Best Makeup Colours : Bright Winter

July 4, 2010 by · 23 Comments 

The Bright Seasons wouldn’t be as perplexing as they are if someone hadn’t made an allusion to “clear eyes”.  Suddenly, they became indefinable. Who has clear eyes? Who doesn’t?

In 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, a repetitive phrase so that people can find me through Google, I know you knew that, this group belongs to the Winter category. Colours are dark, highly saturated, and cool.

Bright Winter is a Neutral Season, so Winter with a Spring infusion. Spring does do some fascinating things when it mixes with Winter, maybe part of what makes this coloring so consuming of our attentions and imaginations. Maybe it’s the relief we have evolved to feel when warmth returns to tell us that we survived another cold spell. Our feeling of welcome is almost heartbreaking.

Maybe we are arrested when pure, pure color energy mixes with Winter’s power.

Some of Winter’s cold is substituted for Spring’s pale yellow warmth. Not buttercup yet, not even daffodil. More like snowdrops. There is a trace of the delicate in these people, unlike True Winter that neither looks nor acts delicately ( or if they do, you soon learn it’s pretend).

When the 2 True Seasons of highest color saturation mix, this color sings with clarity. These are the highest color notes.

Spring also lightens the colors, compared to True Winter’s darkness. Only a bit.

Some Bright Winters react to their palette with “Obviously”, which the happiness with which most people greet their colors. The great David Weinberger said, in the cluetrain manifesto, that “laughter is the sound knowledge makes when it’s born”. Color analysts see it every day, in the laughter that people almost have to suppress when they see their palette. They are joyful and peaceful. And they’re a bit confused by the strength of their reaction.

Some Bright Winters react with “Oh, heavens, I could never do that.” One piece at a time. Let yourself do this. Being safe when you know more is like visually dumbing yourself down. NEVER be less than everything you can be. Buy a bright tank and wear a yellow one underneath. Wear dangly silver earrings. Wear a sheer bright gloss.

These are the C0lour Analysis cosmetic colors that perfect this skin tone.

The eyeshadow in icy violet is incredible. Merle Norman makes Freesia and it is gorgeous for a reason. The icy is Winter. The violet is the complement of yellow, a component of all Spring skin.

The other hilite is yellow, or creamy, but still quite neutral champagne. Everyone can do neutral champagne. Just avoid brown, beige, buff, gold, pastel.

Eyeshadow for the Brights is my biggest search challenge. You can do a clean light grey and deeper charcoal (left column). You can add in a bit of brown and get to taupe (right column) but barely any. Will you be able to find 2 separate products? You might, but you wouldn’t need to.

Shimmer in makeup is a definite possible, though never necessary. The industry just makes so much of it that it’s easier to find. Winter has a still polish. Spring expresses dazzle and movement. Merge the two and the shimmer works. One facial feature at a time.

Eyeliner is charcoal, or black-brown. Purple can be great, but certainly more playful; it’s lighter than True Winter’s and will look purpler. Spring allows imagination, energy, and FUN, but it’s still very contained in this group. Winter’s sapphire can also work. These eyeliners might be better as accents, rather than for surrounding the entire eye. You might just do an inner rim of the upper lid, or the outer section of the upper lid, merging with the charcoal. Just because you can look great in circus gear doesn’t mean you should.

Lip and blush usually take time to get used to. Start light or sheer with makeup. Your Color Analyszed swatches give you lighter choices too. The lip often has a fair bit of natural color. The rest of us would love it on you immediately, but I get that it’s you who has to wear it. Ask someone you trust. I love Mercier’s Lip Pot in Hibiscus on Bright Spring, but on Bright Winter, it is still too flat. They dominate it, and the lip color becomes dullish and grayish and boringish.

As for the clear eyes thing, it sure wouldn’t help you pick them out of a line-up. They are often Black-Brown (see Jocelyn Is A Bright Winter). They can be Virginia turtle eyes, which become OMG with charcoal eyeliner. They can be Asian.

Everyone’s eyes are amazing. Once we notice them, we all find it hard to stop looking. That’s why it’s so important to get rid of the distracting clutter. Calm down the skin, the hair, the over-makeup, and let your eyes leave an echo.

Best Makeup Colours : True Winter

June 24, 2010 by · 34 Comments 

In 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, True Winter is the pure Season whose most important color fact is its coolness. The saturation and darkness are fairly high but not at the max. Every color, light or dark, is cold, crisp, hard, frosty, dry like the inside of a freezer.

There are 5 pages of pinks and purples in True Winter’s Personal Colour Palette. 5 swatches on each strip, that’s 25 pinks and purples. They far outnumber everything else.

The color at the core of this being is red-purple, all very clear and blue-based. The palette is so cold that it almost feels a bit unfriendly to look at. There isn’t a shred of warmth. No brown, no orange, no beige, nothing we associate with comfort. Combine that with the relative darkness, and it’s uncomfortable.

Like these personalities can often be, Winter demands that we make some space for it. We feel commanded to notice it but prefer to keep our distance. It likes to argue and will resist any sort of control. And yet, its beauty is awesome and unto itself.

True Winter has some serious strength in their coloring. They can balance much more makeup than most others. They can wear eyeliner along the inner rim of the eyelids and look even more remarkable. On the rest of us, it just looks vicious.

If someone told me they liked my eyeliner, I’d throw it out. When you look at pictures of Laura Mercier or Mrs. Obama, you’re not looking at their eyeliner. Here, the color analysis cosmetic colours would harmonize a sapphire and deep purple eyeliner, as long as it’s not obviously, ridiculously purple. The sapphire has to be pure, dark, and cold. Not teal, just pure deep blue. Merle Norman makes a nice Sapphire eyeliner. Bright Winter can balance this too, with their drop-dead glamour signal. Everyone else pushes the limits of credibility.

It may take time to get used to these fuchsias, rubies, dark plums, and crimsons in blush and lipstick. Begin with sheer colors, but don’t compromise the color. Your makeup will be invisible, or worse, it will be noticeable as some weird, warm, wishy-washy shade on your skin tone. Don’t go there.

The basic eyeshadow is a clean, crisp steel grey. A cool taupe (grey-brown) can work as a good alternative. MAC Satin Taupe is fairly good, but very shiny. This group can handle shimmer makeup, consistent with Winter’s polish, but nobody should overdo the frost, especially after 40. Summer’s cool taupe could work, but it’s not quite the same because of its inherent softness. If these colours look warm on your screen, they’re not intended to.

How Summers Intensify Eye Colour

June 3, 2010 by · 23 Comments 

We often see the attempt to charge eye color with more makeup. When were you not just staring at the makeup? Natural skin and eyes can only compete with so much pigment before the cosmetic takes over. Luckily, when the color is one that already exists in you, you can apply it quite heavily and it will appear as a believable part of your face, but there are limits.

There is a lot more to intensifying eye color than eye makeup.

Clothes

Never underestimate the power of color analyzed clothes colours to amplify eye color. This alone will do more than makeup on anyone. It’s a way bigger block. How much color can you create with a skinny line of liner or a tiny eyelid’s worth of shadow?

I’ll emphasize that it is not only your same-as-eye color clothes that charge up eye color, though those might work best. It’s all the colors in your Personal Colour swatches. Each one will clear the white of the eye, just as it clears the skin. Your pinks, greens, and grays should all intensify eye color.

Brows and Blush

Colour Analysis will bring attention to your eyes like never before, even if you don’t wear makeup. Groom your brows, have them beautifully shaped, and pencil in the thin spots. Think of eyebrows as the picture frames for the eyes. They matter.

Once many women get the right shade of blush, their first comment is most often “It brings out my eyes.” Absolutely it does, instantly and strongly. Look for that effect to happen when you buy blush.

When Good Color Goes Bad

You know I don’t care for purple, green, and blue on eyes if the viewer can perceive the color. I don’t buy that it intensifies eye color. It just looks playful (at least where I live) and it’s usually all people can see. You surrender too much power, not a price I want to pay for beauty.

Eyeshadow Palettes for Eye Colour

Think twice about investing in palettes made for certain eye colours. Have you ever seen them work?Have you ever said to a woman “your eyeshadow makes your eyes look so much greener” and really meant it?

Why don’t they work? Because there is no universal formula. There are 15 greens in a green eye, it’s too confusing to be able to pick out the core ones. Also, any skin can have any eye color or combination.  If the eyeshadows are made for the green-eye cool-skin woman, then it dulls the skin of the warm-skinned woman. This is the reincarnation of the same silver bullet  we’ve dodged before as “the lip colour that suit every skin tone”.

Off the soapbox, now.

Using the right browns and greys,

And understanding that not everyone can do everything,

And that without a Color Analysis, cosmetic color browns and greys are the hardest of all colours to understand by a long shot,

It’s about repeats and complements and contrasts.

This is 12 Seasonal Color Analysis. There are 3 Summer Seasons, the True, the Soft (blends an Autumn trace), and the Light (a dab of Spring).

True Summer

True Summer eyes look best to me when they are gazing out of a misty pool of cool greys. Soft greys, not sharp greys.

  1. Soft navy eyeliner, not blackened sapphire.  True Summer often has very deep blues in the eye that can be repeated.
  2. Dark denim eyeliner repeats the overall color and darkness level of the eye.  Annabelle’s Blue Grey is one of the best I know for True Summer.
  3. Cool grey or blue grey eyeshadow repeats the True Summer’s skin’s undertone. Mauve-grey can work, but many Summers have pink in the eyelid rims, and we don’t want to repeat that and make they eye look bloodshot.
  4. The contrast of a cool blue eye with a warm brown shadow is stunning, so the magazines tell us. Warm brown shadow on the True Summer skin tone is mud. There is no heat in this skin. You can’t fake it. Choose your right, rosy browns since brown is approximately blue’s complement. Sally Beauty Chocolate Truffle Trio is good.

———-

Soft Summer

These eyes look best when they’re gazing out of a misty pool of…mist. Like they’re surrounded by fog, a pale neutral tan-brown. No hard edges, everything quiet, blurred, and diffused.

  1. Repeat the tan brown in the eye with eyeliner.

The eyeliner is the bodice color. This is odd, but the Canadian Superstores carry a line of clothes/makeup called Joe Fresh. Their Twist Up Eyeliner pencil in Charcoal is the right one.

Your medium and dark eyeshadows are all contained in this dress (linked to Jones New York, but no longer available).

Paula’s Choice, the one and only skin care company I place  my full trust in, was making an eyeshadow called Granite awhile back. It was custom-colored for this skin. They were making the best colored, best matte, best priced eyeshadows around, but not many people knew it, I guess. A certain direction as to who should use what…

2. That tan brown can be repeated again in the highlight colour in the hair. Lots of bleachy blonde highlights do not work, they look like grey stripes, like a strange intended aging effect. The right highlight is browned down. All the Autumns can repeat hair color and eye color. This is beautiful, real, natural hair for a Soft Summer, on Jennifer Aniston. They often get her too blonde and her eyes fade immediately.

3. Any contrasts? The whole concept of the Season is low contrast, so you have to be exceptionally subtle with all makeup. Neutral Seasons have a little heat in their skin, and cooler and warmer choices in their palette. We’re still mostly cool here though, still muddy in warm brown colors. The skin looks heavy and the heat of warm brown in the eyeshadow can yellow the white of the eye in a subliminal way, looking unhealthy. There is no contrast I know, not light/dark, warm/cool, or hi/lo saturation.

4. Any complements? I’m often asked if orange-toned eyeshadows work on blue eyes, or purple tones on green eyes, etc. This is usually a blue eye, sometimes surprisingly pale, or a blue-green eye, where the eye color becomes very strong in pine green clothing. The orange-toned brown eyeshadow for the blue eye is deadly. That green eye could be accentuated with a dusty plum shadow, but it’s soft.  The viewer should not see purpleness.

———-

Light Summer

These are the eyes that get more makeup piled on, hoping to make them “pop”. Either that, or there’s the hope that a dark line will look good against the light eye color. That’s altogether too much hope. The eye can’t balance it, the end result being to close in the eye. Once again, all we see is makeup.

This is a Light Summer eye below. Black mascara has no place here. You could barely find any colours that are even medium in darkness. Gentle light colors are key.  Airy and fresh is what will look  healthy and young.

In the middle swatch, Photoshop extracted the grey shade from the middle of the iris around the 4 o’clock position. The lower one is the colour of the eyeshadow I like to apply after an analysis (Shu Uemura M Beige 815, I believe; why get specific, it’s no longer available; Paula’s Choice did a color called Moonlit, also quite perfect, also unavailable). Both swatches are very close to the Personal Colours palette.

  1. Eyeshadows are mostly gray, not brown. Use very light colors because the eye color is very easily overwhelmed.
  2. Repeats ? None I can think of in makeup. Some people have a much stronger turquoise in the eye and can repeat it in clothing.
  3. Complements? Not in eyeshadow. However, since there is heat in the skin, it can support some bronzer believably, especially as Spring’s contribution is sunshine and the outdoors. A light application of a peach-gold will bring out the eyes without looking artificial. Remember, the best beauty looks like it could have happened by itself. I like Cover f/x Bronzer f/x in Gold. Also, wearing your mauve and purples in clothing will bring out the pale yellow sunlight you may have in the eye, which is pretty.
  4. Contrast. None I can think of. The whole Season’s concept is “not dark”.

Don’ts

Not doing the things that detract from eye color is important too.

1. Avoid yellow in the hair unless Nature gave it to you. Your most delicate of all skin will go red or yellow. Your eye will dull and gray out when the white of the eye goes yellow. Your highlight is just on the neutral beige side of silver if you’re a True or Light.

2. Big dark lashes. The viewer can’t peel their eyes away from the lashes – maybe that’s what you were going for with the Diorshow and the Telescopic. To paraphrase Isak Dinesen, when God wants to punish us, he grants our wishes. Summers should wear grey mascara, which is all but impossible to find. Try “Soft Navy” or “Soft Black”, smearing it on a tissue first to be sure it’s not too dark black.

Ask me some questions.

Anyone know the eyeshadows that match those Light Summer swatches?

Best Makeup Colours : True Autumn

May 28, 2010 by · 25 Comments 

True Autumn’s colours might be unexpected. At least, they are to me.

True Autumn is one of the 4 True Seasons. Far more people fall into the 8 blended or Neutral Seasons. This is 12 Seasonal Colour Analysis.

I keep reminding myself that the colours are not very dark, a little darker than True Spring’s.

What these colors are, above all else, is warm. That’s the pivot point of the whole Personal Colour Analysis cosmetic colour and clothing colour palette : warmed by gold (not yellow).

Gold is grayer than yellow, hence the blunted or dulled colours relative to Spring’s. Are the colours drab? Only if you consider pumpkin, curry, warm teal, and deep periwinkle dreary. There is way too much heat and glow to be monotonous.  True Autumns are often practical women who run from excessive show, so they need practice to get comfortable in their color temperature.

The color I most typically think of as simple brown is not here. It’s in True Spring, in Soft Autumn, and other groups, but not here. Most Autumns love brown, and wear a lot of it, but very often some other Season’s version. These browns are greyer, greener, redder, or more orange. There is a browned effect to all the colours, compared to other palettes, but brown per se is only here in the darkest tones this Season has. Quite fascinating, really.

Frost over 40 is usually a mistake. Still, the skin of True Autumn can look like a recent dermabrasion, the skin tone is so smooth in the right colors. Seems a shame not to work that a little. Matte bronzer is a fabulous way to heighten the warm burnish of the skin.  These are not really pink blush people, but a touch of warm gold blush along with the bronzer is hard to beat.

They also can have metal colors (gold, copper, bronze) in the iris, a most amazing effect. A warm gold eyeshadow, placed as a dot in the center of the upper eyelid, just above the eyeliner, then covered with the usual matte eyeshadow, adds dimension and accentuates that impossible gold in the eye. It’s like fire inside the eye. A particle of MAC Woodwinked gives an antique gold impression.

Their makeup looks like this. Are there other possibilites? Sure, your Colours Book gives you about 15 eyeshadow/lipstick/blush choices.

Are you a True Autumn? Look at Clinique lipstick in Paprika, Lancome Couture Suede, and Revlon Sandalwood Beige. Do they look too bright? Is it because your hair color is too light/blonde/cool?

Best Makeup Colours : True Spring

May 5, 2010 by · 8 Comments 

We each have a map, an inborn GPS that aligns us with our best makeup.

The makeup that looks most believable, youngest, the least severe (synonymous with ‘aging’), and the least fake is dictated by our natural coloring.

Anything else can look as off as a herd of grazing cats. It just feels wrong, you know? Not impossible, just crooked.

Choreograph your appearance to keep repeating.

You begin with a natural colour palette that is specific, not random.

Repeat it with your clothes.

And again in your hair colour.

Again in your makeup.

Once more in accessories.

Level after level after level of building blocks that stack up precisely. Every element is aligned. That looks like strength.

Learn which of the 12 palettes is yours with Seasonal Colour Analysis. The cosmetic colour palette below will be in your personal colour palette swatch book.

We’re going to go through the True Seasons first. They don’t have a cooler and warmer alternative. The True Spring is purely warm, the most important thing about its colors.

This palette is a little different from True Summer’s. Even purely warm Seasons have greys, they’re just warm.

The best lip/blush (because they should be the same) fuse with the basic undertone of your skin.

You adjust the depth of your makeup colors to the darkness of your coloring or complexion. The lip colours should be about the same intensity as the hair colour.

In learning who you are not, the release will flood you with amazing freedom.

In understanding who you are, you will be renewed – and you will look rejuvenated, by 10 years at least.

Best Makeup Colours : True Summer

April 26, 2010 by · 17 Comments 

Makeup is the look factor that most confuses women. Our choices are all over the place. Our wardrobes, though not always correct, often follow more order.

Among makeup products, lipstick is the single item that most women want to learn to get right. We know that we can’t all wear each other’s makeup, but where do we go after that?

There has to be a logical method driving the choice. It cannot be just random, buy what I like, hit-and-miss. That will miss, by a little or a lot, but it will miss.

The only sensible place to start when decorating your house has to be considering what’s already there. The only sensible starting point for makeup has to be an understanding of YOUR own coloring, the canvas that you’re going to paint the makeup on. It has its own inherent colour scheme. It’s easier and much prettier to go with it, instead of against it.

Instead of lining up fairly parallel with your own coloring when you choose makeup, what if you could wear an identical match? A mesh so seamless that nobody could tell where the makeup ends and your face begins? When the alignment is that good, the makeup looks custom-colored for your face.

For True Summer, it looks like this.

In Seasonal Color Analysis, this Season’s cosmetic colour palette is “cool, soft, and light”.

There is a simple system that matches up every piece of the makeup puzzle so it works together, and with the person, with their clothes, with their hair.  The legwork is done for you forever more. You have a map of your own coloring. Personal Colour Analysis is the GPS that points you directly to your best makeup colours. This degree of color precision can’t be reached any other way.

To know what you are, you need to know what you are not. 90% of what is at the makeup counter is what you are not.

Skin Undertones

April 15, 2010 by · 67 Comments 

You may want to skip this post. There will be no concrete answer at the end. It will be a thought repository for my ramblings till someone helps me understand this. If you can’t stand the nitpickiness, I’ll understand entirely.

I realize that I’ve been referring to “undertones”, as in the Eyeglass Frames videos too randomly. I said that the dusty plum of the Soft Summer frames was essentially the undertone of that skin.

Traditionally, undertones are thought to be either cool, neutral, or warm, not coloured.

Overtones are the outside colour of the skin, like the names of foundation, porcelain, bisque, buff, natural, warm beige, etc. Light/medium/deep also refers to overtones. The overtone must be in the top epidermal layer, presumably the relative melanin/hemoglobin/carotene amounts.

You can get any combination of undertone and overtone. So warm undertone + ivory overtone, or cool undertone + ebony overtone, etc. Porcelain and ebony overtones can share the same cool undertone.

Worth noting too is that you can have a false overtone. The red flush in the skin of women with too-yellow hair, or the yellow overtone in the cool dark Seasons when they wear too-warm colour, these are just effects created by bad colour.

Where is the undertone and what exactly is this colour that we are calling cool-neutral-warm? I mean, cool what? Cool grey? Cool blue? A cool colour that varies by Season, but is of the cool classification?

I looked for input from respected sources.

1. Bernice Kentner of Color Me A Season, always ahead of her time, describes undertone as a real colour, a combination of 4 variables. From her book, The Magnificent Eye, she describes undertone as the result of an equation made up of 4 variables:

. the thickness of the skin which varies by Season and determines which colours show through

. the yellow-brown colour of all skin, beneath the top layer

. the meshwork of oxygenated (red) and non-oxygenated (blue) blood vessels beneath the skin

. the velocity of blood flow in those vessels; so Autumn’s faster blood flow shows more red of arterial blood

I don’t know about the blood flow velocity. I would think that ultrasound would have detected those differences among people. If she means how fast the capillary beds are cleared, well, I don’t know.

I absolutely agree with her that Seasonal Colour Analysis is not about overtones. If it were, women who wear the same foundation would be of the same Season.  If it were, yellow skin would wear warm foundation, but it often does not (or should not).

2. Lauren Battistini at Color My Closet makes the fundamentally important point in this post,  that undertone refers to how skin reacts to color. If your skin is most perfected by cool colours, then your skin’s undertone is cool. Not certain if I can extrapolate Lauren’s words this far, but maybe this means that undertone is not a real colour at all, and isn’t located anywhere in the skin’s biological layers. It is a reactionary term.

Personal Colour Analysis is about identifying the precise degree of darkness, warmth, and saturation in the colours of your body, and so in the colours that perfect your skin when you wear them. It has nothing to do with overtone really. We’re looking for the skin’s reactions, or undertones.

In the Comments, Lauren says that each Season has a “core color”, using the example that Autumn is orange. Each Season does have a signature or core colour (Winter=red, Summer=blue, Spring=yellow), but that is not quite the same concept as skin colour, though there’s some overlap.

3. Imogen Lamport at Inside Out Style Blog writes an excellent blog with practical real-world advice. In this post on skin tone and makeup, a client writes in with a question. Imogen offers several examples from her experience as a colour analyst.

If I understand this right,

Now you may be more obvious and have a warm yellow or goldish undertone and overtone and therefore warm colouring, or you may have a pinkish undertone and overtone and be cool.

…means the pure Seasons are those where overtone and undertone accord. She cites examples where the two may conflict – but I’m still confused.

4. Beauty School Blog is written by makeup artist, Jen. I find it a fresh take on makeup blogs, with good lessons, a genuine voice, and a wider spectrum of topics. I found this article very thorough. But I’m still confused. If the undertone is a real colour, then which colour is it exactly, and where is it?

5. The colours of melaninThis, at Dead Dog Cafe, doesn’t fully attack the topic but does implicate different forms of melanin.

Pheomelanin, yellow to red-brown (ie: orange) : small quantity  + blue vessels > green or sallow of some cool Seasons.

”                                  ”                         ”                  : large intensity + blue vessels > warm gold of Autumns and Springs

Eumelanin is the black/brown pigment of non-Europeans.

6. The 12B concept of undertones. The pictures posted along this article show how undertones appear in my head. There is no scientific testing here, only what I see when I look at this skin. (Dark Autumn could be redder. Bright Winter could be lighter and yellower. Light Summer, I couldn’t decide. Close enough to make the point.)

What use is it?

Foundation is matched to undertone (cool/neutral/warm) AND overtone (ivory to ebony). These images don’t help with that.

But these are your fundamental lip and blush colours. These are your from-within, most intrinsic colours. Using them for eyeglass frames, ties, scarves, and accessories looks good, though the viewer would never know why.

Am I way off? Have I over-simplified or over-complicated?

I’d surely love to hear your opinions. This feels like a linchpin in my understanding of skin and colour. It’s really just a theoretical point, but I think about it.

5 Sunglasses For 5 Seasons

April 7, 2010 by · 5 Comments 

Some sunglasses for Soft Summer, True Spring, True Autumn, Bright Spring, and Dark Winter.

The principles of 12 Season Colour Analysis guide us in so much more than just what colours flatter your skin the most. Those make you look younger than all the other colours.

It’s in how you combine the colours that you express all the images and feelings of that Season, that harmonize best with what your natural coloring is already doing.

By choosing the style that reinforces the colours properly, you become quietly fabulous.

Aim for the heart. You will love the trip and find a new soulmate in yourself.

2 points in this video are confusing. Maybe more than 2.

1. The plum colour of the frame for the Soft Summer glasses doesn’t show up well. The colour is here. Fabulous blush and lipcolour for the Soft Summer, straight out of the personal colour swatches.

2. The point about using frames to balance an unbalanced face shape could be interpreted in various ways.

For one, as I’m sure you’ve seen, people with small faces, or heart shaped faces, wearing big shiny lenses…well, it can look like a bug, you know?

On the other hand, if the face narrows at the chin, a frame that gets wider at the bottom of the lens would counterbalance that.

Since there is no such frame as triangular, another option may be to use a frame where the lines curve from the center out to pull the eye outward, but without curving from the outer edge inward as the aviators do.

This concept is illustrated nicely in this short video. I watched this whole series and learned a heck of a lot.

Bottom line, try them. Bring someone brutally honest with good taste. The first rule of being my shopping partner is to NOT tell me everything looks good. Luckily, I have teenage daughters built-in for this purpose.

All the glasses for these videos were provided by Holland Optical in Chatham, Ontario. Call them at 519-352-8632. Seriously outstanding selection, in a marketing world where so many retailers are just repeating the same thing.

The Right Shade Of Peach

February 28, 2010 by · 5 Comments 

A video blog today.

Peach may be the cosmetic colour that everyone owns in some shade or other. Is yours right for you? Most of the time, it’s too earthy and brown. On a light or clear complexion, that looks heavy and dominating and dull.

For eyeshadow, lipstick, and blush,

The Spring wears a light, yellow-based, very clear peach.

The Summer will fare better in a pastel pink.

Autumn colours mesh best with an earth, golden or browned peach.

Winter colours request icy pink or cool white instead of peach when choosing light colour tones.

A Colour Analysis gives you the knowledge of precisely which shades of all cosmetics colours (and clothes colours) is perfect for your skin tone.

Finally, A True Summer Blush

January 1, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

I searched for 5 months.  I was looking for the colour of deep red-pink rose petals. The cosmetic industry adds brown or peach to almost every colour. It’s so wrong on the coolest, most fragile skin tone we see in Personal Colour Analysis.

The colours and article can be found here, in True Summer’s Cool Rose Blush, at my blog, A Greener Tea.

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