Anna heads home, reads the document that explains the color analyzed clothes/cosmetic/hair/jewelry that harmonize most beautifully with her natural coloring, looks at her clothes, and sees that nothing is as flattering as it could be. Just like everyone else after a PCA.  She looks at the pictures of what her hair color should be and starts buying the new makeup.

None of it feels right. She can’t see the greyed brown undertone in her palette. Her mother always said she was a redhead. Her husband calls her his Coppertone girl and I suggested that Soft Summer isn’t flattered by traditional bronzers. Suddenly it’s all wrong. In her own words, she feels “like a bird that’s fallen out of its nest”. She knows she’s making it be hard when it’s supposed to make her life easier, but how to relax into it?

Confirm the result

I can be wrong. Anyone can be wrong anytime, doing anything. I usually, but not always, go with my first impression. A new set of eyes, a new day, and I might see something else.

We went ahead and did the drapes again.

For a second draping, I always have someone sit in who is not a colour expert but is sensitive to the optical effects. Everyone can tell when you look better, but not everyone is visually perceptive enough to watch a face blur and focus, or the eyes and teeth yellow and whiten. I try not to talk much because I usually see what I saw the first time. Soft Summer was confirmed.

The tangle is mostly between the 2 best Seasons. Nobody can see their own face that objectively, including me, which is why a makeup purchase decision is so often wrong if you test it on your face.  Anna’s confusion was valid, in that she felt the shadows around the eyes were less visible in the Soft Autumn drapes. You have to be careful here. If the face turns yellow, then (my theory is that) the yellow is canceling some of the purple in the shadows, just as we choose yellow concealer.

Look at the whole face. It should not be yellow at all. Even a trace of yellow gives the effect of mild jaundice, the features seem a bit erased. Neither should there be a greyness in the face, where the drape is pulling color out of the skin, but be careful here too. In its milder form, that chalkiness can give the “clearing the skin” impression. The crispest, freshest, healthiest skin was in Soft Summer. That perfect, delicate, aristocratic bone structure definition that Soft Summer does ultimately well was clear.

It was as though I told her she’d been switched at birth. Her identity, her safety net of what it meant to be Anna, was pulled out from under her.

Expect to need time

Start with knowing what to never look at in stores again. That alone will exclude so many distractions that the right items will become more obvious. Look at the item and think about why you should NOT buy it. “The grey is too blue”, “I see yellow in it”, “the white is stark”. Try to talk yourself OUT of it.

Match your Colours Book the best you can. Don’t be distraught if the precise fog brown isn’t obvious. Don’t try to classify every garment you see to its Season. You’re already looking a zillion percent better than you used to. Your eye is learning. The Book does the mixing and matching for you. Remember your principles for how to combine the colours (these are sent to clients after a PCA).

Accept that you will keep making better and better decisions. The effect will get stronger. I get that doing your job is hard enough. This is like asking you to do your job AND learn a new computer system. Don’t worry. You now understand where you came from and you know where you’re going. This is empowerment beyond describing. The branches can’t help but grow when the roots are this strong.

You’ll make a few mistakes. In your first windsurfing class, the guy in the water most is the one trying the hardest, progressing the fastest, working on moving to the edge of the technique. Mistakes are good. Allow them to be good. This is how we learn.

Leave the hair to last

Hair is the hardest to get right, hardest to adjust to quickly, and often the most sensitive (and least objective) self-acceptance feature. Get used to the clothes and makeup first and your brain will be much more compliant when you correct the hair color. Do it in small steps and your mind will say “OK, fine, she’s done this before and I survived”. If you did a big hair adjustment on day 1, your mind would say “Wrong, off, can’t be right, looks weird, change it back, need to go find someone and pester them till they confirm that I looked better before, get me to a phone, I’ll see a different colorist, can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.”

As a child, the hair was a warm toffee blonde. Nevermind. Anna has different skin now and that hair might not work at all. Besides, children’s hair takes more money to replicate than I’m willing to spend on my hair and searching out that rare colorist who could create it.

She is now more the pine cone in the highlight (should she choose to have them), than the wheat field. Her natural base, just visible at the temple below, is not very dark, a medium ash brown. Her eyebrow is light-medium ash brown. Letting the red fade till she can go back to her natural base color, with those watery grey-green eyes, would be like looking into a misty forest.

(See Soft Summer’s Best Hair Color for more on this Season’s most skin-flattering hair color).

Breaking emotional ties

You can’t get rid of your color luggage that fast. Letting go of the past is shaky for all of us. “I always saw myself as…” needs to be uprooted but it’s dug in deep. Doing something different is always destabilizing, even if it’s driving a new way to work. You can’t hold your balance and your position. It’s uncomfortable.

Release who your parents expected. Never look back over your shoulder again. You’re not her anymore. You can choose what she has that you want to keep. Allow the calm, strong feeling of finding, and speaking, in your own true voice.

Learning to repel the marketing all around us is part of the journey. A much more difficult question, that may take a lifetime to answer, is whether we intentionally, but subconsciously, sabotage ourselves. As women, we seem awfully good at undermining our full potential in beauty, as well as in personal strength, more than we could just blame on our marketing culture. Everyone who saw Anna commented on the beauty in her face, and in her person. We women are better at cataloguing our faults. Inadequacies that nobody else sees becomes our security blanket.

If it were given to you at this moment to become everything you could be, how many would take it? Marianne Williamson’s words are repeated so often to let us marvel at the truth of them. It is our not our darkness that we are afraid of. It is our light. (If you don’t know the full passage, read it here).

It is THAT fear that must be entered. PCA is not for everyone. It takes a courage that you didn’t expect would be asked of you. Your view of the world will be challenged. The responsibility to make it as you want it to be will feel forced on you, unless you choose to see it as Opportunity.

Anna will be treated differently as she separates from her past and realizes that she may have to step up to how beautiful the world sees her to be. It will take about a year.

This is what I saw. Go back and look at her eye.

Anna said,

…the whole experience has given me peace. Not initially, obviously, but upon reflection, I feel at peace. It was like meeting myself for the first time. Or finding out something major about myself, that caused me to have to reintroduce myself to myself. (if that makes any sense). And now that the ”fog” has settled, the “muted and dulled fog” : ), I am relaxed at meeting the new me. And I enjoy to know myself that much better. This was another, fairly large piece of the puzzle I found in me. There are less questions. Less self doubt. And I feel like I can forge ahead now, equipped with a better sense of self. I have been enjoying the last few weeks, walking into stores and looking for the “real me” in there somewhere. And when it is not there, I don’t compromise anymore. It’ll be fun. It’ll continue to give me direction, as now I know the destination. There are lots of ways to get there, but I will always arrive at the same place. Within my palette. Whereas before, I had no direction, no sense of self, little confidence, and depended on second opinions a lot. I am getting there. It will take time. But I feel much better already.

The colours are greyed, right? They are still cool, but there is an overlay of grey with a trace of brown, like fog, like watching colour through a raincloud. This Season is Summer’s version of colour in shade. The whole personal colour palette shares this very faint grey-brown common denominator. Light Summer begins with the True Summer palette too, but the colours are seen in pale sunlight.

Every Season has a True note, a higher note,  and a lower note. Noise can’t exist without quiet, or light without shade. Soft Summer is Summer’s quieter, lower tempo. In 12 Season Color Analysis, this is the Neutral Season where Summer is beginning to integrate a breath of Autumn.

Drapes

Seldom do I meet such a perfect example of a Season. The skin, the eye colours and patterns, and the hair and brow colour are very much in the middle of the curve for Soft Summer. What made this PCA fun was that Shannon understood the theory and could see the color effects instantly. She was able to do her own analysis, which I love because the doors open fast and easy and the resistance wall crumbles.

Because this coloring is so medium, it seems the most misdiagnosed. The draping was straightforward. A tired face we saw in Winter colours, completely dominated by the drapes. Quite good in Summer colours, but a sense of being incomplete, of not having located the magic. A yellow face in Spring colours, with no benefit that Summer didn’t offer. A slightly yellow face in True Autumn, less so than in Spring colours, with a good eye color intensity, and a sense of “something here is working”.

There was no contest between Soft Summer and either neighbor, placing Shannon in the middle of her Season. Often, Soft Summer has a remarkably fragile bone structure that doesn’t achieve hi-def till it’s in the right colors. The warm neighbor of Soft Autumn color looks queasy, flat, pasty, blunted, and out-of-focus. The cooler True Summer was too blue-shadowed and pink-lidded.

Impression

This is a Summer more than anything. The watery feeling of the colors still applies, as does the coolness and delicacy. Watermelon, clover, and many water colors. Water and hostas can get quite dark, but they’re never crayon.

Soft Season means that not only is the person Soft to look at, with no big jumps between skin/hair/eyes, and so that is how they wear their clothes.  Low saturation colours in low contrast combinations. Gentle colour movements. No trends (too exaggerated) or sudden transitions and dark lines (too severe). Related shades work well, but not necessarily monochromatic. Classy. Subtle.

The Colours Book gives you all your swatches, automatically mix-and-matchable. Your analogous, complimentary, and monochromatic colours are all in there. How they are combined depends on the energy of the particular Season. Neutral skin has warmth and coolness, so they have a warmer cosmetic colour palette (Desert Rose type) and a cooler selection (Dusty Plums). Color analyzed makeup colors are in your Book as well.

The Summer personality is seldom overly demanding.  Refreshingly pleasant personalities prevail in all 3 Summer Seasons.  Children adore their steady and straightforward manner. The loudest voice won’t belong to a Summer. They are highly civilized and have no problem with impulse control.

Autumn inserts practicality, speed, and strength into the Summer core of these people. The moment Autumn is invited to the party, Summer’s soothing way is replaced by Autumn’s determination. The straightness of the brow conveys it in the eye photo alone. As a triathlete, this woman is nothing if not determined.

Soft Summer Hair

This is an article in itself. It is harder to understand and harder to achieve. It’s coming next. Note that the hair is photographing more red than IRL. In the next part, I’ll show you the real color.

Shannon

Your face, Photoshopped, can be yours for the draping.  It’s easy to look at and easy to be. After years of feeling uncomfortable with makeup, Shannon said this,

The colors in my swatch feel right to me, as does the description of the Soft Summer personality – it all fits in terms of how I know myself. The make-up application looked and felt fantastic and, for the first time, made me want to buy and wear make-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discussion in the Comments to Skin Undertones is what led me to finally understand why this happens. For those who helped work through this, we won’t cover any new ground. This separate article is just to make sure nobody misses this point.

It’s fundamental to the essential reason and purpose of 12 Season Personal Color Analysis : to uncover the precise shades of every color that already exist in you. Only then can we repeat them exactly in clothes, hair, makeup. The result is perfect harmony. To the viewer, that looks and feels like “What have YOU got going on? How can I be finding it hard to look away when you’re just wearing a tank and shorts from Old Navy??”

We’ve all put on cosmetic colors that turned orange or bubblegum pink. Why?

I knew 2 things :

1. When I got my color analysis makeup colors, the color change (everything used to turn orange) stopped happening – because I no longer bought makeup with orange in it.
2. When you apply the right makeup color for the skin, it virtually disappears. It fuses with the face. Even with a heavy application, the makeup seems to diffuse away and mesh with the face – because those colors are already in the face.

When makeup changes color, my belief is that it’s because those pigments that can find no match in your natural pigmentation sit on top, separated or isolated from the rest of the product that blended in because it found a match. This effect gives the appearance of a color change.

What else could it be? I’m open to all suggestions.

Your own lip or skin color causing a bizarre combination color? Sheer gloss maybe. Not likely though, other than what I described above. The concentration of pigment in skin can’t compete with a cosmetic.

Skin pH? Medication? Possible. We’ve all heard this at the makeup counter. Color-change lipsticks have ingredients that change color based on body temperature and skin pH. Are those ingredients included in every lip/blush formulation? I doubt it, or all makeup would change color. That would be crazy.

Lighting.  All makeup looks bluer in morning’s bluer wavelengths. In general, I think our brains adapt for that, just as they see white walls as white, though they’re usually influenced by light or furniture. I don’t look at people and think “That’s afternoon lipstick”.

Other variables, hair and clothes? Hm. Maybe. Every color on you will affect how a given color looks. So even if you have the hair color that will perfect your skin tone, it will never look as good in wrong-colored clothing or makeup. The answer must be to have your right hair color when you buy makeup, but I think our brains adapt for that too.

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

Clothes

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

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

Brows and Blush

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

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

When Good Color Goes Bad

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

Eyeshadow Palettes for Eye Colour

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

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

Off the soapbox, now.

Using the right browns and greys,

And understanding that not everyone can do everything,

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

It’s about repeats and complements and contrasts.

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

True Summer

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

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

———-

Soft Summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———-

Light Summer

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

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

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

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

Don’ts

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

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

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

Ask me some questions.

Anyone know the eyeshadows that match those Light Summer swatches?

The yellowing effect of ivory on Summer skin…

The drained, tired skin of an Autumn in soft white…

The disappearing Summer bride in Winter’s aggressive, hard, cold, frosty, sharp white…

Know your perfect white with a Personal Colour Analysis. Achieve your skin tone perfection on this of all days. Your wedding gift to yourself.

Have your Colour Analyst send 3 e-mails.

One to your dress shop, so they can choose the perfect color and style.

One to your makeup artist. If she works with a PCA, there is a cosmetic colour palette and particular radiance in her head instantly.

One to your florist. If he understands PCA, he makes a composition, knowing the flowers to use and not use.

Your jeweler, your hair colorist, everyone needs to know. When the team works together, you become extraordinary.

Are you getting warm? I am.

We look at the colours of satin for the 4 True Seasons. In correct Seasonal Colour Analysis, there are 12 personal palettes. The other 8 are Neutral Seasons, or blends of the 4 Trues.

(I do not own the Sci\ART Bridal Drapes Set of 12.)

Did I say grey when I should have said white? Yup.

Did I say Summer when I should have said Spring? Yes again.

I was trying to be animated, you see…

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

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

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

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

For True Summer, it looks like this.

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

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

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

Part 1 is at Matching The Swatch Book : Blue. Today is about True Summer corals. This would not apply to Soft Summers, who have very different colours. Light Summer may have an occasional similar swatch, but not a whole page.

Coral is one of the more difficult colors to predict in 12 Seasons Personal Colour Analysis. Any color, like turquoise or peach, that has an inherently warm AND cool component, is tougher to grasp confidently.

As we said in the Blue post, it’s often the colours in more distant, seemingly unrelated, Seasons that can be most similar. I looked for the most similar corals to True Summer’s.

They are not among the 3 Summers (except maybe the odd one in Light Summer). No coral in the Spring or Autumn palettes would confuse you if you had your Colours Book.

The corals of True Summer and Dark Winter are similar tones. Side by side, Dark Winter certainly has a dark brown element that takes away the rose-petal freshness of True Summer’s but they are quite close.

Wow, ay? So, how might you tell them apart?

1. True Summer is absolutely cool. You should be able to find no heat, no yellow, no brown. OK, but hard to do with coral, since it always seems a little warmish.

2. If it’s a cosmetic colour, don’t compare makeup colours on your arm or face. None of us can ever be objective enough about our face and arms get messy. Paint it on white paper to compare it to your Colours Book.

3. Does the item convey a feeling? True Summer should express cool, serene, fresh, feathery, and delicate. Choose a visual to help. Rose petals, watercolor, mist, water are True Summer. It should feel true to one of True Summer keywords : gentle.

For True Summer, it’s watermelon, not geranium. Soft plum, not deep eggplant. Soothing, not strong. The personal swatch book may feel hard to interpret, but when you see it in the entire piece of clothing, the colour is easier to figure out.

If you see a trace of sunshine, it’s wrong, it’s Spring. True Summer is absolutely cool.

Ask yourself  “can I see black in the shadows?” . If yes, it’s Winter’s. And this is a good way to make a colr go one way or the other. If it’s a tissue or sheer fabric, wearing a white or dark tank underneath can pull it towards  Winter or Summer very effectively.

4. Compare it to 2 items that you KNOW to be warm and cool. It will be easier to position yours accurately when you have a range with endpoints.

5. Consider the fabric. Colour is an emotional expression that is conveyed by weight, by combination, by style and stitching lines, as well as hue.

If you feel a heavy or somber presence, it’s probably off. Even when True Summer gets darker, the feeling is still graceful and fine. Winter colours look (and feel) aggressive on a True Summer.

If the colour feels like it would have to be velvet because the feeling is so solid, that is not True Summer. If it feels made of gauze or linen, it is right.

If the colour were curtains, the True Summer would let light through. Dark Winter is occlusive because of its degrees of saturation and darkness, both way higher than Summer.

6. What story is being told by the colour? What background does it create? a watercolour or an oil painting? a sheer or a tapestry?

7. In a swirl with Summer’s other colours, would it be dominant, or too aggressive, and overshadow all the more delicate colours?

All True Summer’s colours are very slightly faded. Spring has the odd similar swatch but it is distinctly more saturated, a clearer colour. In the graphic above, I could have softened (reduced the saturation, grayed) the Summer colours even more. As soon as Spring appears, the colours become rainbows to parrot plumage, but they’re clear, not dusty colours. True Summer is just the slightest bit washed out.

If you love the item and your instinct is that the colour is right, buy it if you can return it. Try it with the rest of your palette, in different lighting. Often, a colour that is extremely close can be made to work well because of what it’s combined with, since so much of Season harmony is conveyed by how your colours are worn together.

I believe these are the last stages before becoming completely colour confident. Don’t do it from memory, you’ll lose money. Always consult your Colours Book.

You’re still moving forward.

I need some suggestions for shopping with my [Personal Color Analysis Swatch Book]. Some of the colors in the True Summer book (especially the blues) seem quite saturated and (almost) bright. When shopping, I’m always wondering how I can tell the difference between a True Summer blue versus the Winter blue and even the Spring cobalt blue??

Another question is about the cool-ish coral. I found a lot of similar colors when out shopping, but it was difficult to tell if the colors were cool enough. The artificial store lighting complicates things as well. I noticed that some of the things that were perfect matches to my Book in the store were totally wrong once I took them home and saw what it looked like under natural lighting (and the same applies to make-up colors). Do you have any suggestions for making color matching easier?

What to try:

1. Pick a few items in the store of similar color to compare, rather than just 1 item. It’s by comparison that we understand color. I learned a lot about color and textiles at Value Village because they group 20 reds, blues, etc. together, so the differences become easily apparent.

2. If there are no similarly colored items (often stores work with just a few dye lots each season), hold it against a white item, or better a white and an off-white item.

3. Look in daylight. Jelena is very right about that. Even before your PCA, you probably find that you buy something only to find it wasn’t what you thought.

4. Be sure you can return things.

5. Assume the color of the item and the swatch are NOT a match until you can convince yourself they are. For True Summer, ask yourself:

“Do I see any heat (orange, tan brown, dark brown, gold, yellow) in the color”? go through them 1 by 1. I get in a hurry, or I want to believe it’s the right color, so I  make myself slow down.

Every time I listen to a dog’s heartbeat, I assume there is an abnormality till I can convince myself it is normal. I use the same approach here.

6. Flip the concept and see if you can come at it the other way. Ask yourself  “does it appear less intense than it COULD?” or “could I imagine a MORE saturated version of this color?”

Instead of “is this soft?”, ask “could it be MORE pigment-rich?”

If the color COULD be MORE  intense, it’s probably a soft color.

Here are the 3 closest blue matches among True Summer, Winter, and Spring.

From top, True Summer, True Winter, True Spring.

True Summer is not hard to pick out. It’s always some version of faded denim, even the darkest wash. True Summer is not necessarily obviously grayed; it is just relatively less saturated than Winter. True Summer is not dull or drab, and some of the colors have some strength to them.

When you see a highly saturated color, you usually know it. It is more common to see Winters walking around in color that is too soft because saturated color is hard to find and after a few washings, it’s softened.

Surprisingly, it’s Winter and Spring that are closest for this color. It makes sense for blue.  Both are saturated Seasons. Blue is darkish at high saturation so this is one of Spring’s darker colours. The Spring is a bit yellower. On the 3 Colour Scales of Light/Dark, Warm/Cool, and Clear/Soft, we’re matching all 3 very closely.

My feeling here is that it’s too close to matter.  The difference will come from the other elements of the outfit and how the person wears and combines the color.

The colours should be your most perfect. It is just so beautiful to look at.

How you combine them can be consistent with how colours are combined in your person. The harmony and balance with YOU feels very relaxing to the viewer.

Your style of clothing can enhance your colours and your communication with the world. When it looks unrehearsed, you are looking amazing.

Cosmetics should be your supporting player, not steal center stage. The look you create should feel the way it feels to interact with you. Now, your appearance is really coming together. You look organized, intelligent, and uncluttered. You’re getting taken more seriously.

Glasses, jewelry, and purses should replicate your face and body shape and your clothing style. That’s called “Easy on the eyes”.

Isn’t it time that beauty look like it might have just happened that way, instead of like it took a lot work? As my friend Gina says, Lord have mercy, YES!

With 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, the what-to-buy decisions become easy. Today, some choices for the Spring and Summer colour palette.