• Home
• About
• Contact
• PCA FAQs
• Why Have A PCA?
• Videos
• Analyst Directory

News Feed

Can My Hair Colour Be Warmer Than My Palette?

May 9, 2013 by Christine Scaman · 9 Comments 

Anyone who knows what personal colour analysis is, rather than what it was, lives with a growing sense of how well it works and how much it can improve your choices. The system divides human colouring into several groups, 12 in the one that I use. Since there are far more than 12 kinds of colouring once you get into the subdivisions, not every aspect of each group will apply equally to every person in it.

As you find your private garden and arrange the flowers and furniture to suit you, you ask some excellent questions. L sent me this,

 

    I’ve been very happy with my Soft Summer colors and they’ve made a

huge difference overall. The issue is though, that my hair color is just so

much warmer than my palette that many of my neutrals don’t look that great.

I stopped coloring my hair a couple of years ago and it’s neutral medium

brown at the base and the lengths are quite warm, perhaps a light chestnut

color would be accurate with even lighter ends.  This warm brown just

doesn’t look that wonderful with all the grayish-taupes which make up the

majority of my neutrals. As an interior designer I wouldn’t put these colors

next to each other, so it bothers me to do so when getting dressed.

According to old pics and my mother, this is my natural color. I had

forgotten that since I’ve been coloring my hair for over 30 years. I’m just

tired of trying to use toners and shampoos trying to cool it down.

I’ve been looking at other companies SS and Summer fans and found wonderful

browns in the CMAS Summer fan, and Lora Alexander’s (www.prettyyourworld.com) Soft Summer fan.

I was just curious about Sci-Art’s and your opinion about hair not being that

great with the palette since you cover it during the consultation.

Overall, I’ve discovered that I lean a bit warm within Soft Summer and I

really wish [the present palette] would give a wider range of neutral browns. I

own the Soft Autumn fan and I don’t need to go that warm, but just a bit

redder, rosier than my [present] fan.

 

Neutral to warm? Neutral to cool? Who knows? We’ll have to measure it somehow. That’s what the drapes do. Our eyes alone are not able without imposing some errors, because of how eyes and brains work. And because of the most misleading thing of all…assumptions.

Many of L’s comments could apply to all the Seasons fans. In any Tone, the likelihood of including even half the possible hair colours is less than 50/50 since hair colour is only moderately tied to Season. Why is that? My guess is that it’s because hair colour comes from melanin. Skin colour comes from melanin, hemoglobin, and carotene. Hair colours are an incomplete version of our truth, though what’s there is real and harmonized with us nonetheless. Just not detailed enough to do a PCA with. Hair also doesn’t change enough in response to colour to take accurate measurements. Skin tone does, therefore we use it to guide a colour analysis.

Soft Summer doesn’t tend to vary as widely as some but it certainly ranges in darkness, though it remains on the cool divide of neutrality. In all 12 Tones, eye colours seem to me to be more closely resembling the skin colours contained in the colour analyzed swatch palette, and yet they can appear very warm in persons of this Season. Test them and they still have the best energy in the cool-neutral Soft Summer drapes, not the warm-neutral Soft Autumn drapes. Why isn’t eye colour tightly linked to Season? Similar reasons to the hair, adding in the Rayleigh scattering that makes the sky blue, and other aspects of the physics and biology of an eyeball, such as how it’s pigmented, where its blood layer is located, how it reflects light because it’s in a water-based jelly, and many other factors.

 

Soft Summer eyes can be darker, lighter, warmer, cooler. As long you give them what they care about most: colours that are soft.

A warm-eyed Soft Summer must mean that though we see lots of warm colours of yellows, golds, and oranges in the eyes, these are present in their cool-neutral versions and are outnumbered by the greens, grays, and blues of Soft Summer. You would think the two Soft Seasons’ yellows and golds to be quite different until you try to harmonize a colour palette and realize how close they actually are.

Soft Summer is also a Season where the Neutral persons are often quite warm, on the 49/51 divide between the Soft Summer and Soft Autumn. An analyst needs to be on her toes and own a seriously good set of drapes. They say that our hair and eye colours are among our neutral colours but I agree it is so if you know the real colours of your eyes. If you match what you think you see, which is never what colour really is, you’ll go too warm for your skin and turn yourself a little dull and jaundiced.

 

Whoa now, that’s a Winter eye! Same colour family, cool-neutral hues, similar value level (lightness/darkness), but what’s different? That third colour dimension. And the type of heat, which appears more Spring-yellow than Autumn-gold. Whole different feeling.

How can True Winter or Light Summer be a redhead? Combine their yellow and their red, I would think. Every Season has both in their own versions. The hair tends not be orange, it’s redder than that. But both have yellows, nearly primary yellow in Winter’s case, which is why their green drape can look so yellow in some situations.

L. is colour savvy enough to sense the best solution, which is to move very slightly to a warmer place without losing the harmony. Soft Summer skin is happy to negotiate on warmth of hue as long as the colour stays soft and dusty, not intensely saturated. In my Sci\ART drapes, there are 3 drape colours, identical fabrics, that are used in 2 places. The Soft Summer and Dark Winter burgundy red test is the same. The Soft Summer face is not as flattered as it could be. The client notices that. Seeing the difference is a better learning opportunity than if I just babble on about colour dimensions, because the client sees that she needs to buy dark&dusty, not dark&densely pigmented, and that darkness is not her shopping challenge issue. Saturation is. It’s a strength of the drapes, not a weakness. Makes me now wonder if I should put a few ‘don’t go here or here’ among the Test and Luxury Drape sets that I assemble. But no, you saw those during your 12 Tone colour analysis session.

 

Ah, back to Soft Summer eyes, neutral but cool, and soft soft soft.

Only dyed hair is, or approaches, all one colour. Natural hair has many colours to make an overall tone. You might see one colour but the rest of us don’t.  How it reflects light and shows its colours requires its true colours to reveal the correct tones. Soft Summer has a drop of gold in her hair, not yellow. She is not a great blonde. A True cool Season in even slightly warm clothing or makeup has yellowed, dingy colour. If it’s silver hair, it looks like smoker’s yellow-gray instead of their beautiful clean silvered gray. The foundation colour must be accurate, hard to find in today’s overly yellow base makeup selections.

Others don’t see the discrepancy in our hair as we ourselves might. We don’t see hair as an object of one colour like a wall or a pillow. You might not pair those objects but they’re not coloured with hemoglobin, carotene, and melanin. We sense that living things are  not coloured in the same way as objects, and that man-made objects are  not coloured in the same way as Nature’s inorganic objects. Despite the difference, we are able to find the harmonizing colours and the relationships between them, as us and our clothes.

We can bring colours into our harmony too. Because it’s applied to our face, makeup interacts with the pigments in the skin. A lipstick that swatches on paper as Light Summers might fall flat on some Light Summer and be lovely on some Light Springs. This is called Making The System Work For You. Clothes don’t change so much. No question, in the same way that the drapes have an effect on us and we have an effect right back on them, so do we change our clothing colours somewhat, just not to the extent of makeup because of how it’s used. A Bright Winter can change True Summer’s beautiful, cool yellow into a grayed piece of cloth that’s been washed too many times.

 

What kind of eye is this? Soft or saturated? Neutral? How Neutral? Spring’s yellow heat or Autumn’s gold? Of the 3 colour dimensions, which one matters above all?  I have no idea. This is why I can’t look at photos and know Season. I have no comparisons and no ruler. All I can say is what I always do, whether I’m shown a photo or a real person in front of me: “Could be this or could be that.” If it’s a real person, I can say, “Where’s my drapes, lights, and gray background when I need ‘em?”

L. knows that I would never advise any woman to colour her hair ever. Her natural colour will always be her best colour. Sometimes we can decorate up a little and keep the balance, and that’s good too. My advice is to save herself the time and money and wear her natural hair. Once  her hairs grays, she’ll only look better. Gray is what the Soft Summer does better than anybody because gray is inherently cool, as they are, and they start off with more of it in the natural colours that define them than the other colouring types.

If L.’s discerning eye prefers to warm a few of her clothing browns, excellent. She has to feel well in what she wears. There will be no repercussions as long as the harmony is maintained (more on that in Getting More From Your 12 Tone Swatch Book). There would be more substantial repercussions if she tried to alter her hair colour.

What about L.’s question about the colours present in the Sci\ART palettes? Without stirring up a nest of hornets that have finally gone to sleep, I’ll take a guess. Only a guess. Please don’t come after me on this, I have no valid opinion to offer so I won’t say much. I do not know what was in the head of the person who designed the palettes. I’ll take a shot: As I understand the history, at the time of her passing, Kathryn Kalisz was adjusting the Season palettes, as she probably did a few times over the years for different reasons. She deeply wanted people to feel comfort in their colours, but some of the feedback sometimes said that the colours were too much, probably more in the saturated Seasons. Part of the reason for the choices may have reflected this, though I doubt it was the bigger part of it in this particular instance.

There was (is) also the question of whether the Neutral Season colours should be closer to the parent Seasons, as Soft Summer to True Summer, or to the other Neutral with which they share the most important colour dimension, as Soft Summer and Soft Autumn. Is one right and one wrong? Does there need to be a hard rule? I would say No and No as long as the dimensions of each Season is respected, though I’d be thrilled to talk about it. Where does one cloud in colour space end and the next begin? Is there an overlap? How big is it, what’s the rule? How big should it be, different question? You have thousands of colours. Maybe one day, someone will make 4 Colour Books of swatches for each Tone, not just 1. Smart woman that L. is, she found other options that contained what she was looking for and she knew how to select those that applied to her.

This completes my long-winded way of saying that L. made great choices and decisions on her own Nothing I love better than a woman empowered to work through the many choices about her best self, in any context, and come out right. Discernment is a beautiful thing.

—-

 

Becoming Bright Spring

January 21, 2013 by Christine Scaman · 12 Comments 

I met with Chantal* and Rita* within a month of each other.

Chantal’s hair is cut in a short, wash and wear style. The top layer is very yellow, while the hair beneath is medium-dark brown, entirely natural. She is in her late 50s and will probably still have yellow hair in 20 years. Makeup took away 15 years and showed us a very defined bone structure, with high cheekbones and a nose that tips up at the end. Her expression is focused, questioning, and very alert. A personal colour analysis (PCA) long ago said Spring, which we agreed seemed reasonable. She loves colours. Where most women arrive wearing black or no-commitment colours, she had on a lovely green blouse.

Rita expected to hear Light Summer. She does appear fair, with blue-looking eyes and medium brown hair, coloured to a red-gold colour that works surprisingly well, a bit like rose gold jewelry. Although seemingly light of skin, hair, and eye, it was something about her expression and the shape of her features that put the geisha image in my head. Young, exotic, yet apart, on a Caucasian woman in her 40s.

These women have a lot in common. They live practical lives and make practical choices. Both are sensible, serious, organized, quiet, thoughtful as in pensive, and introspective. Neither is rapid in their movements, impulsive, random, giggly, youthful (except to look at), overtly cheerful, or chatty. Nor are they blunt, direct, or sharp in the slightest. They are very polite, pleasant, and hold their cards close.

On meeting them, the impression is light and warm, except that the intensity of the eye in the face is compelling, rather than blending evenly into the face and equally with the other features. The eyes seem like ‘more’. This is not an impression I get from the brown-eyed Bright Spring, maybe because hair is usually darker and the overall look is more balanced.

In the world of 12 Season colour analysis, the natural colouring known as Bright Spring takes its pigmentation from the Spring qualities of colour (warmed by yellow, pure colours, not very dark). Winter has a little say, causing the colours to be cooler, redder, bluer, darker, and even more pure than Spring alone. Bright Spring is a colour rush.

Accepting Bright Spring, or any Season, from the draping is usually easy. It’s a done deal by the time we’re finished. 9 in 10 people can easily see their appearance change. It is what it is. The makeup is harder to accept. The conundrum of “I don’t recognize myself.” and “That woman in the mirror looks fantastic. Why is she acting like me?” takes time to sort out internally.

The book RTYNC (in the right column) and the documents I send clients  (similar to the book, but they continue to evolve as I learn and widen my own experience) suggest that Bright Spring looks most consistent with their natural appearance when they dress as activated, energized, bursts and squirts, crazy zigzags, a sunny morning after a freezing rainstorm,

combined with the delicate, a chandelier, gold foil, tinsel, cinnamon heart candies,

and the young,  a large or small shiny coloured purse (Bright Spring is not medium), hairbands, sheer coloured tights, and mod looks. A little sharper than Twiggy daisies.

Cirque du Soleil. The motion, physical vitality, and adrenaline of the trapeze. Coloured spotlights. Body paint.

What if you’re really a denim and khakis, Old Navy T-shirts, practical jacket, medium black purse, brown suede slip-ons kind of woman? What if you just like to look medium and not one of those qualifiers connects with you at all?

Some questions came up.

 

1.  Can you confirm that colour 3.3 (from the True Colour Australia Colour Book) is a very dark brown? What would you call it?

Yes, but to me equally gray as brown. I think of the colour of a seal. Bright Spring’s grays and browns are uncommon, very hard to find in cosmetics, and don’t have easy associations for names. They’re just colours I memorize and look at again often. Most important, the colour is not earthy.

 

 

2. What is the difference between black and coal?

The image of coal is to illustrate the darkest black&white gray possible before flipping to solid, dense black.

 

3.  I noticed that you show lots of gray shoes in the emails while the book suggests using hair colour to choose shoes – I would feel more comfortable with the yellows and browns of my hair colour as I’m not a big fan of gray – do you see that as a good choice for me?  And is this boot close enough to my hair colour, which is darker underneath?  I’m not sure I can see myself trying to find or wear light yellow boots/shoes!  If this is too tan, too earthy, is there a way to work with that?  

 

The boot Chantal asks about, above, is here at Roots Canada.

Overall, I think they’re fine. No two women will wear their colours the same way. I like that the boots are not too dark, orange (a bit orange, but lots of yellow), or lumberjack, with heavy treaded soles or cowboy feelings. Your energy isn’t really mesa or Cheyenne. These just feel natural, which is how you feel to interact with. You have no pretense or drama in what you choose to share. So in that sense, I like their authenticity and ease. The boots don’t feel like they have something to prove and neither does Bright Spring.

They are quite warm in colour, warmer than you are. They may not go perfectly with your new clothes colours, even if the clothing style is great with the boots. Wearing your hair and eye colour is one of those areas where women have to decide for themselves. I find that it can get you into problems when you interpret your hair or eye colour incorrectly, which we all do, all the time. Eyes have 20 colours in them at least. Hair is not a good indicator of Season, but it does have the same warmth setting as everything else about your colouring. This is common with True Winters who have apparently warm eyes and hair – if they wear those colours, their skin turns yellow, and there is conflict with the rest of the outfit.

For Bright Seasons, hair colour is the most difficult to understand and replicate. If the colour swatches show more gray, it’s because you are at that coolness level. Brights look poor in brown eyeshadow unless it’s the cleanest colour (no orange, no muted, no earthy). True brown can become mud on these faces. The clarity of your pigments can turn even medium browns into looking heavy and clumpy. But it’s important not to discard every item – I would wear these boots for sure, just with the warmer colours of your palette so they don’t seem like outsiders.

 

 

How about the choice above, linked here, also at Roots Canada?

 

4.  I’m having trouble seeing myself as a high contrast person.  Is this something that I take on faith as revealed by the drapes or can you help me to recognize this in myself?

No. 1: If we define contrast as distance between lightest light and darkest dark, then you’re a medium to medium-high contrast person. You don’t go to white or black.  That’s value contrast. Now, your eyes are extremely intense in your face, giving a sense of a pretty wide span from light to dark, as you have, but not maximum.

Position white and black in your head. Now put a dot at a darkness level around medium. That’s the overall darkness effect you’re aiming for. You’ll achieve it using a span from yellowed-white to coal. Clearly, light and medium colours will be necessary, and the more dark you use, the more light you balance it with.

 

Above,  medium value contrast, yellows with blues, sharp line distinctions in the foreground. Bright, sunny, warm. With every bit of black that’s inserted, the whole thing dies a little. Save it for tiny bits just to sharpen the edges and bring focus.

 

No. 2: There’s also colour contrast, distance apart on the colour wheel between two colours. You are colourful to look at. Your natural pigments are quite far apart (yellow hair with blue eyes, on some, we see light skin with golden brown eyes), which is why I find complementary colours so good to look at on warm Seasons. They are a logical extension of the natural appearance.

 

Medium value, sharp edges, a trace of black, neutrals with colours, the pants and T-shirt, the blouse and the earring.

 

No. 3: I like to see very sharp, clean edges between colour blocks on Brights because that’s what you look like, not all fluffy and blended and soft. That’s not contrast per se, but sharp divisions look more contrasting (is there line contrast?), it’s just a way that clear colours look good. You are moderately sharp to look at (bone structure, eye intensity, haircut is not feathery). Clean edges are a logical extension of the natural appearance. If you follow the guidelines you are made of, your clothes become yours for a reason. They seem connected with you.

 

This is Bright  Winter – simpler, symmetric, darker, colder, with only a faint warmth. Black is half or less of the whole or the whole thing dies a little. Black sucks in light in itself and steals it from everything around it – almost shameful with the purity of the Bright Season colours, and a delicate balance even for Bright Winter because the light is faint and will lose the fight with a black wall.

 

You really can mix and match quite freely in your Colour Book, aiming for an overall darkness effect that’s about medium (there! a medium thing about Bright Spring). Allover light or dark isn’t so good. You are not monotone to look at. Inserting a colour somewhere is always necessary. Inserting a big colour block plus another one is even better.

Whether it’s lightest with darkest or medium with medium doesn’t matter too much. Your Colour Book duplicates your inherent lightest to darkest range exactly so you’re safe moving around in it. If I were to do the Colour Equations again, I’d lighten Bright Spring up even more, with bright blue, stone,  or white pants. The only groups that  make any sense to me in white pants (their white) are the Brights. True Winter, it would depend on how it was done.

In the client’s document, I changed two paragraphs to read this way:

This is Spring-like colour worn in a Winter’s way – meaning that you will wear your bright, clear, warm colors best, but using 2 or 3 different colours at once, and with moderate contrast, not as high as a real Winter would wear. Contrast defines how much distance exists between the lights and darks.  High contrast implies that you wear the lightest lights and the darkest darks together. You are fine in these combinations, and equally good when combining your midtones.

With colour this bright, especially if the line between the colour elements is very crisp, they will look contrasting. They will not be like a watercolour swirl, which creates the problem of grayed colours when complements combine, quite opposite to the properties of the colours you are made of. You probably have medium-high extremes of lightness and darkness in your skin/hair/eyes, so you would repeat that in clothing and makeup to look balanced. Your palette does the thinking for you in this regard in that it comes close but not all the way to black and white.

 

5.  You didn’t mention pearls as a choice for Bright Spring – I have a simple strand – will it work?

Anything will work. Like diamonds on a Soft Season, it’s not a natural fit but that doesn’t matter. Wear them anyhow if you love them. This is how you make your Season yours, your personal brand of dissidence that lets us know you better. It has to work for you, not the other way round. I know a Light Summer woman, the epitome of gentle grace, who wears the most beautiful, large rounded oval, slightly dangly, super sparkly, aquamarine earrings. It’s brilliant. It says to me “I love my life so much that I can’t hold it all in.”

No matter what we do, as gardeners, cooks, doctors, Seasons, we learn the discipline, we figure out the shortcuts and what we can get away with. Then, we decide how we’re going to break the rules or mould them to suit what we bring to the game. That’s just life lived with complete freedom of expression.

 

6.  I have a sweater in yarn that combines several bright colours, alternating the colourful yarn with stripes in a dark / neutral colour. Would it be more flattering to stick to a solid colour?

Brights look great with many colours at once, just not blended together (blending colours causes either a watercolour effect, or the graying of mixing complementaries that makes the muted colours of Autumn and Summer). Side by side complementary colours or with a neutral colours, both are terrific on you. Stripes give energy.

There is a taste factor. You might like your colours blended together and that’s not wrong, just not what my eye prefers because it’s hard to maintain the high purity of each pigment.  Be careful that the yarn isn’t comfy/chunky/heavy looking, especially if you’re working in neutral colours. It risks getting too homemade looking in that Autumn homespun way. Pick something young, Angora, sparkly, smooth. It should not look back-to-the-land. It should look brand new. Fun colours are always better on you, since colour is like your neutral.

A blue-eyed Bright Spring is very colourful to look at.

 

 

Your hair, eyes, and skin come together like this. You are beyond just colourful. You are coloured in complementary colours (blue eyes, yellow hair). That’s an extreme, or a type of contrast. So is light, warm hair on top, dark, cooler hair beneath, another type of contrast. The warm-cool in the colouring at once is true of all Neutral Seasons, but quite bright and alive here. To the viewer, it feels energetic and young.

On Bright Seasons, colours seem more at home than neutral grays and browns. Colours become your neutrals. Every Season has its extremes and only that type of colouring is completely at home and at ease in them. As Susan said so well, black is dressy, but only on True Winter is it casual wear. That’s what ‘at home’ means. It is that easy that it becomes your anytime, anywhere, the one thing you don’t plan around, where you can hide and relax. Having said that, nobody is at their best in head to toe black. Nobody.

Black is only thought to be dressy. Usually, it’s detracting. It can make textile look more expensive, yes. It is easier for marketers to sell us a ton of one thing than have to keep changing production lines, yes. The Dark Winter wears it well enough since it’s dark, but it begins to transform into the solid wall that it is on everyone but True Winter, so they warm it up. Walls are not entirely foreign to Dark Winter’s energy.

On Bright Winter, there are no walls, there is excitement. They are better in white than black, and a so-slightly yellowed white. Black shouldn’t be more than half the overall look. Thankfully, both Chantal and Rita knew to avoid it. As Bright Springs, a thin stripe of it here and there is fine but not more than that or it does what it always does – makes the colours dead. It sucks in all the light around it, which is an absolute shame for Bright Spring, the clearest, brightest colours that exist. The overall effect is gasping for sunshine.

 

7.  I was very surprised to read that Spring is strongly associated with triangles and diamond shapes.  I feel more drawn to squares in fabric (linen plaids, cotton madras, cotton checkerboard print) and rounded shapes in jewelry (beads, hoops, circles).  Any comments?

Your preference. Those shapes are what I feel. Some see triangles as a Winter shape. Squares express more practical, natural, durable, serious, productive energy – maybe truer to how you have seen yourself for the last 20 or 40 years. Could be that the next 20 will be a little different.

Four years after my PCA, I was able to pull in the drama of Winter and could tell where the Enough line was. I couldn’t have done it 3 and 1/2 years ago. It cannot be assimilated in a week, a month, or a year. But you do continue to move closer to your center, hear your guides more clearly, and choose what is and is not the real you.

 

8. I’m having trouble thinking in terms of adding fun to my clothing.  Suggestions of nylon, satin, trims, ruffles!! sound very girly, not a look I’ve ever worn or feel very comfortable with – any suggestions as to how I can approach this?

Bright Winter and Bright Spring read the style suggestions and see this

 

or this

 

or this

 

 

All I’m saying is that you’re not this. She is beautiful on someone else.

 

Start with the colours. Only the colours. Stay inside the lines you are comfortable with today. Pretty soon, they will loosen up and you’ll find some extra breathing space inside them.  You might try yoga clothes instead of gardening clothes, as an example. The clothes at Lululemon, Athleta, Title Nine, MEC are often superb on Bright Spring and way better than rugged wear.

There is no need to ever get fancier than that. Nylon is a windbreaker. Satin might be a scarf. Forget trim and ruffles, and glitter. Not everybody does everything. The point is to get energy, as movement and saturated colour, into your look. Workout clothes give you that.

 

9. My biggest challenge is with the repeated descriptions of Bright Spring as light, delicate, charming, and adorable. When I read these descriptions it starts to feel like maybe I’m not really a Bright Spring after all.  Could we have made a mistake?

The most aggressive woman I know sees herself as nurturing. It shocked her beyond belief to learn that in the character assessment at work, every single person pulled out the Highly Competitive card. A very controlling Soft Autumn. Bit odd. And yet, she is absolutely nurturing.

A True Summer of very classic proportions, in fact quite straight in the hip, sees herself as extremely curvy. In her view, she is aggressive, masculine, direct, bold, a walking firecracker. Yes, well, I could go with endlessly seeking. She has no risk aversion though, which is not really a Summer thing.

We get mixed up about ourselves. More important, we are hugely complex. There are only 12 Season groups. Just playing the numbers, factor in 100 personality traits at high, medium, and low levels, parenting, environment, birth order, experience – you wouldn’t have 12 possible combinations, you’d have 12, 000, 000. Still more important, the 12 groups are not organized around character, they’re organized around colour.

Could I have made a mistake? Sure. Anyone can, anytime. But I don’t think I did. We’ll drape you again if you want. Free. Just bring someone with you. I don’t talk much the second time unless I think I got it wrong.

You have a great deal of Winter in your character. You are certainly curious, analytical, and interested. You have the youthful appearance/hairstyle/feature shape associated with childhood, so there would be great continuity if you wore that but you don’t have to. You may find some of that a year from now. You may prefer to express more distance and reserve and less party, just as you are.

Don’t struggle or try to chase it, you’ll just push it further away, like chasing money. Try not to overthink it or you’ll extinguish all your abilities to feel it. Leave it there and explore stepping around your borderlines in ways that feel good. Release any effort at trying to control it. Trust that it will happen, don’t feel that you need to know how. Your mind took it in when your eyes did – remember how that happened during our PCA session? We were learning it together just by seeing it happening. A few words at the beginning and then we could feel it.

 

10. If it sounds like my thoughts and feelings are whirling around – they are!

They’re supposed to. In our short time together, we had to pull apart everything you thought you knew about your colouring, right back to absolute zero, to the point where you could say, “I do not know what is going to happen next.” Then, we built it all back up again with the blocks lined up correctly. It is a lot to take in.

To learn, you have to unlearn. What we think we know pretty well is usually where we are weakest.

To learn truth, you must surrender what you believe to be truth. Ask anyone who’s had a PCA. You get enough proof to get rid of a lot of stuff fast and make space for the real and the right. It’s a shock to the system.

To gain control, we must first surrender control. Control is only an illusion. Trying to get it is what keeps us tired.

To gain power, we must surrender power.

To empower ourselves with new truths is bound to evoke resistance. We will come up against it every single day. In detaching and deciding, we become free and open thinkers.

I know that I overwhelm you with information during and after a session with me. Everyone learns differently and I don’t know what will click with you. I want you to leave a different person than the one who walked in, on every level, not just your lipstick choice. These reflections, the expansion, the open-ness, the wonder and the wondering, they will carry over into every aspect of your life.

Begin with the colours, bringing them closer to your body as nail polish or a beach towel. To the viewer, they still look like part of your energy field. In time, less serviceable items may be easier to replace with brighter combinations or prints that feel too risky today.

Keep asking me questions. I need it to know where you could use some help. Helping you in real and tangible ways is what I am here to do.

And remember the whole point of your personal renovation (Chantal’s excellent words):

Add Joy to the Journey, to every little glimmer, every success, every little deeper understanding.

 

—–

Can Eye, Hair, and Skin Colours Conflict?

November 7, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 29 Comments 

Answer: No. Never. They can appear to conflict until your colours are correctly analyzed.

I get 3 or 4 emails each month about this. So let’s talk about it, framed around pieces of conversations with real women. It’s the practical application of my digression in the earlier post, How To Match Foundation.

Palette and swatch in this post always refer to colours found within your particular group of colours in the 12 Tone system of colour analysis developed by Kathryn Kalisz. Some of the Tones or Seasons may have similar or identical names with other companies but if their origin isn’t Sci\ART, their colour collections are different. I don’t know how other organizations developed their palettes, what their colours are, or what the desired outcome of their PCA process is. It’s not my place to answer questions about them.

The eye photos in this post are just lovely pictures. They are not textbook examples of the words or the ideas.

 

 

If hair/eye colours are not in the palette

I am a Bright Spring with dark brown eyes, dark brown hair, and light skin.

Yes, Spring under Winter influence is often brown eyed, from a glowy topaz jewel yellow to black brown. Many persons of Asian and Celtic origin have this colouring of darkness in hair and eyes and lightness and brightness in skin.

Since this is predominantly Spring, not Winter, the person is sometimes not conspicuously contrasting, though they certainly can be. A brown eye with light skin or hair is fairly contrasting in itself. Sometimes, the Bright Spring eye is so light brown that it’s yellow, like a wolf. It’s quite a thing to see. Or to be, I would think.

It’s this,

 

 

not this, but notice the coat colours and the eye-coat harmony, animals are just like us,

 

 

 

The color of my veins, lips, and cheeks are all in my color swatches and flatter me.  However, the brown in my eyes and my hair is not in my color swatches and does not flatter me when I wear clothes of that color.  How can I wear brown as an eye and hair color but not anywhere else without looking washed out?

You’re wearing the colour you think you see, which is never what colour is. Here is one reason for why it’s harder to figure for some Tones.

There is variation in hair and eye colour in most Seasons, but nowhere more than True Winter and the Brights. I’m not sure of the answer from a genetic perspective. I don’t think anyone can answer the magic of how harmony happens in spite what our eyes think they see. Maybe the mysteries should remain mysteries.

The way I reason it is that we don’t know the exact pigments that make up our hair and eyes.  If I showed you 20 brown eyes, could you pick out your own? Would you pick the same brown as your friends would choose? Would you pick the same browns, yellows, oranges, and other colours, that the drapes (consistent with the Sci\ART colour calibrations) identify within your colouring? Probably not, on any count. We do not know which colours make up our final colours until one is draped. If you knew and wore the ingredients that go into your total hair and eye colours, you’d be utterly flattered.

Bright Spring has many yellows, beer and clear cider colours. When they have dark hair, it’s usually root beer and black tea. It is never coffee, which only looks heavy and thick on a colouring that is as far from those as you can get. Lighter brown hair is herbal tea, not orangey-muted-gold, not velvety-dense-brown. It might look ash brown or medium brown but it isn’t.  It is clear. While clear means high chroma, and transparency is not a quality by which we define colour (because colour can be bright or soft and still see-through), this hair is like coloured cellophane.

 

 

People with green, blue and grey eyes seem to always look great if they match their clothes to their irises.

I would not agree. Blue eyes will match blue drapes or blue clothes in any Season but the best match is only in one. It’s not even a difficult decision. Some aspects of a correct analysis are challenging for a woman to perceive on herself. Achieving the ultimate eye colour is usually easy.

The colour a woman has matched to her eyes all her life is never the best or correct one in my experience. She needs her Colour Book to direct her to her turquoise and only then will her eyes become all they could be. I see women hope they’re wearing their eye colour all the time and most cases, they’re barely in the ballpark.

Blue eyes under Spring influence (one of the 5 possible Seasons) are seldom blue. They’re turquoise, aqua, or cornflower (light blue with very little green, the cornflower being one of the few truly blue flowers, but to me, appears a little violet). It’s a beautiful thing when you find it.

 

 

Not just me but a lot of brown-eyed people can’t wear brown.

Quite right, many brown eyed people are Winters of some sort and have very little brown in their palette. And when they’re draped, darned if much of the brown in the eyes suddenly turns black and then they’re wearing their real eye colour at last.

Hair and eye colours as they appear are often not in the True Winter, Bright Winter, and Bright Spring palettes.  I think the way it works is that the contributing base pigments are there but the mix isn’t.

You could say to me, “OK then, if I could take colours from my palette and mix them, are you saying that I could theoretically make my hair and eye colour from the swatches? ”

I think so but the truth is that I don’t know for sure if any and every mixture would still guarantee that the hue/value/chroma remain constant. If you mixed complements, you would mute the colour if either of the originals contained the complement of the other. You’d mute the resulting colour into a more muted Season.

To make clear green (say, Winter), you need a blue and a yellow without red, I would think. Could it be done? Winter colours contain red, but are there a blue and a yellow without red? I’m not enough of a colour mixer to know.

Thinking out loud now…To make clear orange (Spring), you’d need a red and a yellow that contain no blue. That seems possible, Spring colours are not blue-based, though some contain blue.

Clear violet – needs a blue that leans red and a red with some blue in it, neither of which contain the complement of violet, yellow. That could make a brilliantly clear violet, even a violent violet, if it’s necessary – sure it is, for Winters. How is that done for Spring where yellow appears in every colour? Haven’t figured that out yet.

Can I make amber or warm brown eyes with a True Winter palette? I think so. True Winter contains yellow, very saturated, a little blue without turning it green. It also contains the other primaries of red and blue. Three primaries make brown.

True Winter and the Bright Tones are intricate and unique types of colouring. Not inconsistent, just complex. Which is why I suggest they think twice before colouring their hair. I have never seen it be improved enough to balance the cost, time, and upkeep.

 

 

I can match clothes to the rim around my iris (which is sort of a dark periwinkle) and it is quite flattering but if I wear clothes that are the same brown as my irises I look washed out.

So it’s not the right brown that you’re wearing, it’s just the one you think you see as the amalgamation of all the many colours in your iris. Good call to notice that the rim of the iris is different and if you can match it, a superlative colour on every person.

 

 How can brown-eyed people can be any Season, but only Autumns can look great wearing brown clothes and makeup? 

There are a million versions of brown eyes. Brown eyes can be in any Season, but they won’t all be the same brown. Same with the 12 Tone palettes. Many Tones have brown choices but they’re not the same brown.

Nine in ten women only find out their real eye colour when they are draped. Those brown-eyed people you refer to in your question and the browns that you refer to looking great on Autumns… very unlikely the same brown.

 

 

 

Are cool hair and warm skin possible?

I was snow white blonde as a child, but am now a dark, ashy blonde. It’s a cool colour.

 Dark ash blonde could be found on a cool, neutral, or warm person. Apparent hair colour isn’t tightly tied to the true heat level of your colouring, though your overall contributing colours and appearance are always 100% in harmony. Every person. The true heat level of your hair is perfectly consistent with the heat level of your skin and everything else.

We could take your dark, ash brown hair and place it next to five other dark, ashy heads. It would be interesting to see whose is cool, whose warm, and whose is neutral in between cool and warm. I would guess that your hair wouldn’t be the coolest if we compared it on a scale. It might be cool-ish, but that’s not Absolute Cool.

Because you know, Absolute Cool and Absolute Warm, they’re rare in human colouring. Kind of extreme. I haven’t seen a True Autumn or True Winter in ages. I see several Neutral Season versions of Autumn and Winter every month. The thing to wrap your head around is Neutral. What does it mean? What does it look like?

Just playing the odds, you are neither warm nor cool in skin and hair. If you’re like eight or nine people in ten, why wouldn’t you be, you’re a Neutral Season that might lean towards cool.

Whatever you are, cool, warm, or somewhere in between, the setting is the same in all your features. One genetic code governs your paintbox.

 

 

 But I have medium light skin with golden undertones and no rosiness in the cheeks. All I see is yellow. Wouldn’t that be warm?

Colour analysis, which guides every colour decision you will make, isn’t about what you look like or appear to look like. Your natural colouring group, Tone, Season, is determined in the one way that can truthfully reveal it: how the colours in you react to other colours. Nobody can know their truthful colouring correctly without testing their own skin’s reactions against an organized and measured set of colours in a colour-neutral environment. If your colours react the way you expect them to, you would be that one person in 50 who knew ahead of time what was going to happen. That’s why it’s so hard to do from books and photos and impossible from verbal descriptions.

Your skin probably is light-medium. What colour your undertone is, or even whether it’s warm/cool/neutral, nobody knows till we test and measure it. Why am I so sure? Because nobody who comes to a colour analysis appointment is ever wearing their correct foundation – until we solve that question forever more and show you how to make the best choice.

 

 

If my hair is overly golden, my skin looks red. When it’s natural dark ashy color, highlighted with platinum, it looks tanned and alive. Just natural it is bland. Dark red wasn’t good. But when I went a more natural dark blonde with subtle red tones, I got many compliments. Dark golden blonde, more of a caramel, washes me out, as does all over light blonde with no contrasting darker pieces. Can someone have a seemingly warm complexion with cooler toned ash hair?

Actually it’s really common. Usual, in fact. Though there’s lots of good colour observation here, the description could occur in many of the 12 types of colouring. Sounds to me like you have cool-neutral skin with a little warmth, but placed next to wrong hair colour, it will look warmer than it really is.  You may have a false yellow overtone, like many cool Neutral Seasons, and be interpreting that as your golden undertones and yellow warmth from the previous question.

Too yellow hair does make faces red, especially True and Soft Summer, I find. But then, there’s a disconnect in your comments. Dark ash with platinum sets up big distance between lightest and darkest, which I find looks right on nobody.

On Summer, their light/dark range isn’t this wide, since it goes from pastel to mid-dark, not icy light to very dark (which is Winter). And so it follows that their best highlight is not that far from the base colour, or else they look striped and severe.

On Winter, they do have this big light/dark range but putting it in the hair is only disruptive, breaking up their force. The randomness looks messy when placed on a colour language that is very far from random. Of course, nothing applies to everybody and you can’t generalize about hair colour across an entire Tone. Some Lights are not flattered by highlights either.

3/4 of women would say their natural hair colour is bland. Not remotely true but media has taught us that it is so they could sell us hair colour. The hair industry, ay? Their biggest problem is that they think they’re fine. Many women would not attest to that – the same ones who bought $40 a bottle of wrong foundation colour. Women love their colourist most of the time. We feel real friendship and loyalty. But regarding our faith that we really are wearing our very best hair colour? Not so sure. Hair is a trend-driven industry – highlights, lowlights, we’ve never tried copper, let’s go lighter. We only have one skin colour. It is illogical that we could be flattered by five hair colours. Become the expert of your own appearance.

Until you are wearing your best clothes and makeup, your natural hair colour will not appear as beautiful and perfect as it is – so I advise women after a PCA to make one trip to the salon to get the heat level set right and come closer to their natural colour. Then leave the hair for a few weeks and work on the clothes and makeup. Your eyes need time to readjust to the real original you and to absorb how your better colours affect your apparent hair colour by making it look perfect and ideal. Then you can really see your hair colour and you can go back to the salon, hopefully only one more time, and finish the fine tuning.

Also, once a woman has had many hair colours, she and those who have seen all those colours can’t make a solid judgment any longer. There’s just too much history swirling around. Someone outside your box needs to touch the reset button. I nominate your friendly neighbourhood colour analyst.

 

 

I am at a loss as to what color to dye my hair.

I’m at a loss too till your colours are accurately analyzed. You are like 98% of the real people in the real world who seem conflicting. You’re not. Nobody is. Everyone’s colours make complete sense.

Once we have your Tone understood, every single aspect of your colouring and the colour decisions to follow are consistent and coherent. It’s not even hard. Once we know the truth, each one of us is very logical and connected in our colouring.

But. Even knowing your Tone, I still couldn’t give blanket hair colour advice that would cover every woman equally well. Everyone makes her own darkness adjustment within a Tone. Not everyone is necessarily improved by departure from her natural hair as it grows out of her head. And for nobody is this more true than the Bright Seasons.

 

 

Art and Science

Not being able to explain a thing doesn’t make it not true.

C. said it so beautifully here,

…the science of light, the discovery that it is both particle and wave and how it behaves erratically when observed. So nature is evasive and we can not reduce everything in the world around us to neat mathematical equations

….artists working in isolation through history have been representing through symbol what scientists have been discovering in the lab at the same(ish) time and not even known it. Think of the cubists and surrealists relating back to Einstein’s new world of curved space and the theory of relativity, or the complex inherent patterns in Jackson Pollocks’ work reflecting a new understanding of the complex, previously overlooked patterns in nature.

It seems artists, at least revolutionary ones, had/have a deep unconscious understanding of the stuff of the universe and represent it through symbol before we have the words or the science to explain.

All of these threads…point in the same direction. Colour theory, it seems, is not about finding the best lipstick. It is recognizing we are made of the stuff of the stars and finding our place in the universe.

 

—–

 

How To Match Foundation

October 20, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 12 Comments 

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

The Wrong Hair Colour Merry Go Round

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Who’s zooming who?

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

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

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

 

Ending On A Happy Note

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

 

 

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

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

 

——-

The Best Skin Finish on Autumn Colouring

September 30, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 28 Comments 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

What about the 3 Autumns?

Soft,

True,

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Debra Messing Pictures

 

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

 

Debra Messing Pictures

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

What’s the same

- eyebrows definition without darkness or high contrast

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

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

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

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

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

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

- her entire face is velvet, not sparkle

- coppered, tawny, metallic hints, hot hot

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Skin Textures

We did Springs previously. That went as:

Bright   Spring = glass

True Spring = persimmon

Light Spring = petal

 

So the Autumns could be:

Soft Autumn = suede

True Autumn = velvet

Dark Autumn = leather

 

3 Autumn Seasons 

True Autumn:

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

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

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

Soft Autumn:

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

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

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

Dark Autumn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

———

 

Between Soft and Dark Autumn

June 17, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 24 Comments 

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

————————

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

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

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

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

—–

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

——-

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

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

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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

———–

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

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

The Season Circle

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

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

Any two immediate neighbours could maybe share some colours if:

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

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

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

————

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

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

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

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

————

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

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

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

———

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

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

——-

I also appreciate this post very much

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

But it make the things for me much more complicated :

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

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

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

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

———

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

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

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

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

————–

Light And True Spring: Neutral Colours At The Office And CEs

March 3, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 27 Comments 

The previous article was about settling into the mood. We looked at some landscapes to help us get the human face and all the emotions it evokes out of our decision-making. The brains of women especially go into an overdrive when we see faces (which is why advertisers make a point of using a face or at least a set of eyes in ads) that make it very hard to be completely impartial about colours to include or decline from the scene. It looks good, right, and real when the woman, her natural colouring, the colours she’s wearing, her own style, and the style she’s wearing, all point in the same direction.

We also decided on the neutral colours are that will be the spine of a work wardrobe. Spring looks so good in colour that ‘neutral’ was expanded from grey/beige/brown/taupe to include navy and your darker green, which are the suits I’d choose. I’d also add blush and pale peach to the light colour choices.

First thing: You Don’t Have To Be Perfect.  (Or: Don’t Let What You Can’t Do (or Find At The Stores) Stop You From What You Can Do). We could have an ID bracelet : iLearn. iAdapt.

The face, the woman

Let’s bring in faces. Who are we dressing?

Taylor Swift Pictures

Her new hairstyle (hippie looks excellent on Spring) and lighter makeup are beautiful. I always saw her as Light Spring but wonder if she might be True. This hair colour is too ash (ash being comparative, like all colour is – her hair isn’t ash brown but it is greyer and dustier than Goldie Hawn’s) and could be more brightly yellow and maybe a bit darker. That and the muting of the dress are causing her to lack bone definition. The face blends into neck. The center of the face is blurry. There’s the feeling that the whole is a bit anemic, of wanting to step in with a brush and add more colour. Then again, maybe it’s all lighting. She’s still so much better than she was.

Taylor wears a simple, young, natural style that suits her and looks like what she represents. All the signals point the same way. That feels secure to look at. We are given every reason to trust that she is who she appears to be. In a business setting, especially in sales and teaching, this matters a lot. People are much more open, both sharing and receiving, if they’re not expecting you to play a wild card.

60 Minutes is the only TV I watch so I see Leslie a lot. I find her very beautiful in her expressions. She conducts an interview with curiosity and interest, not a fact finding mission. One of Spring great assets is their charm. Because Spring can look so young, age bestows a power and confidence that the young may not feel easy to own. Below is how a True Spring looks wearing Light Spring colours: better than many other choices but somehow not enough the balance her. She is more colour than what she’s wearing. Notice the  Suzanne Somers- type face proportions. True Spring was assembled to look best when they’re smiling. You see twinkling eyes, dimpled cheeks, beautiful teeth, the natural disposition is just to be happy.

Lesley Stahl Pictures

Give her heat, anybody’s heat and it’s better because heat is the TMIT for True Spring. The eye colour is more faded than it needs to be but that’s just a little colour adjustment to bring them up to the level of the hair and lip intensity. I often feel that I’d be happy to know her and be in her presence. Looking at these Spring faces, who wouldn’t?

Lesley Stahl Pictures

Ivana – love her lipstick, dress, and necklace. A woman who knows what looks good on her never goes out of style. Perhaps the blush is a little cooler than the lips, bah, she still looks great. True Spring needs a lot of cosmetic colour for their  magic to happen. Nobody can outdo them cream skin, lagoon eyes, clear apricot cheeks, and pure coral lip colours, all swirling around. Colours aren’t too blended because they aren’t on the natural face. Ivana’s lips, cheeks, and eyes are distinct (I’d even define her brows more). I’ve said Ivanka, her daughter, may be a True Spring and she has some of her mother’s qualities, but her voice is deep and her manner blunt, more Autumnal. Who knows?

Ivana Trump Pictures

Office attire

By comparing the neighbour Seasons of Light Spring (the natural colouring made up of True Spring’s base palette, then cooled and hazed by a wash from Summer’s, so 2 True Season parents = Neutral Season) and True Spring (the natural colouring defined by pure, light, warm, yellow-based pigments), you can see the size of the visual heat shift. You can see darkness and saturation shifts as well when you look from one Polyvore to the next.

For the good of the group, Spring, wear more colour than anyone else. It’s a good rule, rather like ‘always be the most sober person in the room’. For the office, keep the number of juicy colours to one big block and one little one, which could be lipstick or earrings, a watch or scarf. Try keeping the very colorful items near you but not on you if you feel too much at first. A colourful jacket or sweater you can drape or carry, a clutch or wallet, a hair accessory on the back of your head, shoes, a laptop case, it all counts if it’s seen in your vicinity. Colour signals confidence, creativity, imagination, sensitivity, and an open-mind. If I’m hiring, those and self-motivation are what I’m looking for because they’re near impossible to teach, learn, or implant.

Use grasshopper green and goldfish orange. All of us, so often, the TMIT of our Season is what we’re busiest suppressing and covering, the thing that makes us most special that we downplay. Being a toned down version of our TMIT makes us usual, average, and hidden. It seems we do it without thinking, and yet it’s the unique features that we love most about others, that define them, not the traits they share with the rest of us.  If True Spring does wear mostly neutrals in clothes to work, make every accessory coloured within the limits of the boardroom. While that may look too fanciful on anyone else, on a Spring, it’s a woman who knows what suits her.

All-one-colour looks too quiet. Analogous colours are too gradual.  Spring jumps around more, facial expressions changing every few moments. The person looks like a lot of colour and is better balanced when dressed that way. Of course, nobody looks like a lot of colour right out of bed. Most humans look like variations of brown. We don’t sit at the Food Court and see the yellow-based people. If you stood everyone side-by-side, you’d see the yellow ones. Dressed in their best colours instead of the colours of pavement that are favored these days, suddenly everyone looks different and more like themselves.

For the Polyvores below, if you visit the site, you can zoom in and take a better look round.

 True Spring

 

 

Light Spring

 

For both:

Be unexpected. A blue that has a trace of violet. A coloured shoe. Wear the coloured skirt or pant and neutral top or vice versa but wear colour. Keep the cut conservative and the size of the vivid block controlled.

Purple is so important on Spring, but like yellow and orange, can make textile or garments look less quality, so make these your most beautiful purchases.

The daisy print is saved because the centers aren’t yellow. The grownup version of kids’ items looks superb – hairbands, patterned tights, beads, all very workable in neutral colours.

Not tortoiseshell, which looks odd to me on everyone but the 3 Autumns. Coloured plastic better.

Avoid fabrics that mute or dull colour. Pick fabrics with a little shine in one element of the outfit. It’s pretty because you shine a little. Also, it adds the sensation of movement just by breathing, which keeps shifting the light play.

If the outfit is neutrals, make the accessories colourful and the makeup glowing, vibrant, alive. Neutral colours don’t belong on True Spring faces and nor do shy lips, which True will turn gray. Just to simulate the natural lip colour for a no-makeup look, it takes a lot of pigment. Neutral colours do belong on Light Spring faces – grey eyeshadows, softer blush, and apricot and beige lips.

Don’t wear darkest with darkest, especially Light Spring. The overall value effect is light for the Lights and medium for the True.

Wear green.  It’s excellent for those of us looking at you.

Liven up neutrals by finding them in prints. Coloured buttons are good.

Why all the solid colours in the collections? Because I don’t see prints I like. I was asked to do florals for the 12 Seasons. I’m sorry, it would take years. Wear them if you can find them. Prints are great on Spring.

Consider that neutrals are a bigger challenge for Spring than colour and for True more than Light. Look at navy, your darker turquoise colours as pant, suit, and skirt colours. Widen the meaning of neutral colour. Some analysts consider your red among your neutrals.

Coloured coats, trenches, and jackets look good on you.

Keep the overall look relaxed. The dark suit looks stiff and heavy. Spring isn’t wrapped that tight.

Play to your strengths. What is it that Spring knocks our socks off with that nobody else can do? Yellow-green. It’s uncommon, it looks like the new leaves we wait for each year.

True Spring

Don’t match too much.

Wear lots of accessories. You know how children can wear a candy necklace, several bracelets, hair clips, and look fabulous. Spring has a lot of that.

Never dull down Spring in any of the 3 colour dimensions. A True Spring who compromises saturation or darkness level looks pale, floury, grey, with doughy bone structure and no angles in the face. True Spring is looking for warmth first, yes, but pure pigments and enough darkness really do matter too.

What about a print with white in it? What should come across is sun. Even a little white can look too crisp and drain you as the Bright Spring drapes did. The two turquoise tops in the upper left of the Polyvore – see how the one to its right has more warmth of a yellow type beaming out of it? The dots one on the left is cooler in the colour, and cooler still and sharper by the white,  no primary sense of sunshine, looks more Bright to me.

True Spring goes darker than Light. Experiment with it. If you overshoot, it’s not a big deal. If a Light Spring overshoots, even far from the face, the whole picture is weighed down.

Beige yellow, butterball yellow, not cool yellow. The yolk in those Laura Secord Easter eggs. For zingy days, wear it with purplish blue and pretend you had no idea what purple and yellow do for each other.

I wouldn’t wear red, orange, purple pants to the office but would in a skirt with a cream or beige top. Consider more stuff at the store tomorrow than you did yesterday.

Wearing a busy coloured top? Make the bottom be one of the colours in the top rather than adding yet another colour element.

Mod looks great.

Orange can be a colour that preoccupies the eye, maybe just my eye, but it’s very at home on Spring.

The brown dress – too muted/orange/Autumn? Maybe it’s on the line. Wear it with the Spring orange cardi to pull it over to Spring.

I love blazers. Love them. You won’t wear your red lips to work, favoring nectarine, but wear your red blazer. It looks awesomely strong. Wear it on Casual Friday to stay office-worthy.

Light Spring

Much like True Spring but a lighter colour stamp, since the Season’s TMIT is that colours be light.

Bit more monochromatic than True Spring but still lots of colour. A pink blouse and a turquoise sweater look fine. Since the article is about neutrals, I used those more but go the colour way if you like. We will be very happy looking at you.

The cooler yellows are gorgeous as are the cooler pinks.

Build your wardrobe in the next few months, even buy your Christmas dress now. You’ll be happy in December.

Light Spring Looking Serious has a lot more information about this Season.

Accessories

We still need to superimpose the Polyvore below on top of those we just looked at. That’s how much the audience has to connect. We are like a 1000 piece puzzle to look at. So amazing when all the pieces fit, so obvious when one doesn’t, somehow our eye goes right to it. Imagine a black dot floating in those collections. You would see nothing else, you’d just stare at it moving around like some kind of hypnosis, like the railroad tracks effect of black mascara.

True Spring on the left, Light Spring on the right.

 

 

In 12 Season personal or seasonal colour analysis, True Spring looks

- Yellower and warmer.The pink drop earrings for Light Spring are cooler pink and the metal less yellow. Belt buckles are yellower for True Spring.

- Brighter, which can translate to bolder.

- More pigmented or saturated (compare the green shoes – are they yellower on the Light side? Yes, but you’re always juggling heat/value/saturation at once and these are less saturated).

True Spring’s accessories can also take on more weight. That could be more solid (a heel), sturdy (fabric weight, a buckle), chunky (a belt), big (a stone), or wide (a strap). That bead on a wire effect in jewelry, it looks really excellent on Light Spring. Don’t be too literal or exclusive here, many pieces will work well in both Seasons.

—–

From the book RTYNC pictured in the column to the right:

Colour Equations Light Spring

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 light colour

One neutral colour + two colours

Use of complementary pairs in medium sized blocks or with quieter colours.

Overall light to medium darkness effect

——

Colour Equations True Spring

One light, medium, or dark neutral colour + two brighter colours of similar area

One large block light to medium-dark neutral colours + one small block medium-dark to dark neutral colour + one brighter or lighter colour

One light, medium, or dark neutral colour + one bright colour + two other colours in small areas

Two colours

Full use of complementary pairs

Overall light to medium-dark effect

—–

We are dressing to look like we inhabit our natural space, looking like we were meant to look when we stepped into this world. The glow and vitality of perfect health and eternal youth are Spring’s claim to fame.

 

Light Summer CE And Being Not Pale

January 16, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 20 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 · 32 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. Autumn women often have a deeper voice, as does Ivanka. But then, so does Scarlet Johanssen who appears Spring. Can’t go by that.

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.

 

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 · 9 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.

 

You can see some very lovely examples of Winter eyes and line patterns in the Our Eye Album: Winter article. Accompanying the Bright Winter eye 5 photo are some suggestions as to how a woman with those eye colours might approach intensifying them.

 

Next Page »

• ***COLOUR TRAVELS***

  Nikki Bogardus of My Color Rx will be in:

  -London, England, June 10-14, 2013.

  More information about Nikki's sessions and Contact details to book appts. can be had by emailing from her website at www.mycolorrx.com
  =========================

  Christine will be in:

  -London, ON ! Last visit before October !, June 7, 8, 9, 10.
  -London, ON, October 18-21, 2013. DATE CHANGE

  Please email to christine@12blueprints.com for scheduling. Answers to common questions are linked in the upper crossbars on this page under PCA FAQs.
  ---------------------------------------------

• ***PCA TRAINING COURSE***

  Dates for the course to become certified as 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analyst trained by Christine Scaman, are as follows:

  -Chatham ONTARIO, May 27, 28, 29, 2013. [FULL]
  -Chatham, ON June 18, 19, 20. [FULL]
  -Chatham ON, August 20, 21, 22, 2013. [FULL]
  -Chatham, ON, September 30, October 1, 2. [FULL]
  -Chatham, ON, October 28, 29, 30.
  -Chatham, ON, November 25, 26, 27. [FULL]

  Space is limited to 2 students per session.

  Deposits are accepted and the course package mailed 6 weeks in advance.

  The Complete Collection of 108 Test Drapes will be available within 4-6 weeks of completion of the course for students only. More info in the article linked two lines down.

  More about schedules, content, drapes, and looking ahead to 2014 at http://12blueprints.com/the-pca-training-course/

  Please email me at christine@12blueprints.com with inquiries, to request an additional session, or to reserve a place.

  --------------------------------------------------

• We are most beautiful when the colours we wear are in perfect harmony with the colours we are.

  

  Learn how your natural colouring can guide you to your most flattering clothing, makeup, and hair colour choices. It works every time, for every item, on everybody.

  12 Seasons of practical, affordable information on the styles, cosmetics, hair colour, and jewelry that each palette wears most beautifully and the comparisons you need to wear your Season perfectly!

  Click here for Book Details and Buy Info.

• Recent Posts

  • Can Some of My Season’s Colours Be Too Dark?
  • Introducing Sci\ART Colour Analyst and Trainer Terry Wildfong
  • Can My Hair Colour Be Warmer Than My Palette?
  • The “I Know What Looks Good On Me” Dream
  • Colour Analyst Training Course: Drapes
  • PCA Training Course Testimonials
  • Coloured Hair or Silver?
  • The PCA Training Course
  • Getting More From Your 12-Tone Swatch Book
  • Protected: For Training Course Graduates: Self-Test and Review
  • PCA Training Course Update 2
  • Season Colours in the Off-Season
  • Dark Winter in Hot Weather
  • Protected: For Training Course Graduates: Business Resources
  • True Spring Blue

• Recent Comments

  • Daenerys on Can My Hair Colour Be Warmer Than My Palette?
  • heatherlee on Can Some of My Season’s Colours Be Too Dark?
  • Susan on Can Eye, Hair, and Skin Colours Conflict?
  • Janine on Can Some of My Season’s Colours Be Too Dark?
  • Mary Steele Lawler on Can Some of My Season’s Colours Be Too Dark?
  • Christine Scaman on Can My Hair Colour Be Warmer Than My Palette?
  • Kirsten on Can My Hair Colour Be Warmer Than My Palette?
  • Shirley on Can My Hair Colour Be Warmer Than My Palette?
  • Christine Scaman on Do’s and Dont’s of Matching Lipstick To 12 Season Colour Books
  • Polly on Do’s and Dont’s of Matching Lipstick To 12 Season Colour Books

• Categories

  • More Topics For The 12 Seasons | v (198)
    • Autumn Colours (33)
    • For All Seasons (86)
    • Spring Colours (34)
    • Summer Colours (47)
    • Winter Colours (38)
  • PCA Appointments (1)
  • PCA Training Course | v (7)
    • Privileged Posts for Course Graduates (2)
    • THE COURSE (4)
    • Training Course Testimonials (1)
  • Testimonials (1)

• Get daily makeup and colour updates. Join the 12 Blueprints Page on Facebook! A Click on the box below will take you there.

  12 Blueprints Colour Analysis
  
  Promote Your Page Too

Copyright © 2008-2011 · All rights reserved · Revolution theme by Brian Gardner · Log in