Light Summer CE And Being Not Pale
January 16, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 10 Comments
Keep in your mind who we’re putting these colours on. Next to a cross-section of the population, this person is pale. But let’s call it light, since pallor implies ill health. Sharon Stone, Meryl Streep, they will be overall lighter than most people you put beside them. Their darkest colour never gets very dark.
The Light Summer person is light to look at standing in front of a black wall. But not always. In their natural beige brown hair and eyebrow colour, they look more medium till you start putting colour next to or on their skin. Then you notice that the lightest blusher that would be invisible on most women has a huge effect. To balance and not overtake, their closet is light. Light needn’t mean a bowl of dinner mints. How does a rainbow dress to look interesting and impacting? First, see yourself through others’ eyes.
Nobody complains about looking at rainbows. They feel fresh, hopeful, soothing, and happy. Let yourself be who you are and get media perceptions about power out of your way. The clothing, weight loss, anti-aging, personal growth, and cosmetic industries can get you to buy more stuff if they can convince you there’s something wrong with you. It’s cheaper for them to make clone colours. Please believe me, there is nothing wrong with you. In your light colours, you are breathtaking. The sun shines out through the sky and water of your eye colour. That is such a special magic and few are capable of it.
I had a very beautiful, natural, easy Light Summer client. She arrived quite certain that she was a Winter and was going though the motions of a PCA just to confirm it (and come to find out, she had recently bought light blue and peach Capris just because.) Part of her Winter conviction came from seeing her facial structure as strong or intense, which it was, more in keeping with her ideas about Winter. When I think of Spring Summer blends, fragile doesn’t describe their bone structure – or anybody’s bone structure, for that matter. Meryl Streep (whom she greatly resembled), Sharon Stone, Joni Mitchell, Carmindy, Ivanka Trump (perhaps a stronger Spring), these faces express far more than daintiness. You’ll see many fine-boned faces among all Seasons. Media’s convenient typecast of power as dark, intense, and masculine is very far indeed from what power really is. It’s important to distinguish power from intimidation, the cheapest form of power. And like all things cheap, it is neither sustainable or enduring.
Light Summer is a Summer above all. She likes precision and dislikes clutter. Like True Summer, her personality is considerate, and to a lesser degree, can work the details all day and all night, and be uncompromising about getting them right. She is not really stubborn, just striving towards an idyllic vision that’s almost romantic, as in Utopian.
We often think of ‘feminine’ for True Summer, all lace and flounce, but that’s not quite the right adjective. Womanly is better. Moon goddess. Fertile (her version of earthy), giving, patient, complete (hence the circle symbol). She can be very sentimental though the first interaction may be quite formal. Relationships, wisdom, and intuition are nearer her heart than raw intellect, which on its own strikes her as unkind, one-dimensional, and too boringly linear, logical, and external.
Spring’s arrival brings the potential for a little more giddiness. She’s more cooperative, happy in the middle ground, and so easy to get along with. She loves a laugh and takes life less seriously. The sun is coming out. She has humour, self-directed humour, the single best entry ticket to self-knowledge. She doesn’t get all the way to the stronger Springs’ “If life’s not fun, what’s the point?” but she does think “Why can’t everyone just lighten up and get along? Why did God even make Dark Winters? They’re missing all the good stuff.”
She embodies the simplicity of just being pretty. A little cute but mostly pretty. A face like a doll. Christina Applegate. Light Summer is not tough or rugged, it’s tender. Not stern, it’s lenient. Not funky, but still informal. Life can get so complicated, but not here. This is the afternoon off, the nowhere-to-be day, the tell-your-troubles-to person.
Light Spring is creamy, Soft Summer is foggy, True Summer is cool and misty, Light Summer is sunny and barely misty (or do I mean myst?), like a Once Upon A Time land. The rainbow when the sun comes out. Flower petal showers. Trees always in leaf. The lightest dusting of sugar sprinkled all over, a Cotton Candyland (Light Spring is the Jellybean Candyland).
______________________________________
Polyvore
She wears the light taupe shoe well because her hair is light taupe. On this woman, it actually does elongate the leg.
She may carry a green purse and she’d probably even go about in green pants. Light, fresh, and fun.
Warmth? Cashmere. It comes in so many colours. Likewise, fleece. It floats.
Wash those white pants with your darks to soften the white a bit.
A serious colour? Add a girlie colour.
A lot of light? Add a darker colour in a small area. Sunglasses count. Cool frame, cool lens, light hardware.
The light colours aren’t that light. Winter’s are even lighter because they’re not pastels. Make big use of your medium range of colours to move away from the pale feeling.
Squint to blur the details and you see dappled light, the perfect light on Light Summer.
Could drift away like a thistle on a breeze.
The dress on the left, too dark? Maybe so slightly. Reminded me of bunches of grapes. Good colour flow. Wear a light shrug or Pashmina and a fun shoe. Carry a light purse. Impact without consequences.
Turquoise ruffled blouse too saturated? Maybe. Don’t care. Love the colour on this person and I see it on them just fine (rather than not seeing them in a too-much colour).
Those blue capris, that’s darker and more saturated than your navy. The pants will be what people see so the area will get bigger by proportion. The V-neck top to the right of the yellow dress is better. But, they work well enough. If you look at the whole picture, they don’t jump out.
The fun juicy accessory. Why not? So people see your Miu Miu pink coral clutch first (in the outfit along the R side.) So what. Wear your matching lipstick and carpe diem. Light Summer has that Spring fun element. True Spring is the Hawaiian luau. The luscious scent of the lei, the side to side sway of the hula dance, all about relaxed mood, hips, deliciousness, and fun. Light Summer might not get that unfastened but she’s Spring enough for the hair to come down.
I love when Neutral Seasons (those groups of natural colouring whose inborn pigments are neither 100% cool or 100% warm, but have in-between colouring on the heat scale) demonstrate both Seasons they’re composed of. Wearing cooler and warmer versions of their colours together, as a cool pink lipstick and a light gold lip gloss, is an example. It gives them dimensionality. I also love when they wear both esthetics together. A Soft Summer looks superb in lace (Summer grace) and denim (Autumn strength). A Soft Autumn is beautiful in a flowing scarf (Summer water/flow) and cowboy boots (Autumn leather/desert).
Light Summer’s elements are Summer (graceful, water, feminine) and Spring (sun, movement, sport, play). I love ballet effects (grace and sport) as wrap tops and skirts, ballet flats, scoop necks like leotards, or body-fitting fabric in pretty colours. I love prints a lot, that can show the dewdrops feeling and depict motion with the body’s movements. Outdoor combinations that repeat water and sun, as any kind of sun hat, floppy to baseball to gardening, are great. Small sparkly stones near or on another colour are beautiful, raindrops on roses, as beading on a cardi, better in a wave, or a necklace against a blouse, or an earring near a rose lip.
I was asked how a True Spring expresses two energetic states at once. I haven’t come up with anything because there is only the one energy. That seeming rivalry isn’t there. But there are many ways of depicting the sun and on a True Spring, there is almost no such thing as clutter. A yellow or turquoise Swatch, several beaded bracelets, a necklace of turquoise beads and another of different length with a cluster of small gold charms, all three at once, it just looks better and better. Keep sunshine and colour near the eyes at all times.
——-
In the each Season chapter of the book, there’s section called Colour Equations. To help you see what was in my head when I put those together, and I appreciate that illustrating them is needed, I’ve pasted that section below:
Colour Equations
One light, medium, or dark neutral colour + one light colour or one medium colour
One light to medium-dark neutral colour + one light colour + one medium colour
Two light to medium neutral colours + one other colour as a smaller block
More restrained use of complements as gentler colours or smaller areas
Use of analogous colour combinations, moving towards True Summer’s monochromatic designs
Overall light to medium darkness effect
—————–
I was seeing this:
Is it pale? Well, compared to what? Dusk? Yes. All the black in the stores? Sure. The person we’re putting it on? No.
Does it still feel too light? Add a darker block and keep it smaller. People will see it.
There’s a fair bit of colour variation but still continuity between colours, because that’s what this person looks like. Mixing up the colours even more than what’s shown looks really good. Keep a balance. The more colourful the look, the gentler the colours should be. This isn’t something to worry about if you have a Colour Book of swatches, the gentleness levels are built in.
My thanks to Natalie who pointed me to Alima Pure’s line of cosmetics. The eyeshadow and foundation selections are beautiful, with many choices for Neutral Seasons. Under Products, choose your category and when the page opens, click View Swatches. You’ll see the whole panel open up for comparisons with colour accuracy that appears very good. I can’t recommend particular colours, having never tested them, but if you have experience with this line, please do leave a comment.
If we’re dressing to repeat how we already look (and we are because it feels good to the viewer), the overall effect shouldn’t get darker than medium on a white to black scale. Big light blocks can look bridal or sterile, not right on a fun-in-a-quiet way, optimistic, and cheerful person. Getting too saturated or busy with colour means her clothes compete with her and win. If colours get too dark, her skin will be drained and grey (and it will follow, who needs grayer teeth?) Remember too that viewers have a lot more colours to process besides your clothes – there’s hair, makeup, eyes, and that big block of skin – that aren’t in the graphic above. They will thank you if everything matches.
The Dance
How could I forget the music? From classical ballet origins in True Summer and then loosened up when Spring appeared. Spring brings magic and mysticism, freedom and imagination.
Proving that anybody can make fire:
Too hot for Light Summer? Maybe that’s Light Spring’s and we need something dreamier? A reader felt a connection with this very beautiful harp music.
The True Spring With Dark Hair
December 20, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 28 Comments
Or
Tension Vs. Relief
Or
Learn To Trust Your Feelings
A fascinating draping experience recently.
A woman of Northern Italian descent. Her overall appearance was of a mid-range darkness level. From the nose down, she had an Old World Mona Lisa face shape. Dark beige hair and eyebrows (hair growing out an orange-red dye), light brown lashes. Her eyes are large and a green brown colour that glowed yellow if lit from the side. Baby perfect skin that seemed fairly clear, more translucent than restrained in colour clarity. Her mind could spin in three directions at once. This lady could change topics on a dime.
One of my reasons for loving the Sci\ART analysis system is that it self-checks as it proceeds. No Season is canceled until we have multiple sources of corroborating evidence, meaning many different comparisons that always gave consistent results. We were sure she was a True Warm. Our choices were down to True Spring and True Autumn.
This is where it got difficult. She was one of the few women I’ve met who was not even slightly drawn to Autumn colours. My gut feeling was always Spring in every contest. In the end, True Spring brought out a delicacy in the features that Autumn would blunt. We saw darker shadows under the eyes in Autumn drapes. The edge of the iris was fuzzier. It was the Spring brown that most intensified eye colour, not Autumn’s camel brown.
The dark haired True Spring won’t look like Charlize Theron. Lightness is not True Spring’s TMIT (the most important thing). Of course, even Seasons whose TMIT is lightness can have dark hair because hair colour is very varied among all Seasons. True Spring’s TMIT is yellowed warmth. The Season doesn’t get very dark but the colours that most folks associate with True Spring actually reside in Light Spring. When we finally wrap ourselves around True Spring’s palette, we say “Oh, wow, I didn’t get how much colour there is.” Most people would be physically fatigued after an hour of trying to match the energy of True Spring colours. When we’re dealing in brown, there’s a lot of brown.
The richness of colour and the high degree heat give True Spring’s colours much more intensity that we expect. The darker colours are so saturated that on a person of fair skin, they can appear to be fairly dark. Put that hair on the head of a dark person and it would look lighter, like sandy brown. The same colour that looks quite dark on Helen Mirren will look just medium on Sandra Bullock. The question we want to answer is “What are your darks? Which colours make up your perfect set of just-right-darkness darks?”
Natural hair colour isn’t always typical of the average for any Season. Indeed, there’s very little yellowed hair growing from heads over 35. If that colour were added to the hair, it would look great on most True Springs but not all. Many True Springs don’t have Uman Thurman’s Nordic genes. They are inherently darker of hair and eye. Highlights are never a necessity nor do they flatter everyone in any Season. As we saw in The Emmas Are True Springs Part 1, the result of a PCA can be quite unexpected, and never more than for True Spring.
I try to think of resemblances because I often see people for 3 hours and never again. I can’t always remember faces for future email questions. Also, it helps us picture changes on ourselves if we can apply them to a look alike. This woman made me think of Lucrezia Borgia. There was a Renaissance quality to her face.
The facial progressions to find a modern day version landed on Spanish actress Sophia Valverde. She could be a dark Winter for all I know, but could you agree that she doesn’t seem an automatic Autumn? There’s a lightness of colour and a delicate bone structure. She is more streamers (Spring) than building blocks or bricks (Autumn). Is that just because she’s 20 and beautiful? Yes, sure, very possible.
Here she is as Lucrezia.
And another version of the same woman.
María Valverde Pictures
What does streamers and building blocks tell you about a person’s colours? Nothing. Season can only be known by in person draping. I’m not trying to prove Maria is a Spring. It’s just fun to think about. Have a look through this evolution of Maria. I found Picture 9 most interesting. Then, let’s compare her to Jillian Michaels (watch the video clip) and go through our Autumn vs Spring question list.
Who is an unattractive blonde? Maybe both women are. Jillian has great Autumn hair colour. Blonde would not be nearly so good, though not as rough as on a Dark Autumn. There, if she’s 30, she looks 50, and if she’s 50, she looks a much older woman, as if she’s frosted her hair with grey for some reason. The pale pink lip they put on Jillian looks grey, as every pastel does on Autumn.
Who feels like bricks? Jillian does, perhaps part of her media persona, but it doesn’t feel a big stretch. Maria looks to have a lighter, more playful touch.
Who wears corduroy, who taffeta? I’d suggest J and M in that order.
Who wears toffee lips, who clear salmon? I don’t see J in clear salmon. Maria? Well, I’d be open to either. You don’t have to know the answer to every question just as the winner in every drape contest won’t be obvious or easy. Maria in toffee lips makes me feel like I did when Leslie Stahl of TV’s 60 Minutes wore a curry lipstick. Goodness gracious, it wasn’t good.
Whose energy is best described by ‘solidly grounded’? Ms. Michaels definitely is. Maria seems too delicate. If one of these is the little coloured glass figurine that sits on a little mirror, it’s Maria.
Photo galleries are a good exercise in learning to recognize tension and relief. Don’t think about shadows or makeup and so forth. Only think about when looking feels most relaxed. Only think about where your guts don’t tighten up at all. Where do you need zero internal adjustments, where is it all acceptance and no resistance? Where is there no distraction of external stuff to process before you get through to the real person? Every time you change the photo, every time I change a drape, tune into your first response – did you feel a step forward or a step back? Maria’s gallery is here. Lightness or golden-blond, as the photo leaning on white wall never feels so good, too heavy or thick. Something about the long peach dress works.
Renata’s recent post on Ivanka Trump shows another woman who reminds me a lot of Maria. Similar face structure, like the singer, Dwight Yoakam. They sure could be Soft Autumn, but I’d sure be keeping True Spring in mind till they’re draped.
A most astute True Spring reader sent me this photo of Nicole Richie. That seems a True Spring red, maybe even more saturated than that depending on your monitor (which would push it into the Brights). I have no idea what Season the woman is, though the stereotype pushes you to drawing Soft Autumn assumptions and maybe that’s correct. I’m just saying that you have to stay very open to the possibilities. This colour doesn’t look completely overwhelming on her. She is sorry in black and sad in white, so are Soft Autumn, Light Spring, and many True Warm Season people. Have a look at this most interesting gallery. All this yellow coming out of these eyes- who knew it was there?
Michelle Williams is similar. Many blonde hair green-eyed celebs like Hilary Duff and Kate Moss seem Soft Autumn to me. Not this woman. The pixie face, the general sense of lightness, dimpled cuteness and youth, speak to me of Spring. ‘Strong, solid roots’ doesn’t seem to capture her somehow. Ethereal, sprite, and fairy fit better. She’s not a great ash blonde, nor is she a natural blonde. See all the yellow in the eyes?
She is a great honey blonde. She can go incredibly yellow and just gets prettier.
Photo linked to Allure Beauty Trends blog.
Perhaps we haven’t learned much we didn’t already know besides illustrations of the difference between tawny (Autumn) and perky (Spring). And how hard it can be to see the difference and the many ways in which it got hidden. That’s fine. Seeing the infinite variations of beauty never stops inspiring us.
We often look at one another’s photos. The fascination and the problem with them is that until we see you in person and in your right colours, we haven’t really seen you. I find this with every woman whose photos I’ve looked at many times, then finally see in her right colours at a draping. It took those colours to fill in the missing blank, to express everything that that woman is, not just some parts of her. This is where the frustration of searching for your right colours arises, of trying to come up with that last elusive jigsaw piece. You know you haven’t been seen, or been seen as someone else, and you’re tired of living the half-truth.
One of the basic questions asked by philosophy is “Who am I?” But we get confused and uncertain, with age and media and so on. Eventually, what we are looking to answer is “Is this me?” Without knowing that, it’s hard to move on to answer “What is my place here? What is my purpose?” That’s what the woman sitting in front of the analyst’s mirror is looking to recognize. It helps her pin down “This is part of me. That is not part of me. The border between the two is here.” That’s why women want to know and understand their colours and how to express their colour language. And why it disturbs many analysts so much to hear that they’ve tried and tried and keep getting different answers. At least know that there are analysts as distressed by this as you are who aim to fix the problem, even if it means exposing it, discussing it openly, maybe ruffling a few feathers, and then moving away from these Dark Ages to a lighter, truer, more educated place.
PS – about a question on differentiating Spring and Autumn’s peach:
Spring’s peach can be found in a pile of cooked cold shrimp on one of those $2.50 rings you can buy, you know? You can perceive gentle white, young skin pink, and clear luminous yellow. And it’s moist.
Autumn’s peach is more likely to be in a bouquet of dried flowers. It will look duller and drier. If asked whether you pick up the same colours as the shrimp ring or let’s say, the presence of tapestry beige, brick red, and muted gold, you’d choose the latter.
In the Comments, Renata asked for a visual of the comparison. Huge thanks to Margo for creating the graphic below, a gift of creativity and time.
Note: I do not own the photos on this page. Wherever possible, they are linked to the site of origin. If you own these images and would like them removed from this page, I would be happy to do so.
How Winters Intensify Eye Colour
September 10, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments
How the other 9 Seasons intensify eye colour has been discussed in previous posts (Spring, Summer, Autumn). I neglected Winter because I figured these eyes don’t need a lot of help, they tend to be self-emphasizing. I thought I wouldn’t have much to say (will I ever learn?). But I was wrong, there are still ways to make what you have better, and really important ways not to make things worse.
Previously, we said you can emphasize eye colour, or any colour, by repeating it, by using the complementary colour, or by using contrast.
For All 3 Winters
1. Coloured eyeliner, of course. Sometimes repeating your eye colour works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it’s because there’s conflict with your inherent pigmentation, skin and eyes being usually made of very similar pigments. Stick with the personal colour palette. Once you get a perfect colour for your skin, it will automatically be perfect for your eyes and hair. At what point obvious colour in eye makeup becomes too young is your decision, and might depend on your age, your taste, where you live, and what kind of day it is.
The exact colours to buy are in the swatch book. If you try to guess at the best brown/blue/purple/green, you have about a 20% chance of being right. Think of how many blue or green eyeliners are available. If you know your Season, you could look at the colours Sci\ART analyst and makeup artist Darin Wright has posted, and sells, at eleablake.com. Go Personal Makeup Colors > Liner > Eye Liners > then pick your Season. Some of us couldn’t scroll down to the lower ones, but one smart woman pointed out that using the up/down/left/right keys works for her, and it did for me too.
You have darkness, so very dark pure plums, violets, and sapphires can look like a softened black if obvious colour isn’t to your taste.
These eyes are very hard to dominate. Heavy liner looks fine, certainly on the Darks and Trues. Bright Winter is a more delicate face, always something of the sprite, and some may need a lighter hand with dark liner. IMO, black doesn’t suit anybody unless you’re very dark, darker than Halle Berry, because it’s too hard. Very blackened browns and greys look more real and less pharaoh.
2. Wearing your eye colour in clothing, which is more effective than eye makeup since the colour block is bigger. The high colour saturation in Winters strengthens the effect even more. Winter looks cluttered and fussy wearing many colours at once but the colour(s) they do wear are very bold. Since there’s less colour distracting the eye, the one colour it does see is maximally compelling. If it happens to match the eye colour, they carry each other that much higher.
3. Wearing makeup. No group looks more heightened with makeup than Winter and they know it, often not leaving the house without a fair bit of it – but, boy, it can take them places. If any group can carry a little too much, it’s this one.
4. Generic brown eyeshadow is too hot, flat, and safe for this group. They are far more grey people. It looks cleaner and sharper. Grey includes a thousand choices from ice to near-black. The Darks will wear iron and diesel smoke. The Trues and Brights wear stainless steel and coal.
It becomes essential to learn your right greys, the colour I think is the most challenging and often the last one people get very comfortable choosing after their PCA, but such a high-efficiency engine in clothing and eyeliner. I appreciate that the idea of saturated grey is oxymoronic. Closeness to greyness is how we decide a colour is of low saturation. What does Winter do, who needs high sat everything?
It comes together in an item that looks densely pigmented, like a heavy layer of paint, not gauzy or watery or dilute or sheer. Light wouldn’t shine through it – or so it should feel, even if the item is sheer. The grey consists of B&W only, which looks harder, not bluish or pinkish or any ishes, which look softer. Sound softer. Hear ish and the whole message softens, like speaking with your head straight (no ish) or tipped (ishy). Seeing another colour with the grey, like Summer’s mauve greys, feels like the compromise we associate with softening or muting, the presence of 2 colours at once. There’s no iffiness about Winter’s colour. It is or it’s not. Water can be lots of colours but nobody argues over the colour of blood. Solid B&W grey feels like no bargain, no deal, no give…why, just like Winter!
6. These eyes can be black brown to the point that no detail can be seen in the iris and the intensity of the colour doesn’t seem much affected by colour. What is strongly affected in every one of these eyes will be the crispness around the edge of the iris. In wrong colour, it blurs and fuzzes, which, of course, is happening to the whole face. The same colour suggestions apply regardless of eye colour if the skin Season is Winter.
7. Complementary colours exist opposite each other on the colour wheel. In each other’s presence, they set up a current, almost a pulsation.
Notice the blueness of the white of the eye above? In right colour, that blueness is accentuated. It acts as a complement for orange-brown in eyes. Self-emphasizing eyes, just by pulling on the right shirt!
This seems easy. The usual pairs are,
Blue if brown eyes.
Brown for blue eyes.
Purple for yellow.
Red for green.
Be careful. You need the right complement. Every single blue and every single orange don’t come together to make the vibration of adjacent complements. It’s not just low-lying fruit. The money shot depends on getting it right. Make your blues more purple, the complements get yellower. Make your inborn blues more saturated and redder, complements get more staurated and yellower.
Luckily, once you know your inborn colours, you Colour Book contains their inborn complements. It’s actually really hard to know your exact eye colour and which pigments matter to make the colour effect work. A blue eyed Winter isn’t going to have big use for yellow in makeup, but can sure wear primary yellow in clothes. She’ll repeat the blue in liner and then contrast the white of the eye by choosing a dark blue liner.
Play with your eye colour and this tool (enter Complimentary under Scheme and play with the Sat and Brightness sliders.)
If you have a brown eye, all the blues in your personal colour swatches will complement the orange tones, brown just being dark orange. Pick the ones that make sense to you as eye makeup, like the black sapphire liner.
Green eyes are obviously not going to pick red eyeliner, they’ll pick red clothes. Many Winter greys have a red undercurrrent because red is a huge part of the undertone. I have really never seen a subtle red presence in grey in clothes or eye makeup. I doubt these items are coloured that specifically. If you could find it, it would be interesting with eyes that contain green.
8. Contrasts?
When I say contrast, I’m almost always meaning light-dark contrast, or value contrast, though there are other types. Wearing the lightest lights and the darkest darks at once is as important on Winter as getting their colour right. It applies to makeup as well as clothes and jewelry.
A very defined and precisely shaped brow is so important. It can be almost old-world movie star stylized. Elizabeth Taylor eyebrows. Casual is not so successful on Winter. Can you even imagine her in sweats? It’s almost impossible. Winter finds it hard to make jeans work and easy to dress up.
Define the brow with pencil or powder of the same colour, not darker, which can be picked out a mile away and looks cliche. Some Winters have a light brow. Go with that. To thine own self, right? It introduces gentleness that’s not expected and is extremely approachable and attractive.
Another way to define the brow is to surround it with light colour (highlight below, foundation above), like they surround the lips with light colour on makeup ads to make them jump out of the page. Always find ways to heighten the contrast on Winter. Winters will choose an extreme icy light under the brow.
You’re using very light and very dark eyeshadows. The eyeliner is quite dark, almost black. These 3 Seasons look good with dark eyeliner on the inner rims of the eyelids. Everyone else looks too vicious. Winter looks fierce, which they already look like anyhow (and are) so the stretch isn’t beyond credibility. It looks hard and they look hard, both in a good way. Great partnership (terrible grammar, sorry, Word is sending me all sorts of flags.) You haven’t altered course. The needle is still pointed the same way. You’re elevating what you are already, the name of the game.
9. Mascara is blackest black and lots of it.
Dark Winter
In 12 Season personal colour analysis, Dark Winter is the group whose natural colouring is mostly composed of the Winter palette pigments, incorporating an Autumn portion that will darken, mute, and warm the colours as though 4 drops of darkest chocolate were mixed in. They might look like Demi Moore, Sandra Bullock, or Paula Begoun.
I apologize to women of colour who get tired of being outnumbered by women of light Caucasian skin in these discussions. My own experience is with light complexions so I’m more comfortable suggesting makeup for that skin. Among my clients, one woman of Indian ethnicity was Dark Winter. Asian women have been Bright Winters and Bright Spring. One African-American was Dark Winter. I used the very same makeup for them that I do for light women and they looked great. No doubt, more intense and darker colour would have worked as well.
Eyeliner is black brown or dark gunmetal. Dark Winter is not playful, they’re functional. When I wear coloured liner, my children say “Mom, you’re just not that happy.” I just found out I am an INTJ personality, same as Bill Gates, which is weird because he doesn’t look Dark. Ben Bernanke, now, that makes complete sense. I quite love the eleablake liners in Currant, Walnut, and Midnight Blue. If Dark is going to do colour, do it right. It gets cartoony quick.
Teal matters. As a repeat to teal in the eye colour or to complement the orange tones in brown eyes, whether in makeup or clothing or jewelry, this is an important colour for everyone with any Autumn in them. Some degree of gold-orange, in this Season it’s the darkest, coolest version as darkest chocolate brown, is present in the skin and overall colouring.
Eyeshadow is dull dark grey (with an icy highlight under the brow). Clinique Totally Neutral is good. I see Edward Bess Soft Smoke and Chanel Gris Exquis online and they look good. MAC Smut is a contender, with a good name. Dark Winter grey is like a dark, dull, dirty (not dusty, which lightens as it dulls) grey.
The Darks can do a brown in eyeshadow better than the other Winters because of that browning-by-Autumn element. It is purpley. I mix Dynamic and Groovy.
True Winter
Could be Liv Tyler, Josh Groban, Elvis Presley, Anne Hathaway.
Eyeliners are black brown, coal, black if you insist, black sapphire, and dark purple.
True Winter is quiet. They are not working (Dark) or playing (Bright). Shape and outline matter more than colour. A perfectly lined eye using white and mid to darkest gray, that would look no different if seen on B&W TV, has unbelievable impact.
Red is the signature colour of the Winter group…and so eleablake gives True Winter the perfect cool, dark green liner in Eucalyptus.
Of all the Winters, True adds the fewest colour elements. They are perfectly defined and refined by B&W alone in very symmetric but strongly defined shapes. Colour in clothing can almost get in the way of the eye colour. One colour should stand alone, like one leaf left on a frozen tree, one red berry on a bush. Let that one colour be the eyes. And then the lips. I’ve never seen any other group do this B&W+eyes effect with such force. They’re just electrifying (explosive will be the territory of the Brights.)
Chanel Smoky Eyes is a good all-in-one quad. It’s sparkly, which looks good on the young. For the rest of us, it’s those cleanest greys in a matte version.
Bright Winter
Bright Winter describes the natural colouring of the person who is primarily Winter, with the faintest yellow light shining on the colours, making them lighter, clearer, and a bit warmer than True Winter’s. Who? Zooey Deschanel, Audrey Hepburn, Liza Minelli, the cute pixieness of Spring but the glamour is bigger.
Fun not functional applies to all Spring blends. Winter is the bigger gun in Bright Winter and brings with it glitz and shine. When you mix the two, the flash can’t be held back. Cat eyes, shine, colour, it all works, but stay true to Winter’s need for control and just do one thing at a time in a reserved way. Winter holds too much back to fit 100% with thrills and bright lights.
Here, coloured eyeliner to the point of crayon actually makes sense. It can also backfire if you get it wrong and take away from the eye colour. Depending on your colouring, this is the lightest of the Winters. Your eyeliners are here.
Purple is to any Spring what teal is to any Autumn: important. An element of yellow is present in every colour in the palette/person. Know your purples. Yours are lighter than TW and DW, more variations on sugarplum and poster violet than majesty purple.
The Chanel Smoky Eyes quad is a great choice here too, or equivalent colours. I think L’Oreal makes a Smoky Eyes. MAC has a number of greys, though I wish they weren’t all so dark and similar. They need to make the same grey range that they’ve done so well with brown.
Examples
First: Reminder: The importance of blush to heighten eye colour can’t be overstated.
With such strong eyes, a lip with enough colour to at least be natural is important or the eyes look spooky. The TW face seems off-balance. You’ll see the current page number above her photos and the Page option below so you can move around.
The lips should be in contrast with the skin just like every other feature. On a young girl, fire engine lips can look like playing dress up. She’ll wear clear fuchsia pinks, sheer reds, and purple glosses. The whole strong eye-pale mouth look, I never love it on any Winter. Lip colour doesn’t have to be dark, especially if lips are thick or thin, but the lips should not look like they’re wearing concealer or be chalky. Choose a sheer plum. Wear a nude look, but your nudes won’t be in the same tube as Soft Autumn’s.
The bottom of page 2 is bizarre, like Snow Princess disguised as Cinderella-pre-prince. What could be has been diminished utterly. I couldn’t find this girl till the second last photo Page 8. I can’t even talk about the one above it. Hair colour matters. Even on a Winter, spending all your time on the eyes and forgetting the rest isn’t a look that works outside of magazines, like the second one down Page 10.
As a general impression to the viewer, these colours on Elizabeth Taylor don’t hold a candle to these. The eye colour is grayed, the liner is too hot so the whites of the eyes are yellowed, the face looks pudgy. Quite possibly the most beautiful lips ever given to a woman just make you want to turn the page. The next one is the goddess. Do you know what the waterline of the eye is? The inner rim of the lower lid. It’s a makeup effect to draw a white line on it because it looks so clean and healthy (off whites and beiges on other Seasons). In right colours, it will be very white on everyone, very important effect on Summers who can be quite pinkish to begin with. See how white it is in the good photo – that’s been edited in but it just elevates what’s already there. If it were placed in the worse photo, it would look weird or sinister, it could never fit in. And yet it belongs on this woman.
Our Eye Album: More Beautiful Eyes
July 30, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 3 Comments
I’ll begin with a sincere thank you to everyone who contributed eye photographs. When I began looking more closely at eyes, my reaction was “How in the world have I not seen this before? Is this magic in everybody?” And you can see that it is.
The first pair of eyes is from the same person, a right and a left. Notice that the colour detail is more varied in the left eye. Our strongest eye pattern is usually on the dominant side. This person began life left-handed, changed over at some point, but has retained many left-hand dominant psychomotor tendencies.
Right eye.
Left eye.
These are the eyes of a Light Summer, so the Summer person who incorporates a smaller fraction of Spring. We see the relative absence of strong lines and designs. The random flecks of brown in the left eyes are often seen in Autumn eyes. Many people probably contain traces of other Seasons that are either not present in the skin, or not enough to shift the most perfect colour palette.
We might all have secondary Seasons and tertiary Seasons in PCA, but it can be hard enough telling colours apart with 12 Seasons. Adding more categories would render the colours impossible to tell apart, so the process loses in usability.
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And finally, a selection of just plain beautiful eyes and colours.
You may read about an Aztec star around the pupil of Dark Autumn eyes. As in the eye below, the colour is dark bronzed-brown hugging the pupil, with the points of a star round the edge. In some people, the points of the star are very clearly defined.
The eye below came with a story. This woman has been draped as a Cool Winter (I think that’s about like Sci\ART’s True Winter, but the systems do have differences). She doesn’t feel right in the blacks and darks. The only way to resolve this would be to drape again, staying very open to the possibility of a Summer, from the open circle round the pupil and absence of intense pattern in the iris. The gray-blue in the open circle and the yellow in the skin, and beige (not brown) lashes could suggest Light Summer.
Now, I have no idea, right? The eye seems gentle (Summer), not intense or relentless (True Winter), but I haven’t even seen the whole face in a photo, let alone IRL. Sometimes, the PCA result is correct but it takes some time, practice, comparison, and convincing to have the woman herself see it. Sometimes, the result is off because some people are just really tough to analyze. There is nothing wrong with a mistake, we all make them every day to help us learn and get stronger. An open-mind is a beautiful thing.
Each of us carries our own personal rainbow within.
Our Eye Album: Winter
July 24, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 13 Comments
Many Winter eyes.
Dark Winter
This colour appears mostly cool, not a lot of warmth in the eye. The petal shapes are undoubtedly Winter. The brow is light. The woman draped out most fantastically as a Dark Winter. One of the most amazing transformations I have seen.
Freckle colour is not useful for determining Season, but they are interesting. Below, the brown is netural (not orange), and as often happens, similar shades appear in the eye. The natural hair colour is dark cool brown with red glints in the sun. Notice the coolness of the skin – the magic of the Dark Winter, cool skin with warm effects in hair and eyes.
I put the eye below here because it feels like it belongs, though the woman has not had a PCA. There is darkness here in brow and hair, and a feeling of slight muting in the skin.
In the next photo, you see the Dark Autumn influence, the eye of the tiger. The determination in the straightness of the brow (look for it in Soft Summers too, or anywhere Autumn is found), the hint of orange-brown in the skin. This woman draped better as a Dark Winter.
Below, me.
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True Winter
Once you stop wondering what brand of mascara this woman uses, notice the blue-whiteness of the white of the eye.
Lots of geometry, lines, patterns, usually means Winter.
Remember how Summer had that well-defined line-free ring around the pupil? Notice that in Winter, that space has lines going right to the edge of the pupil and its edges are not as clear.
Wow. Ice princess.
Below, my daughter, whose eye I’ve tried to capture for years. In every shot, the brown seems to snap to black. I had to lighten this shot so you could see anything and it’s still not easy. Many Winter people have black in the eye that comes out in Winter’s blackened colours.
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Bright Winter
I have only one. If you had to pick between yellow and orange in the skin, which would you choose? Note that this is a man’s eye. The pigmentation in men is often more intense than in women of the same Season.
A new Bright Winter, below. Intense concentration of pigment in the hair, high contrast with the eye colour, the promise of early sun in the iris and in the overall appearance.
And another. This woman must look simply striking in her colours, with the unexpected ability of what seems a gentle colouring to balance a palette that is anything but gentle.
The eye below is as interesting as it is beautiful. The iris has certain properties that could be seen in a Light Summer eye – a space around the pupil, the hint of light beaming out from around that space – but there is drama, intensity, and darkness that would make you take a closer look for Winter. At the 10 oclock position round the pupil in the center, you can see the line pattern beginning right at the margin with the black. At 3 oclock in the iris is a petal shaped formation in the blue that is often seen in Winter. The similarity between Bright Winter and Light Summer is reasonable – both begin with a pure cool Season and both integrate the same small portion of Spring.
Our Eye Album: Autumn
July 18, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 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.
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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.
Our Eye Album: Summer
July 12, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 19 Comments
The previous post, Our Eye Album: Spring, contains a few introductory notes.
Many wonderful Summer pictures. I’ve put them in Light, True, Soft Summer order. Hovering the cursor over each will give you the Season.
Summer eyes are the most predictable, unless they’re brown, in which case I find it very tough to read anything. Look for a flower or ring-shaped space around the pupil that has no lines in it. Look at the iris and notice the gentlest rippling water type lines, no definite serpentines, stars, or petal shapes. The 3rd eye from the top is an exception in that it contains a lot of lines and patterns, like a kaleidoscope.
I’m not getting all worried here that lighting and focus may not be perfect. My explanations are just fun observations. I never look in an eye before or during a PCA, because I don’t want any nagging second thoughts if eye patterns and skin don’t match. The skin absolutely is the deciding factor.
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Light Summer
Can you see the faintest pale yellow light coming out in a ring, out in the iris?
Notice in the above eye that all the colours are soft, light, even watery, and that the skin is faintly yellow(Spring) and pink (Summer)?
Below is the eye of a 12 year old girl whom I draped 2 years ago as a True Summer, with true pure blue eyes. Yellow has come into her skin and her eye has changed dramatically. The overall colour has warmed and the yellow ring is present in the iris.
She’s presently cleanest and freshest in Light Summer, but so very close to tipping over into Light Spring. There were so many beautiful effects in Light Spring that my decision was something of a compromise. By the age of sixteen, I expect she’ll be a Spring of some sort. She’s been able to adjust her own wardrobe accordingly, as children often can. Her hair is yellow-white and has not changed.
The pair of eyes below belong to the same woman. She is a Light Summer, with True Summer as second best but lacking in the ability to refine the features or add a creamy, even-coloured quality to her skin. She wondered if seeming dark to look at, at least from her hair colour which is a darker grey, would exclude her from belonging to the Light Seasons, but she already knew the answer: No!! What matters is which colours make your skin and face the most perfect. Hair colour is only loosely tied to Season.
This pattern is fantastic. It reminds me of being underwater and looking up at the sun, especially the lower photo where the yellow seems to serpentine through the iris. In the upper eye, the sun is mostly seen in the points, arranged in a circle out in the iris. This leaves the appearance of a grey rim round the outside of the iris, a very frequent Light Summer effect, which is very striking in person and can be heightened a lot with right-coloured clothing and makeup.
The eyes have that open, line-free, very distinct floral shape round the pupil which is Summer. The ability to see some lines and the more defined geometry from 8 to 10 in the upper eye are not uncommon in Spring blends. Both contain a lot of yellow (Spring). There is some orange but it’s clear, not clouded as Autumn’s is, and it’s not uncommon to see it in Spring influenced-eyes. A Spring effect can put irregularity in the eye patterns, I find them the least predictable, maybe because I haven’t looked at enough Spring eyes. The lashes are light and have warmth. Also a fair bit of yellow and pink in the skin.
The thing that would surprise you most about the Light Summer people to whom these eyes belong is that about one third of them are dark haired. They may be iron grey or medium dark brunettes, not the stereotypic blonde and light beiges you expect. And yet, the supremely beautiful eye below is classic for Light Summer, though the woman’s hair is fairly dark brown. The overall colour is watery with lots of grey (Summer), the lines are like gentle ripples in water (Summer, not Winter’s heavy spokes and serpentines), and the faintest yellow sun is coming in as a wreath in the iris close to the pupil, to signal the Spring presence. Light Summer is the doll’s face come to life, the big, round eyes and small, beautiful mouth. The woman below is the dark-haired doll, petite face with girlish features, big eyes, smaller perfect mouth and chin. You can see Spring’s faint yellowness and youthful perfection in her skin.
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True Summer
Classic True Summer, the eye above. The open space, the greyed colour, the pink skin, the medium sandy brown lashes. The camera picked up the odd orange fleck is floating around, an Autumn influence, but there is no heat in the skin.
Blue, blue eye, no apparent heat, pink skin and blood vessels. The brown around the pupil is cool greyed taupe. I don’t see any heat here.
Below, we see an eye with a lot of line pattern. This woman would probably be overwhelmed in Winter’s blackened, intense colours, but she has some darkness in her. The white of the eye is a soft white, not the intense blue white you see in the Winter Eye Album. Nonetheless, we would have to drape carefully for Winter.
The eyes below are those of a woman who draped as a True Summer. Sandy brown lashes, a soft white of the eye, and beautiful clear water effects in the iris corroborate that. What’s special is the amount of heat (meaning warm colours like golds and browns) that have found their way into the iris. Like the eye just above, there’s also a fair bit of line pattern and the lines begin just at the edge of the iris, effects seen more in Spring and Winter. As magnificent as it is, these are a lovely reminder of why we don’t do colour analysis by eye colour.
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Soft Summer
Very muted colours, little line pattern, could be similar to the 4th Light Summer, except the skin seems greyer, not sunny.
More warmth in this eye. This woman wondered if she was a Soft Autumn, and the heat is coming in, but she drapes better in Soft Summer.
The 2 photos below go together. This very beautiful woman was recently analyzed (online) as a Soft Summer. 20 years ago, an analysis said Soft Autumn. A later PCA said a Dark Winter, but the makeup and colours felt too dark and aging. This threesome of Seasons is one of the most commonly confused. The eye supports one of the Soft Seasons. I’ve talked before about the particular facial geometry of many Soft Summers, with the delicately carved cheekbones and jawline and the very symmetric and beautifully fine-edged outline of the face. Here you see a perfect example. No other palette than Soft Summer will reveal these. In Soft Autumn colour, the edges are far less defined and the features seem blunted, not nearly as delicately clean as this.
Our Eye Album: Spring
July 6, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments
No aspect of human form or colouring do I find more beautiful than eyes. The more photos I looked at, the more it seemed that such collectively splendid human truth should be compiled.
This is our family album, a celebration of the miracle of Nature’s creation. Let yourself be uplifted by the intricate simplicity of her use of colour, in our home planet as in our own body. I payed no heed to which PCA system determined Season, or how perfect the photographic conditions.
I am not attaching words except to say that eye colour and pattern are not sure guides to Season. Season, hair, and eyes come in any and every combination. As well, train yourself to look at everything in the photo. Notice the colour of skin, lashes, blood vessels, the rims of the eyelids, and the white of the eye.
A special tip of my hat to Color Me A Season founder Bernice Kentner who was first to deduce the eye colour and pattern association with Season. Her book, The Magnificent Eye, contains all the explanations you need to get started.
If you have pictures like these and know your Season, please do send them to me at christine@12blueprints.com and I will gladly add them.
Spring eyes have been a fascination to me in that they are barely ever what I expect. I cannot come up with a consistent pattern except the presence of yellow. Quite in keeping with the unpredictability of Spring. Line patterns in the iris may be very defined, to the point of crossing into Winter’s eyes. Lines radiating out from the edge of the pupil are more defined than Summer’s (often barely discernible), though less than Winter’s. There is often a lot of yellow, but not always, and not always organized as a ring in the iris. The yellow is usually yellow to strong peach, seldom an earthy orange-brown (which belongs to the Autumns), but sometimes the distinction isn’t so obvious.
Light Spring
Pure cool colours in the eye below, much more definite lines, Winter characteristics. But the skin is light yellow and so are the lashes.
See the yellow ring out in the iris?
Below, on a Summer base blue (little line detail, line-free ring around the pupil) there are brown flecks that seem Autumn, lots of yellow that’s not organized into a ring, and petal shapes that could suggest Winter. Eyes can be as misleading as helpful. They can give away too much about the real us, as we well know. The skin and lashes seem light, clear, yellow, and pink.
Notice what is so uniquely beautiful in the eye below: there are two rings of sunshine! One at the outer edge of the brown spacer round the iris and another at the outer edge of the iris, with many a sunbeam connecting the two rings. These eye photos just get better and better. The eye belongs to the very beautiful Light Spring woman in the light coral drape just under the eye. She and I both find it interesting that her facial structure resembles Louise’s in the article Louise And Stevan Are Light Springs (Light Spring eye 1 at the top belongs to Louise.) The haircolour you see is her natural colour. Her skin could not look more perfect.
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True Spring
True to everything else about this Season, the eye pattern are the most unpredictable. What the cameras are picking up is amazing.
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Bright Spring
Eye patterns can seem so confusing, but in retrospect, once you know your Season, it can be so obvious. Bright Spring … the Season that combines a lot of Spring (seen in the yellow ring out in the iris, separated by a small distance from the edge of the pupil) and a little Winter (you can see that the spoke lines begin right at the pupil edge and go out to the outer edge of the iris). This skin isn’t very yellow or warm because Winter puts a lot of red here. But there’s Spring clarity in that eye, like beach glass.
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A Blonde True Winter Part 2
June 30, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 22 Comments
Perhaps you met Hanka, the newest member of the Sci\ART family of personal colour analysts, in the first article, A Blonde True Winter.
If you have watched an analysis performed, you could accept any result as amazing, surprising, but completely plausible. The Sci\ART process forces you to just see what is, not what you think should be, a reality check.
Your eyes only need to see this once to go through to the other side, where the Season stereotypes have evaporated. You know the feeling of being dragged to your colour frontiers, resisting all the way (because the change we resist the hardest is the one we need to make the most to reach our next level), and surrendering the preconceptions. After that, like with all change, you realize it was harder to think about than to actually do.
But enough philosophy. Hanka responded to some doubts in the Comments of the previous article. People very rightly ask for visual proof. I’m not posting the blonde photo here, I’m hoping you’ll see this one first, and let it imprint itself in your mind (and you’ll turn inwards and find an awareness of the pathways your mind immediately starts to set out on, with so little substantiation; until you’re aware of that, you can’t have a roadblock ready for next time.) Hanka has done a lot of work in voice and theater, and sent me this photo from a performance a short while ago.
I never analyze skin from photos, far too many variables going on, so I look for other things.
1. Am I looking at makeup or the woman? The woman. I see intensity of colouration, whites are sharp, colours appear highly saturated, no soft, misty feeling. No sunshine, no earthy feelings, even in the skin, from what I can see.
2. Did dark eyeliner close in the size of the eye, because it would on someone who couldn’t balance the darkness? No. In fact, the eyes seem bigger with crisper outlines and better definition from the face. Our eyes are the focal point of our body. When our appearance expresses us truthfully and most beautifully to the viewer, others are looking at our eyes and listening to our words, no tensions, no distractions from busy colour F/X elsewhere. The eye wanders around the composition with ease, very happy that all the colours belong reasonably together, no feeling of a colour battlefield.
3. Does the hair colour steal colour from the face, or clear the skin to look clean and fresh, but not yellow or grey? Seems clear and fresh, not older in any way I can see.
4. Does the hair colour dull or drain the eye colour, or intensify it? Intensifies it. The eyes can balance and corroborate that hair colour. They are able to vouch for each other and seem believable on the same head. I’m not saying that Hanka should darken her hair, which I have never, ever seen improve a person. For most of us, our best hair is the colour we had around 25, when we’d settled into our Season but before we darkened with maturity, and then lightened a shade or two to soften the concentrated pigments of chemical colour. My opinion only, very open to being convinced otherwise. Like lipstick, though, wigs are an interesting means of ‘draping’ and seeing what happens. You can be surprised.
5. Do my eyes keep coming back to a too-bright lipstick, or am I looking at eyes, but having the lipstick in the same visual field and feeling good with that? The latter. Is the lip perfect, maybe not, but there are certainly some things about it that work.
6. Flip the lip colour to something nude. Does the face lose definition and freshness, or is it a relief? No relief, it would be boring and flat. I like lip intensity to approximate the intensity of hair and clothing, adjusting darkness a bit for complexion and occasion. On a lighter Season, our eyes would be stuck on these lips and keep coming back to the lips, unless we applied an effort we could actually feel to drag our gaze elsewhere.
7. Look at other things in the photo. They will have an effect, which is why PCA is done in a grey room. That wall plaque behind her may be throwing some heat into the skin. Does it feel like it belongs with her, could she wear a turtleneck that colour and would you feel good, or feel like “Uh, Hanka, have you got anything else to wear?” Maybe I’m not sure. You don’t have to always know. If I can’t make a decision with certainty, I don’t make it. I keep going. It might not be her best outfit, but something about it might work…the darkness level? the rosiness? Not sure. I like it better than the yellow-brown doorframe off to the right, and I feel better all of a sudden when I block it out with my hand.
8. Is the makeup just making the hair colour work? Again, not sure, but the face is not so different from the body, except that it photographs whiter as makeup always does.
9. If you have progressed far enough in your understanding of personal colour to agree that hair colour can be variable (even if you can’t get to admitting that it should have a place in the Season decision), if I showed you this woman first…would you still say Spring? Or were you really just seeing a blue-eyed blonde and got stuck in the trap they taught us oh, so, well, way back when.
PCA is about skin and one photo tells you next to nothing about skin. Colour is understood by comparison because pigments x, y, and z in your skin, though they look like everyone else’s skin, will react totally differently to colour A than Hanka’s pigments, or your BFF’s. Skin may all look similar, but it reacts differently. It can’t be predicted, expected, or assumed. Stereotypes are assumptions.
A Blonde True Winter
June 19, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 30 Comments
Kathryn Kalisz’s Sci\ART 12 Tone system revolutionized personal colour analysis in many ways. By conforming only with how light and colour behave in Nature (instead of restructuring), by creating 8 Neutral Seasons (whose colours were exclusive to each), and by insisting on a level of colour accuracy not previously attained, a new standard was set. She also shook up the status quo by ignoring, even denying, the entrenched beliefs and the stereotypes. Hair and eye colour are variable in every Season and will mislead if allowed into the Season decision. Season can only be known with certainty by observing the skin’s reaction to specific colours placed adjacent to it.
Hanka Kralikova is a newer member of the Sci\ART family of colour analysts. I’d like to introduce her to you by letting you read her story, in her words. Even colour analysts have to climb the wall of who they think they are and who they’ve been told they are, to meet themselves as they really are. We have also stared dumbfounded as the evidence that comes from our own colouring, that has always been there to be unveiled and understood, becomes less and less deniable. For an analyst, I think it’s extremely important to have personally lived this experience. I expect that many readers will recognize Hanka’s journey.
Hanka is opening a studio in Prague. Should you wish to have a consultation, she can help you with accommodations, another reason to visit this most beautiful city. You can email at hanka@topimage.cz. A website is in the works.
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Here are older photos to show my natural colouring.
I have been a freelance make-up artist for several years and became a certified Image Consultant last year. I realized that I needed to get the colours right as they are the core for everything. I first tried colour analysis as a client about ten years ago – not the best experience. The analyst told me I was a warm Season and since I am blonde and blue-eyed, I must be Spring. Full stop. I bought some make-up for Spring, used it several times, did not like it, and left it at the bottom of my cosmetic drawer. I decided colour analysis was good for nothing.
Couple of years later, during my make-up artist course, we also talked about colours. The tutor even analyzed us. This time it was different – they were already using the 12 Season analysis system. The only problem was – someone translated it from English and misinterpreted bright as shiny. Again, I was blonde, there were no standardized drapes (everybody trying to do analysis picked their own or bought them from someone who did so), no proper lighting, no neutral surrounding. So the result was: I am light and more cool than warm but True Summer colours are too muted for me – I am probably Light Summer.
Next time at a style course I was told (without any draping at all) that I was Light with no predominant warmth or coolness. I could choose if I wanted to be Light Spring or Light Summer. I tried both since each had something that worked. I liked the brightness of the Spring and coolness of the Summer but never was able to find a good lipstick for myself. I should have realized by then – cool and bright are quite good indications, but first I was blonde and second, hardly anybody can be objective about themselves. I always thought about myself as kind of wishy-washy, light and quite soft looking.
At the end of 2009 I was searching the Internet for some information on colour analysis, convinced there must be some system that could tell me exactly who I am. I really mean that. Knowing my colours really helped to better understand and accept my personality. I found it. It was called Sci\ART, it was based on real science (both my parents are physicists so I must have some science somewhere in my genes) and it made sense. I bought the book Understanding Your Colour and received it with a personal note from Kathryn. I loved the book and at the beginning of 2010, I put the money together to go to States and learn it. Unfortunately I was too late. Kathryn was not there anymore. I had never met her but still I felt as I had lost a friend.
I struggled with colours for another year when I gave it another try. I searched the Internet again and found several people who were Sci\ART certified trainers. I was lucky that one of them, Terry Wildfong, had been thinking about retiring and she was looking for someone to train who could then buy the business from her. We exchanged several e-mails and in the end of March, I was in Grand Rapids waiting for my life to change. And it did.
At the end of the first day of my training after we went through all the theory, Terry did my draping and showed me how to perform the analysis. I was expecting her to confirm I was Light, finally decide between one of the two Light Seasons, hoping that the Sci\ART ‘scientific’ palettes would have the right colours for me. I had my hair and clothes covered with grey so I could see just the face. The draping began. Terry did not need to say much. The first test drapes showed I was cool – there might be a little warmth but not much (“so, I will most probably be Light Summer”, I was thinking to myself). But then came the shock. We compared different Seasons drapes in between each other and I could see which ones were better but still was not able (or did not want to) to put it together. I looked great in brighter colours – I had never realized how bright my eyes were – and much better in cool colours then in warm ones. Black was not bad at all, crisp white looked perfect. Still, my brain was not willing to accept it. Then Terry said “So, do you know which Season you are?”
I went through all the results one more time – cool and quite bright, I can handle quite dark colours, I look great in icy pastels, there might be a little bit of warmth but not enough to make me a Neutral Season. No, it cannot be – but what else? Can I be a True Winter? Terry agreed. I was in shock. “It is not possible, I am LIGHT. How can I be WINTER?” Terry put some winter make-up on me and we went through “Ooh and Ah” session with a set of luxury drapes. I have never looked so good in my whole life. Thank you, Terry.
What was I going to do with my wardrobe full of pastels, those coral T-shirts, and a jacket I bought only recently? My head was swirling around when I was leaving that day. I slept very poorly that night. When I woke up the following morning, first thing I did was hold up my new True Winter palette next to my face and looked in the mirror. “Ok, I am True Winter, then. Let’s start new life.” That day I was analyzing people Terry had scheduled for me. I was very happy that I learned my lesson the day before. Some people can be very obvious – the moment you see them you know what Season they are and the draping just confirms it. With others you get surprised. I do not try to guess anymore, I wait for the drapes to tell me.
Instead of lunch I went shopping. I bought a pair of black jeans, white T-shirt, black tunic, bright blue, white and black dress with geometric pattern, and a bright pink lip gloss. It felt great. I had not worn black for ages and I fell in love with the deep berry lip gloss I never dared look at before. When I got back to Prague I spent a day sorting my clothes and found out one interesting thing. There were some pieces, mostly impulsive buys, which were spot on or very close to my Winter palette, mostly in purple, my favorite colour. I also had some brighter blue T-shirts and tank tops, one pink sweatshirt, and a dark chocolate jacket and suit. The jeans could stay, too. In the end I got rid off of some clothes, mainly in coral and some soft colours that I never wore. I could wear and combine what was left easily.
I still want to add some black and white, new for me, and also some other colours. I never go shopping without my True Winter palette anymore. I do not bother looking at things that are not in my colours. And above all I get compliments on how well I look even from people I would never expect to notice such things 
And one more thing – I have started to experiment with my hair colour (naturally mousy medium blond somewhere between 7 and 8). I got rid of the highlights and tried something a bit darker than my natural colour. It is still not perfect but I am getting there. I have got several comments that my eyes are looking brighter with the darker hair so I think I am heading in the right direction. BTW I had always thought my eyes were dull.
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Here are the ‘dull’ eyes, dearest readers. They contain stars.
And since this amount of cuteness would brighten any day, here is the child’s colouring.
Don’t let your left brain see patterns it is convinced that it recognizes, and proceed to dictate to you what they mean. Left brains try to do that, but they’re best relegated to data processing. Data assimilation is better done by the right side. Your eyes see snow and your left brain tells you that you are seeing white. Your right brain sees what really is, that snow is affected by the colours around it, including that of the light, and can be blue powder, a violet cloud, a sparkling yellow carpet. Patterns led to confusion and lack of trust in colour analysis, but they sure are hard to resist, even when you’re aware of their ambush. Approach every person as though they could be any of the 12 Seasons.
If you have questions or comments for Hanka, please add them to the Comments. She’ll be checking in here and on Facebook.
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