy, like a velvet couch. They may also seem browned (because brown is just dark orange), or greened in the various shades of dry tobacco. The taupes look more brown.

Soft Autumn greys.

In a Spring grey, you can see sunshine yellow coming out of it. Grey is inherently cool and Spring is not. Grey is quieter while Spring sings of colour. Therefore, Spring has few real greys and many more browns, peachy ones and greenish ones. Their greys are yellowish, which I could never pick up unless I held up several grey items in the store together. The greys are actually so yellow, they can seem a little green. Spring is often that way, like dandelion yellow is almost green, like the unripe banana is greenish-yellow, like the hair of some True Spring children is so yellow, it can seem greenish in pictures.

Spring greys.

Does darkness or lightness guide the grey to a Season?  Doesn’t help. Every Season has several levels of light/darkness in most colours, including grey.

Colour Analyzed Home Decor

February 20, 2011 by · 30 Comments 

It is my belief that the colours we project for others to see are a continuation of our inner selves. When the colours that we add to our bodies repeat the energy of who we already are, our beauty feels the most real and right, both to us and to those looking at us. The colours with which we surround ourselves may be even more important to our well being because we see them more than we see our own appearance. Huge thanks to Sci\ART Colour Analyst MarySteele Lawler in Mississippi for contributing this article and the colour layouts. They illustrate so beautifully one of the lesser-known, very fascinating applications of Personal Colour Analysis.CS.

Ambiance, light, color. Nothing is more important in a room.  Like The Princess and the Pea and her stack of mattresses, I’m extremely sensitive to colored spaces and have never understood how hospital designers expect people to improve in rooms painted in sad colors. With my Sci/art training I have come to understand the underlying reason why there are comfortable or uncomfortable color choices for each person.  Thanks to Kathryn Kalisz, I know why the effect of the same color can be either unhappy or brilliant for different persons.

A warm-toned person naturally will be ill at ease in rooms painted with cool shades and vice-versa. One might not be able to put a finger on the source of discomfort, but this distraction is because the room essentially was painted for someone else.

My increasing fascination with light and interior color prompted me to notice that successful designers are picky about the colors they choose for projects even if the color is just a particular shade of white. I began trolling through decorating magazines and web sites looking for popular paint references. That there must be room colors best suited to blondes or to brunettes logically followed the precepts of seasonal color analysis.

Since I am not a decorator, I leave the paint color selection to professionals. They have experienced that some colors more than others do well in any light in any part of the country. These popular hues that interior designers go back to time and again are the ones that I match from my Benjamin Moore swatch books to my Sci/Art color book. The result is a log of hundreds of tried-and-true designer paint favorites divided into the twelve tonal categories.

Such luminous beauties, these batches of whites, grays, violets, greens, and blues held together by a common chroma and temperature. Although there is some overlapping of paint colors between the seasons, each season’s entire collection of shades is distinct from all the other seasons. Each collection stands on its own in the loveliness of this distinction

Here are photographs of four ambient possibilities. There is an icy cool set of colors for True Winter including mountain peak white, crystal blue, topeka taupe, celery ice, and forty nine others. The list for Soft Summer comprises cool, velvety tones such as patriotic white, soft chinchilla, and mountain ridge, a favorite misty brownish- purple. Light Spring’s hues range from cameo white interior room to windmill wings blue and florida pink, a delicious pinky-red. Dark Autumn conveys its stylish warmth with rosy apple red, glowing apricot, pink corsage, and black satin.

True Winter palette

Soft Summer palette

Light Spring palette

Dark Autumn palette

My clients come to me already convinced of the power of color. I tuck a paint collection list into each information packet included in my consultation. This way, when it is time to redecorate, a client can experience the wonder of living inside a color that reflects her particular color harmony. I say, “I want you to look beautiful in your rooms. I want you to feel cozy and to shine within your colors, not only in what you are wearing, but also amidst your surroundings. I want you to glow in your home!”

My color business is called Luminosity. I operate from Oxford, Mississippi, but I pack up my drapes and travel if I have a group in another city that wants to be analyzed. The cosmetics updates that I glean from the contributors to the 12 Blueprints discussion board have been a wildly popular part of my consultation. Learning about one’s season for the first time can seem overwhelming, like sitting under an avalanche of compelling new information. I give clients handouts on everything from hair color to the types of wood and metal best suited to their homes. The more ways you can get at the uniqueness of your season, the better you can understand it.

If you know your season and wish to expand your harmony, save yourself legwork and choice overload by ordering your seasonal list of Benjamin Moore paint numbers. When you pull swatches from your local paint store you will automatically love the paint chips because they will match you.

One seasonal paint selection list costs forty dollars. There are sixty to eighty color numbers on each list. I am a Light Summer.  I live in a pink house that is on my chart and I believe that everyone should be so fortunate! Checks should be made to Luminosity and sent to 307 Bramlette Boulevard, Apartment 21, Oxford, MS, 38655. Include your mailing address and expect your lovely collection in two weeks.

The Brown-Eyed Spring

February 9, 2011 by · 81 Comments 

Or Never Give Up On Your Colouring

This post is special for a few reasons.

First, I get more questions asking how this colouring looks than all the other groups.

Is this the rarest Season of them all? I think it depends where you live. I have never analyzed a True Spring, but I have seen what they look like: Wayne Gretzky. I give up a bit on female examples because they are so altered, usually for the worse, that a natural original is almost impossible to find.

Bright Spring is not really rare. It is unpredictable. This colouring always seems to look like something else. To confuse matters, the opposite is true as well, where many other Seasons can look like Bright Spring. When hair is dark, this person can resemble Dark Autumn or Dark Winter when eyes are dark. If eyes are light, the similarity to True Summer can be startling.

Secondly, this beautiful model, whom we’ll call Audrey, has brown eyes. Those are rare in the Spring and Summer groups, but where human genetics are concerned, nothing is impossible.

The Bright Seasons are those that combine Winter and Spring colouring. If Winter is stronger, the Season is called Bright Winter. If Spring influence is larger, the person contains the colours of the Bright Spring palette in their natural colouring. Both are Neutral Seasons in the Sci\ART 12 Tone system, meaning that this skin has some warmer and some cooler colours. This is important information for buying the right foundation.

Asian features often belong to people whose colouring is perfected by the Bright Seasons. Here is one of Audrey’s pre-PCA pictures.

Nothing wrong with that picture at all, but would you think of a Spring person? Maybe, but I didn’t. Bright crosses my mind when I see Asian features, but I couldn’t picture the bright coral pink lip colours on that skin tone. When you look at the PCA pictures, do you find that Audrey doesn’t even look like the same woman? I was blown away by the difference. In her most beautiful colours, her skin tone is light, bright, evenly coloured, illuminated and brilliant. Bright Spring takes their Winter influence and turns it into pure sparkle.

This illustrates what worries me about doing Personal Colour Analysis from photographs, even good ones. They just give you one static shot, but colour analysis is anything except static. It is a very dynamic process, of ever-changing drapes, colours, and better-than decisions, through many sets of drapes.  We compare and compare and compare again.

***Thank you to the wonderful Maytee Garza at Reveal Style Consultancy in New Jersey for this analysis. Maytee has shared photographs of PCA sessions with several clients on her Shutterfly page.***

During the draping, we see right away that black works pretty well, but seems too serious and hard at the same time. Something is off, not always easy to put your finger on what. In True Autumn brown, nothing happens. It just sits there. And the longer it sits, the worse things get, which happens with all wrong colours on everyone. Some Bright Springs look physically small, old, and weak in Autumn colours.

Then True Spring’s yellow goes on. Wow. The person turns yellowish, because that drape is too warm, but the eye goes from generic blue or brown to something amazing. The face becomes perfectly evenly coloured. If you could just erase the yellow, the face would already be wearing custom-coloured foundation and concealer. Ten years come off the face of older women. Everyone in the room stares speechless.

In the photo below, compare Audrey’s coloring to Maytee’s. Maytee is a Dark Winter. The clarity and lightness of Audrey’s skin compared to the much darker, muted tones of Maytee’s are so much more evident. Notice too that black works, but a small black block with a big light,bright block is spectacular.

Audrey’s descriptions are far better than mine could be. She said,

I love that it’s mostly about the skin tone in Sci/Art, but it really is about the eyes and hair too – not in the way that the eye/hair color is part of the final judgment call about a person’s season, but in the way that one can see changes in the hair and eye color too. When I wore the wrong colors, my eyes darkened and you couldn’t get the full effect of the topazy/hazel/interesting lightness (comparatively to other brownish eyes). When I wear my best colors, my eyes lighten to a shade I never even knew they could be, and even my hair changes – I notice the warmth in it, the interesting chestnut/red/orange undertones.

This is the best part. When the hair is covered, it is easier to believe what your eyes are telling you. In Audrey’s words,

The Bright drapes, both Bright Winter and Bright Spring, worked, but the Bright Winter drapes were a bit too blue/too cool, and they didn’t light me up as well as the Bright Spring drapes did. Interestingly enough, some of the Summer drapes worked on me but in general, the Summer palette greyed me and I REALLY could see it. 

So finally, it was between Warm (True Spring) or Neutral (Bright Spring).

Can you believe it – me, a dark-haired, “dark”-eyed gal (who actually has topaz-ish clear hazel eyes in the Sci/Art lighting which is a duplicate of natural lighting), was actually being considered for TRUE SPRING! I almost couldn’t believe it but funnily enough, it took a little while to figure out which worked better – warm or neutral. They both looked great but the Warm drapes yellowed me a bit. Also, between True Spring and Bright Spring, there was no contest – True Spring did not incorporate my natural darkness, which Bright Spring does.

One of the most interesting changes that we noticed aside from a greying of the skin or a dulling of the skin was the fact that my eyes darkened when I wore colors that weren’t bright/clear enough. This is also something that I noticed before this draping session, especially when trying different blush colors. When I’m not wearing the right colors, my eyes darken and you can’t get the full effect of how topaz/hazel-colored they are, and now I know that it wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks on me!

The more you’re willing to release, the bigger the prize.

True Autumn’s Best Hair Colour

January 30, 2011 by · 16 Comments 

Really, I adore the company of True Autumn women. Something about their naturalness is very relaxing. They have a take-it-or-leave-it-but-this-is-me attitude that I love.

I don’t see many True Season clients, with the exception of True Summers who outnumber all other Seasons combined by 1:3… and I practice 12 Season Colour Analysis! Very complicated coloring, True Summer, and all too easy to misplace into another Season.

Like all the True Seasons, because they’ve been around longer, wrong ideas about the palette and the style are more entrenched and more outdated. True Autumn is thought to be all khaki and pumpkin. So not. Think more of an evening sky dripping liquid orange gold into a molten ocean. True Autumn is every color of coffee, spice, chocolate, a golden home-baked loaf, a glorious pie crust.  Envision Bollywood colors.

Shying away from heat is a natural reflex.  Before their personal color analysis, a True Autumn woman often arrives with flat, beige hair that doesn’t enhance her. She’s gotten used to light hair or believed the someone who told her that women need to lighten hair as they age. Meanwhile this woman’s face, clothing, jewelry, and energy could say everything. Beige hair color is aging.

In other cases, the woman placed herself among the Winter Seasons and the hair is too cool and too red, which looks crisp and severe, like the pie crust burned round the edges.

Aim for Bambi eyes and melting milk chocolate hair. True Autumn emanates a warmth that is comfortable, a darkness that is medium, and a sultriness that is extreme. When I see them a few weeks after their color analysis, I can barely take my eyes off them and I can tell that they are getting used to that reaction.True Autumn doesn’t strive to get noticed, but these women have no choice once their colors are right.

When I plan outfits or makeup for this gorgeous group, I always remind myself that they are not well suited to very darks or very lights. Colours can go to warm creamy buff and as dark as 70% chocolate, but would not reach all the way to black and white. The extreme of lightness and darkness, so-called high contrast, is way too sharp. The overall effect to the viewer when they see the woman head to toe should be medium to medium-dark. The colors in this chair offer a good range of base hair colours.

Every person in every Season has to make a darkness adjustment with her color analyzed palette. Some women will look or feel better in lighter colors than others. The hair right color is some shade of brown, not beige, or apricot, or butterscotch, or really not yellow blond. Think of Susan Sarandon and Russell Crowe. Would lighter hair enhance their strength and presence? I don’t see that it would.

Autumns are often thought to be red-haired, and it is possible but not common. They can certainly wear a dark copper highlight if they chose, but the natural color is not often red. The red would not be carrot; it would be squash. Carrot’s clear yellow-orange, as Rupert Grint’s, belongs to a Spring. The colors in the chair below are the right highlight range. The wicker basket is Soft Autumn’s. The dried flowers are too light as a highlight for any Autumn I know. The silver lanterns on the left side would be pretty on a Light Summer/Spring.

On this chart, I like golden chestnut and henna red. For a highlight, I would choose copper blonde. Obvious redness in the hair of Soft Autumn beyond muted apricot is too much. This Season can manage it far better.

I didn’t choose Light Copper Blonde because it would make obvious stripes, and break up the molten metal heat that works so amazingly well.

Rimmel Lip Gloss for 12 Seasons

January 15, 2011 by · 26 Comments 

Some folks take exception to my swatching makeup on white paper. They say you can’t tell how the colour would look on your face. They’re going to love the way I swatch lip gloss.

I find I can see the subtleties of the colours way better on paper. On paper, you can be more detached about the colour. It’s still far enough from you to be perceived as separate from you, and only on its own merits. Once it enters your Personal Zone, all kinds of meta impressions start happening.

The hot second you try to evaluate a colour on your own face, you’ve lost objectivity. Your imagination alters your face, and everything on it. We have no idea what we look like to others. The only thing we decide when we look at a new makeup colour on our face is whether it could be consistent with how we’re used to seeing ourselves.

The Sci\ART Colours Book is outstanding for matching makeup colours, the trickiest part of working with your Season. Good thing there’s lots of help to get you started once you get your Season ID. The swatches in the Book are on white canvas. At the store, I can smear the makeup on a white page. Back home and decide, in daylight, if the colours are the same.  Any client who has done this with me during a PCA appt knows that she can look from the makeup palette we create on paper to her Colours Book, and find every swatch in her Book immediately. Her eye just goes to it, and she is right every time. This system works.

These Rimmel Stay Glossy lipglosses impressed me because of the good colour selection – or was it that I found Winter colours, usually so hard to do? So often, a line will have 3 good colours, and you stand there looking at the rest of them, thinking “I have no idea who would wear these colours.” In this line, the fairest and darkest have a choice, the most muted and clearest, and the Winter colours are actually wearable.

The gloss is supposed to last 6 hours, or 8 hours, or some big, impressive number.

Critical Thinking : the ability to discern what is probably right and what is probably wrong. A 6 hour lip gloss? You didn’t even expect that to be true. There’s no 2 hour lip gloss out there, unless you’re a mannequin, the plastic kind. Forget 6.

The product is plenty nice, and reasonably priced, whatever that means in cosmetics. Heavens, I’m being snarky today, but there is too much undeserved cosmetic raving going on out there. Every week brings a new rave. That’s how you came to have a used-it-once drawer. I’m just trying to keep the reality glasses in place so you never add one more item to that drawer. I am nice enough to say that there was nothing about the application that I didn’t like, besides the sinking ship of 6 hour expectations. This is also a nice product to apply over a lipstick, long wear or otherwise to keep it going till lunchtime without needing a mirror.

I swatch lip gloss between 2 pieces of tape to avoid having gunk all over my purse. I can spread it around and look at the nuances of the colour when I get home to daylight. I can see the colour next to other tones, because colour is all about comparison.

Once you see a colour you like on paper, and it seems to match your Book, I absolutely suggest you put it on your face. There’s more to a makeup buy decision than its colour. Also, no two women in the same Season look quite the same or will interpret their Season in the same way, or have the same comfort level with colour on the face.

I match the color analyzed swatches from the middle darkness colours, or the lighter ones for the Light Seasons. The darker swatches work fine in clothing but most light-medium complected women find them dark. The Sci\ART system is 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, because 12 is enough without being too much, but you’ll refine your position within your Season with time.

The pictures are a bit randomly organized, and seem a bit sloppy (that’s part of the reality theme), but they cover all the colours, with some opportunity to compare. In Canada, we did not have Endless Night, Unlimited Gold, or Endless Summer, unless they are here with a different name. I haven’t adjusted any settings. Photos were taken at 11AM on an overcast day, on a sheet of white paper.

True Winter : Yours Forever

Dark Winter : All Night Long

Bright Winter : Timeless Allure, Fuchsia Fever

Finding a clean red-violet that has that purple pivot that True Winter hovers around is challenging, especially in a cheaper product. I like this one.

For many darker Season women, they don’t always want a dark lip. I’ll never (or not soon) be convinced that Sandra Bullock (probably Dark Winter), Liza Minelli (True?), or Audrey Hepburn (Bright W?) look their best in browned, flesh toned lips. Dark W wears a browned deep rose as a disappearing lip (NARS Dolce Vita), but it has little impact. A very good option to nude lips for Winters, which the intensity of the person’s coloring can still dominate too easily, is a sheer lip.

I hope you can see that Dark Winter’s colour is browner. Bright W’s is lighter and clear.

As a Dark Winter,  I tried All Night Long. It’s quite similar to the Dark Winter always-in-your-purse anchor of Merle Norman Stolen Kisses.

Light Summer : All Day Seduction, Stay My Rose, Dare To Say, Eternal Flirt

True Summer : Captivate Me, Dare To Say

Soft Summer :  My Eternity, Stay My Rose, Captivate Me

With the sheerness of a gloss, several of these colours will work across categories. Your own lip colour will come through and help adapt the shade to your face.

All Day Seduction has a gold glimmer in it, it felt best for Light Summer. Soft Summer can do gold shimmer sometimes, as in MAC Plumfoolery blush, but the base colour is deeper in that blush than this light pink gloss. Soft Summers are much cooler than they are warm and not especially light.

Light Spring : Non Stop Glamour, Always Lovely,  All Day Seduction

True Spring: Here To Say? , Non Stop Glamour

Bright Spring: Fuchsia Fever, Timeless Allure, All Day Seduction

True Spring gave me some trouble. Here To Say may be one those colours that is too browned for a Spring and not browned enough for an Autumn. It is orange and yellow enough that it may work well, with just enough brown to make it more nude/flesh coloured. I try to picture it on Wayne Gretzky…not sure. I was hoping it might look like this.( I think Uma may be a Light Spring because pale lips look so good on her. True Spring does better with a shot of real color).

The beauty of a gloss is that it tempers brightness (as in Fuchsia Fever) and darkness (as Timeless Allure), allowing Bright Spring to wear both. They could also do All Day Seduction, because it’s a clean pink with a gold shimmer. Light Summer  had this colour too, because there are similarities between it and Bright Spring (both can do well in medium-darkness colours, both have a trace of Spring yellow).

So Fabulous is a slightly yellow caramel beige. It is not orange, nor is it as heavy as butterscotch sundae sauce. It is a Spring colour, perhaps a good flesh-toned lip for Light Spring, a Season that is exemplary in the various beiges of nuts and their shells.

Soft Autumn: Here To Say?

True Autumn: Immortal Charm

Dark Autumn : Everlasting Crush, Still Gorgeous

A Soft Autumn will probably find Here To Say too orange. I’m usually looking for a color like the pink in a flowerpot, and this is not it, but they do have a warm side, especially when the hair has an apricot highlight, and they do look great in nude/flesh lips, a la J.Lo. This is a line where the Autumn colours are less plentiful, while the pinks are over-represented.

Still Gorgeous could be lovely on Dark Autumn, and very natural on women of deeper complexion.

Black Diva, well, y’know. Oh, I forgot that one.

Lockets for the 12 Seasons

December 12, 2010 by · 15 Comments 

Lockets come in so many styles for one type of jewelry. They are at once classic, Victorian, and vintage. Styles vary from very time-honored simplicity to jewel-encrusted modern. They emanate a sense of ancestry that feels grounding, well-bred, and perfectly belonging to this time of year of tradition and family.

At Heartsmith, I found a wealth of styles and a poverty in my ability to choose just one style for each Season, which I failed to do in many cases, as you’ll see. The name of each design and the photo are linked back to the product page.

A sincere thanks to Heartsmith for allowing me to reproduce the photographs.

Let’s look at some very beautiful jewelry.

SPRING

Heart shapes are in keeping with Spring. They are young, romantic, pointed, and delicate. The adjectives romantic and delicate are often given to Summer, but they are appropriate here too. Spring’s romance is more magical than Summer’s Bosoms&Roses style (as a young friend of mine once described her True Summer Mom’s reading taste). Spring is delicate as youth and fairy wings.

True Spring

Mrs. Potter 3/4 Gold Locket&Diamond.

Because True Spring is the sun.

Spring is airy, floaty, skyward-directed like growing new plants reaching for the sun’s light. Many members of all 3 Spring groups have small features and a petite aspect to their features. A small, floating heart is so pretty, for any Spring or its blends.

The Alia Floating Heart Pendant.

Light Spring

Juliet Gold Heart Locket has a brushed center to integrate the Summer element, but the flower petals could be the wings of butterflies. For the Light Spring who resembles a Summer, this style is also available in a white gold.

Bright Spring

For me, this Season is crisp but delicate, like frozen lace. They are the frost on the window, the ice that coats evergreens and bare branches after an ice storm, the pattern in the thin ice over a puddle when you step on it. In the Season that blends Spring’s sparkle and Winter’s polish, metal must shine.

The Destiny Lace Set Diamond Locket.

Audrey is stunning too, larger and less yellow in the metal.

If the Wishing Star pendant comes back into stock, put your name on a list.

SUMMER

True Summer

True Winter is minimal in its ornamention. Pieces are important but they don’t move. I see True Summer as more detailed and decorated. The circle is Summer’s essential shape. The  metal is brushed.

Elizabeth Sterling Silver Victorian Locket expresses the gentle strength of this group. Summer is highly capable without needing to control everything around it (like another Season we know).

Holy Spirit Locket

I loved this one too. I like it when I have to think about it a bit. This design felt a bit unexpected, and others may have a different interpretation of the look of a True Summer. Pushing the limits of your own taste is an expression of your creativity, of thought becoming matter.

True Summer is often a reflective, pensive personality.I loved the darkness, because True Summer is so often stuck in lightness, and they are not that light. The weight felt good, because True Summer is not light by weight any more than it is by colour. The swirling ivy lines are perfect. The peaceful message of the dove is highly Summerish, as is the grace and flow of wings in flight.

Light Summer

Alternating polish and matte silver integrates the Summer muted and Spring shiny elements. The size is small and there’s a minimum of fuss to allow the essential heart shape to take center stage.

Laurie Chasing Hearts bracelet

Soft Summer

In this Season that is essentially Summer, with a dusting of Autumn, the refined sophistication of Summer becomes more solid, thanks to Autumn’s strength. I love the weight of the chain, the pearl, and the stronger closure. The small blue stone in the heart is perfect. I find this piece gorgeous.

Claudia Locket Bracelet

AUTUMN

True Autumn

The Brandy Bracelet is fantastic. It is muted in colour and shine, antiqued, of mid-darkness, with good weight.

Soft Autumn

Autumn’s lights and darks give a sense of depth. We see this in plaid, for instance, where there are advancing and receding elements. Autumn’s strength is expressed here, as we look for more sustenance in this Season (as we do in the foods we eat as the cold approaches). This is muted in colour and metal, not too hot or cold, feminine but substantial.

Chantilly Charm Bracelet

We’ve been talking about which Season is which element in our Facebook group. The symbolism of the Seasons, and how these are depicted in their human examples, fascinate me. Sometimes, an association gets stuck in my head and I can’t dislodge it. For me, Soft Autumn is the tree. Are they the wood element? Yes, probably, I could make that extension.

This piece is perfect for a Neutral Season, with the gold and silver. Both are muted, as looks best on Soft Seasons. If you wear metal (or makeup, or clothes) that are shinier than you, you just got duller by comparison. The gold is earthy, not light and shiny. Love this piece.

Tree Of Life Pendant

Dark Autumn

Beautiful, in silver with gold accents. You can see how absolutely lovely this item is in the video on the product page. (With citrine, topaz, or diamond options).

Isabelle Locket Garnet

WINTER

True Winter

True Winter is controlled and controlling. They are not all over the place. Floppiness is hopeless. They do not move their bodies in a floppy way. Like the royal family, they are contained and ceremonial when they look their best. Pieces are symmetrical and balanced, an exact equilibrium.

Hannah White Gold Oval Locket

Bright Winter

Yes, the metal is yellow, but Bright Winter is a Neutral Season. They have yellow in the skin, and it is this light, shiny gold. It is well balanced by the darker lower half. The jaw-dropping opulence, especially in a piece of this size, is balanced better by the Bright Winter than any other.

Roxanne Locket

Safety is nowhere on Bright Winter. It disappears completely. If you are brighter than your jewelry (or makeup, or clothes), they are duller by comparison.  This is the ultimate go-big-or-stay-home Season. Glamorous hairstyles, dramatic necklines, they just look better.

April Diamond Locket

Dark Winter

Lenore Garnet and Pearl Pendant

The contrast of blood and snow is always Winter. The medieval weighted hardware of Autumn. The imperial luxury of Winter. The deep red undertone of Dark winter skin. The darkness in the metal. The overall feeling of cold and hard. Not too shiny, as Autumn mutes textures as well as colours. An amazing piece of jewelry.

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