…remember TMIT, The Most Important Thing, for your Season. That aspect of the colour should be the first thing you see. Even if you’re a Light Summer buying red lipstick, the noticeable lightness of the red compared to all the other reds at the counter will help get it right.  Your red, once it’s on your face, it will just look red, not red and dark. Light lips look good. Light colour, light colour deposit, light texture, light weight, light shine, light lipliner. Light is good on Light Seasons at every age.

…smear it out on white paper or white paper towel. This works well for colour analysis swatches that are on white backing and partly why I like that presentation better than fabric or plastic disc swatches. This is the only practical way I know to see the nuances of a colour. The same applies to eyeliner, eyeshadow, even mascara. Not foundation though, which is applied on the side of the face and jaw, about 4 colours at a time, assessed in daylight or with full spectrum lighting.

…compare several colours at the same time on the same paper in the same lighting. Colour perception and the 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis (PCA) process itself are based on comparisons. That’s how our eye positions a colour correctly. Especially for foundation, don’t buy on the basis of a single colour test.

…take samples home. Sephora and MAC will sample anything. May cost more but expensive products often have more beautiful pigment quality (though staying power isn’t related to cost). 2 beautiful lipsticks are worth far more than 4 meh ones.

…stay in touch with your analyst. Many of us are forever swatching makeup, hearing from clients about great finds, and keeping extensive and updated lists of great products for you to try. We can save you a lot of time even after your PCA. For you, it’s a frustrated afternoon. For us, it’s a Copy&Paste. We want your colour analysis to work for you and we recognize that you need help getting your Sea(son) legs once you start on your own. If your analyst doesn’t have these lists, Rachel at Truth Is Beauty blog and MarySteele at her Luminosity Color Analysis Page on Facebook have posted them online. Need something warmer than this, redder than that, darker but still in your Season? Ask us! If you want to know, so do other women and we can pass the info around.

…ask cosmetic counter staff for help with lipstick. Don’t get into the Whys and Hows of the Colour Book of swatches. Be very narrow in your question. “Do you have a lipstick in this colour?” They’re often very good at this.

…try many colours from your palette. Neutral Season women, especially those who lean to their warmer or cooler side, may feel better in one set of colours. Even pure Cool Season women have a variety of shades and may find some too purple, too pink, too dark. Dark and Bright Season women should try sheer formulas, especially if they’re not used to a lot of colour. Soft Season women look fabulous and young in naked flesh type colour, either mauvier or brownier.

…have a sense of your best lipstick range. From within your palette, consider setting the darkness and brightness of lipstick to the intensity the eyebrows have on the face. I’ve talked about using the level of hair darkness and brightness as a good guide for about how strong the lip colour should be to look balanced. That can work as often as any rule can, including the eyebrow suggestion, which is about 80% of the time.  Next time you’re at a meeting or a family meal, look at all the eyebrows. Not the colour, but the darkness level and the contrast. In about 80% of the 5 Winter blend Seasons, they will be quite dark and contain some black. If they’re wearing their right colours, the eyebrows may seem even more contrasting than in their pyjamas. As pigmentation darkens and saturates, so do the brows. As complexion gets darker, a Winter’s other colours will get much darker faster by comparison with the darkness of the skin, while a Summer blend’s brows (and other colours) often remain only slighter darker than skin. Eyebrows can go in and out of focus during a draping like every other feature as we try to pin down “How light are your lights and how dark are your darks?” In right colour, the brows will achieve their best darkness and best definition from the face (but be careful, they also become severe in too dark colour when the rest of the face gets too shadowed.) The eyebrow starts and stops sharply, as so most things Winter, so it looks fine if eyeliner does too. The lips look good at the same level of definition from the face as the brow. It creates a balance between two similarly sized colour blocks that are right on the face, which the hair will not be.

…explore every aspect of your Season. A Bright Winter – dramatic, theatrical, yet delicate enough to appear in a fairy tale. Bright Winter is distinctly lighter and brighter than True Winter. That brightness probably makes them look lighter relative to True Winter than they really are. But it does matter, that sunshine. Winter is a fascination to me in that they have those icy pale colours that can appear as ultimate powder puff innocence on a colouring and person that are quite intense. But in BW, the innocence is genuine and of those baby pale colours, peach is the one I love most. I find it interesting to use cosmetics to express every aspect of what the person/Season is, and all the Springs have this guileless sincerity. Their lightness of colours is important, even though they’re Winters. If BW could find a peachy pink colour with enough clarity and saturation, the contrast needed on the Winterness of the face would appear and yet look as a youthful baby peach lip. At the link, Bagatelle, Magnifique, Pink Teaser look excellent. This is a blog to Bookmark, the photos, dupes, comparisons, and reviews are absolutely outstanding. Springs will love Chanel’s Spring 2012 collection. If you’re a Light  Spring looking for blush, again, look to the Beauty Look Book for great photos and comparisons.

…remember the companies that have done the thinking for you. eleablake and Pretty Your World create gorgeous cosmetics custom-coloured for your colour analysis result. If you haven’t tried the blushes for your own colouring from eleablake with a soft diffusing brush, I feel very comfortable saying that you don’t know how good blush can be.

DON’T

…apply lipstick to your face first. To really be impartial about a colour and decide if it matches the swatches, it can’t come within 4 ft. of your face.  Also, clothing colour doesn’t change on your body but cosmetic colour does, adding another level of confusion and distraction. Use the paper, not your arm or hand. Get the decision away from your body.

…assess the colour by looking at the product in the package, the sticker on the tube, the plastic tag under the tube, or the pan.  Every product has too many variables of warmth, yellowness, green tinges, shimmer, etc. As you really come to understand your Season, you’ll get more discriminating – and more often disappointed if you just buy from the tube. Every person will see more by smearing the colour out. Keep a pad of unlined paper and a pen in your purse. Get paper towel from the cleaning isle or the Ladies Room if you have to. I’ve done both and haven’t bought a loser lipstick in many months. Dedication pays off!

…apply a cosmetic on its own on an otherwise un-made-up face. All the products together bring in the harmony and the balance. Yes, they balance what’s in the face already but the intensity of chemical pigment will dominate natural pigments. Even in your best colour, it can just look odd or off.

…get discouraged. Analysts understand that matching makeup is the hardest thing, which is why many give you a list to get you started. Some Seasons are much more difficult than others. Some personalities may be more questioning than others. True Summer has a tricky and unexpected palette to begin with, being given to an idealistic personality. The perfectionism of True Winter can get in the way too. Both continue to seek, though with different motivation. Might Autumn, the pragmatist, and Spring, the optimist, be easier to satisfy?

…assume that every colour recommended for a Season will work for you. At the end of all this, you do need to try it on your face, with your hair and your clothes. Be open to the possibility that even after a PCA, you don’t really know what looks good on you for a few months. You have a pretty good idea of what doesn’t suit you.  Ask for opinions by finding an honest friend and giving them a choice. Not “Do you like this colour?” Rather “Between these two, which lipstick is better on me?” And expect that once you think you’re onto it, some family member will come along and say “Dear, are you sure you should be wearing that lip colour?” and you feel doubtful and disoriented all over again.

…ask cosmetic counter staff for help with blush and eyeshadow. You can’t be sure that they have a strong concept of colour saturation or the difference between Spring’s and Autumn’s warmth.

…give up. Getting anything perfect the first time doesn’t happen. Don’t be letting that keep you at home. This is where less expensive products are a great option. Get to know e.l.f., Palladio (at Sally Beauty), and the many drugstore brands that do let you test. You’ll buy a few duds. And you will have learned something when you figure out what made them duds.

…wear your hair down if the colour is off. Hair colour usually takes a few tries to get right but nothing can get in the way of right cosmetic colour more.  Those months while hair is being adjusted can delay or drag out that feeling of reaching a finish line. You’ve come this far, keep going. You’re almost there. Tie hair back in a grey or right-coloured scarf.

…overdarken your hair to get your love of red lips to work. Especially with dark colours, chemical dyes create so much more heaviness of colour deposit than a natural head would have.  It’s demanding on the skin to try to balance the hair and the other more intense cosmetics needed. As if constantly trying to be heard over a background din, the skin can look drained and tired. It’s also very demanding of the viewer’s visual processing faculties who have to clear the solid black wall to get to the woman behind/beneath it. If the words unexpected, unique, surprising, and delicate apply to your colouring (Spring), all the sparkle will be sucked into the black hole. Even those Seasons who wear darkness and saturation well, don’t go darker. You’ll overwhelm what your skin tone can pledge as “this is the real me”. By all means, enrich the colour you have or gloss it up.

There are three dimensions or measurable properties of colour that we use for personal colour analysis:

- value – how light to dark

- hue – or heat level, how cool to warm

- saturation or chroma – a colour’s position between the most greyed version of the colour and the purest version of the colour

Your colours don’t zigzag all over the place on any of those scales. They stick to a fairly close setting. Who has colours that are extremely warm and extremely cool at once, or very clear and very muted? Nobody. We can have several positions along the value scale but there is still a logical and consistent range that is respected within each of the 12 categories. The genetic paintbrush is very organized. It decides what your settings are on the 3 scales and from there, faithfully picks the paints for your own personal colour wheel, a predictable slice through Planet Colour.

However, whatever the settings on your 3 scales, which is what decides your Season or natural colouring group, one of those matters more than the others. It’s The Most Important Thing, or TMIT, for that natural colouring to glow with their most perfect skin. Once that attribute is fixed at a certain setting, colours that respect that setting are more likely to work well for you. That setting on that scale is your TMIT. The other two scale settings matter but they are less critical.

Your TMIT setting can’t be known just by looking at you. That’s done with drapes, by knowing the Season first. Sometimes when you’re looking at photographs without seeing the person in various colours, you find yourself thinking about their TMIT. I believe Color Me Beautiful calls these Dominant Traits. They ask themselves “Of Dark, Light, Clear, Soft, Warm, or Cool, which of these is the person MOST?”, or the reverse as “Which of these is the person LEAST?”

Tricky because some people don’t really look like what they are. You might look at a woman of medium-dark complexion, quite dark brown eyes, and fairly dark brunette hair and think that she seems Dark, when in fact, she’s a Soft. Look at this gallery. What do you think about Pics 13 and 28? (As a side note, I wonder if Revlon Lip Butter in Tutti Frutti would look like Pic 15 on a True Spring. Who else could look that good in clear orange?) As you go through all the photos, try to pin down their TMITs.

The intensity of a brown-eyed True Winter can be so undeniable, especially if complexion is dark, that you think “Wow, they’re really a Dark”, when what they are most importantly to perfect their skin tone is Cool. Think about Kim Kardashian, often thought a Dark Winter. She  might well be. She doesn’t have the squareness of the Selena Gomez/Salma Hayek Dark Winter jaw. In fact, her long face is more a True Winter shape. She looks terrific in B&W&red. Scroll down the photos, worth the trip in itself, till you get to her. Does she need browner colour?  You could say her lips and cheeks are Dark Winter now, quite possible. The point is just that you can’t tell by looking at one photo.

This is one of the weak points of Photo PCA – you never saw it happen. Your mind can’t get completely at ease with the Season. One relative comes along and expresses doubt about your lipstick colour and you feel all unsteady again. You can’t say back to them “I thought I might be Dark Autumn too! But, oh, my dear, you should have seen how drained those colours made me look. And I learned that a Dark Autumn looks near dead in my Summer pastels (so does a Bright Spring)!”

Once your Season is known from a correct in-person draping, your TMIT is most important when you go shopping. And that’s when you’ll begin choosing and wearing your rightest makeup.

The TMITs

Light Summer: Lightness!  Saturation (clearness) is low-medium. Neutral cool.

Light Spring    : Lightness!     “              “            medium. Neutral warm.

Lightness in a colour will help it work well for her. Her eyeshadows, suits, eyeglass frames, nail polish, and shoes are more likely to be beautiful if they’re among the lightest in the selection at the store. It doesn’t mean that every colour she wears must be light, not at all. She has her version of dark tones too, but they’re her version, to look dark on her.  Nevermind that they’ll look medium or light on someone else, we’re not talking about them here. Too dark colour on a Light and oldness will happen. Dark colours are not forgiving at all, meaning that she really needs to get them right or they’re way wrong and she is subtracting from herself.

A so-smart reader asked “Since every Season has its best black, does each have its best white?” Sure, yes. The Lights will do raw cauliflower better than latte, but many could get away with latte just fine if it’s mostly milk. Just being light in value raises a colour’s odds of being pretty good. As long as the other scales, of warmth and clarity, stick near the middle, things will probably be quite ok. Once we raise the darkness level to cinnamon or nutmeg, we run into problems with aging, fatigue, and 5 oclock shadow effects and they’re not even dark colours. The woman needs to have her colour analysis swatch book to wear the best suit for her speech.

Soft Summer: Softness! Value (darkness range) is medium. Cool to neutral.

Soft Autumn: Softness!      “                “                “                  “     .Warm to neutral.

Another so-smart reader pointed me to Cobie Smulders. I see her as Soft Summer. Is her hair too dark for that Season? No. But notice her eyes. Yes, they’re light-medium blue, but what are they MOST? Blue or hazy ? I’d say hazy (at least in this photo). Someone might say icy. The overall impression isn’t light and it isn’t dark, it’s medium. She seems cooler than warm, but more soft than cool. Someone might say “She’s definitely mostly cool. She’s a True Winter.” Who’s right?? Who knows?? Drape the woman already, then you know.

Cobie Smulders Pictures

That white is hard on her. The white is owning the whole picture somehow, it keeps nagging at our attention. A Winter would subdue that white into behaving itself. The same woman in that great soft pine green that is pure beauty for a Soft Summer blue-green eye (we could pretend the beads are not there):

Cobie Smulders Pictures

Doesn’t always work. Like that green, not every colour that would look fantastically good on a Soft Summer’s colouring is obviously grayed, though many are. Same as True Autumn can have reds and golds that are so rich and so hot, you’ll think red and gold before you think heat (but with time, you’ll come to think HOT or at least, GOLD, first).

Some Soft Summers have a brown eye that is most perfected by their red wine colour. Some, who lean towards the warm side, can have warmer greens like avocado and army in the eye. Their eye colour is incredible in Soft Summer’s medium taupes and can even look great in Soft Autumn’s greens and browns. As long as the colour stays soft and muted and they don’t try Soft Autumn’s reds, oranges, and yellows, the skin will remain beautiful. I love this effect on Soft Summer and it’s not common. You see it sometimes in Dark Winter too, the very cool skin with the very warm eye, like the last golden-green-brown leaf left before the first snowfall. The contrast looks remarkable and even better when repeated by wearing warm and cool colours from their palette together in outfits.

Dark Autumn: Darkness! Saturation is medium to fairly high. Neutral warm.

Dark Winter  : Darkness!        ”                    ”             “                “     . Neutral cool.

I find most people cooler than they think they are, but are confused about how to get a little cooler with their colours without going all the way to pure cool. Demi Lovato carries darkness well. She can look Warmer&Dark and Cooler&Dark quite well as long as the Dark takes precedence.

The Warm version:

Demi Lovato Pictures

There are cool photos in her gallery. The picture she presents of herself is often cooler than warm. Below, Demi goes too cool and we lose it. She’s become cooler than she is dark. It becomes hard and uncomfortable to be with compared to the molasses cookie above. It’s that dark toasty woman that we want to get close to. We wonder how close we could get and if our intuition is right, could we be singed? Winter is coming in and even in small amounts, a vague sense of unease or jeopardy comes with it.

Demi Lovato Pictures

Bright Winter: Brightness! Value is medium to fairly dark. Neutral cool.

Bright  Spring: Brightness! Value is medium, not too dark. Neutral warm.

It’s the pure colour that you should become aware of first, before Thinking Mind engages and starts chewing on “Well, let’s see, I don’t perceive greying down of the colour, it looks neutral and somewhat warm,…” Grab onto that moment before dissecting mode turns on and proloooonnnng it. Spend some time just feeling what’s happening there. Soon, you’ll have more control of it and will be able to slow down that time. Think of fresh basil or parsley. Before you get going on how cool, how dark, what enters your awareness is GREEN.

I don’t get the same feeling here:

True Summer: Coolness! Saturation is medium. Value is medium.

True Winter   : Coolness! Saturation is mid to high. Value is mid to fairly dark.

Stand a True Winter next to a Dark Winter and ask someone “Who’s darker?” The TW may have dark hair, dark eyes, but if the complexion level is the same, it’s often the DW that gives the darker overall impression. They seem a little shaded, less shiny, their whites not as blinding, as if their skin were so slightly and evenly cross-hatched with a graphite pencil.

Now, if you’d said “Who’s cooler?”, the TW always seems not necessarily frost-coated like a windshield, but they’re more absolute, more hard, more definite, more clear-cut and less ambiguous. They seem cleaner. Better to ignore the hair colour a lot. Seems to me I see more variation in natural hair colour among the True Winter than any other.

I was asked recently about the difficulty True Summer has in finding shoes (and mascara) in a world of brown and black. Compromise the darkness but not the coolness. In time, you’ll insist on being more discriminating. You’ll have found yourself enough great items to give you confidence in holding out for the right shoes. You won’t need to buy stuff just to have shoes at all. Use soft blacks, navies, and cranberries. Borrow some True Winter greys. Choose textiles that mute colour. Look for medium colours like denim, teals, mauves, and taupes. It takes time for every Season to build a background wardrobe. 

True Spring     : Warm-ness! Saturation is mid to fairly high. Value is medium.

True Autumn  : Warm-ness! Saturation is medium. Value is medium to med-dark.

I find these the most difficult people to decide their TMIT just by looking at them or their photos.

People ask “How can I be warm and cool at once?” It depends on how warm and cool you’re talking about. You won’t see really warm and really cool colours together in one person. Nobody’s setting on the Hue scale will swerve around that much. If your inborn colours are all completely warm, you won’t contain any completely cool colours. You might be 90% warm and 10% cool, but for shopping purposes, you’re so much more warm that you would shop as though you’re 100%.

For those people whose colouring is nearer the middle on the cool-warm scale, the Neutral Season folks, they can have slightly warmer and slightly cooler versions of their best colours. “OK”, you say, “how slightly?” That question can’t be answered well with descriptions or numbers. You need to own the palette that the colour expert made for you.

So if you know TMIT, often built into the Season’s name, plus the approximate heat level, the other parameter is a fairly safe bet at medium. Or ‘what I should worry about less’.

Short answer: No, there are no such people. I would say you are best in all 60 colours of your Season’s colour palette, your personal colour analysis swatches, though many women will only partially agree.

From the analyst’s position, what I care about is that no colour brings out the imperfections that we worked for 2 hours to eliminate. In that context, all 60 colours do work. Many others might too. From the question above then, it depends on your definition of “really best”. Mine is the youngest, most flawless, and evenly coloured skin tone possible. Your personal issues with powder pink or baby blue are not foremost in my head as long as I have you in your best pink and blue.

No doubt, women have preferences in their palette. Some will just never see themselves in yellow, especially True Winter and Soft Summer. It may take a woman 10 years to overcome being a green-hater. When we conclude the draping, there are 15 beautiful Final Drapes (not the test drapes) that we look at to begin exposing the client to more of their most beautiful colours. She will always love some and not love others. Few will ever own an item in every colour in their swatch book.

She will always look better in some when we see her colours the second time wearing her perfect makeup colours and the hair down.  And she’ll look worse in some because wrong hair colour is detracting from how beautiful and balanced she could look, but it’s important for her to see that. As awful as the gray cap is, it’s a real moment in personal growth when you see yourself looking better in it than in your present hair colour. This is when you truly get it.

You have no worries here. Having something to work towards is empowering in itself. By that stage of the session, you will find your mind supplying you with the colour your hair should be or the colour that will perfect the skin. It’s a brand new voice for everyone, nudging you to make the right change. What the colour should be will appear in your head as soon as you stop trying to be the boss of yourself. It’s a very polite voice. It won’t interrupt the traffic flow in your head till you hold up the STOP sign.

It’s also in how you wear your colours. A Dark Winter in a big block of light colour won’t look quite right. She needs darkness to balance it with the larger proportion of dark colour in her and set up the contrast that every Winter needs. If her complexion is very dark, that block of light will work better because the contrast will already be in place.

Many Soft Summers don’t feel right in some of their lightest drapes. Flip one or two of the medium and dark colours over her shoulder at the same time and the picture clicks. Soft Summer is the queen of the sophisticated colour combinations, where sophisticated can mean “to become less simple and straightforward through experience or education” and “to develop into a more complex form”. Soft Summer is very much about layers of meaning, intention, and nuance, in their thoughts as in their colours. When other Seasons combine colour, they drive up the energy. Soft Summer colours are so gentle that they can be combined and still keep the picture elegant and so refined. For me, this Season’s magic isn’t fully apparent until its colours are combined. I’d say the same about Soft Autumn. They’re not so much speak-for-themselves colours, like True Autumn and True Spring. They seem to support one another with a synergy other Seasons don’t achieve as well, or at least, as graciously.

Many Bright Season persons need time to adjust to the colour brightness and energy if they had no inkling of the outcome. The analyst’s job throughout is to keep them focusing on their face, not the drapes. It’s easy to get scared off if you’ve been dressing like your friends or if your cosmetics salesperson thinks “She’d look unbelievable in this red but there’s no way she’ll try it, let alone buy it.”

True and Dark Autumn usually love all their colours. If they arrived wearing blonde hair and black whatever, they recognize there’s a little work to do but they don’t shy away. They are job-oriented anyhow and now have their better alternatives. The next time you see them, they’re glorious.

Light Summer can be surprised, having lived as a Soft Autumn with warm golden hair for 20 years. Since it is impossible not to like this palette, the adjustment is easy. They look better in the gray hat and their Final Drapes than they do when the hair is down but the problem is plain to see. They are usually just excited to get going though apprehensive about how to explain to the colourist what needs doing. They go in armed with photos of what they do want and what they don’t want.

Light Spring is usually happy too.  Springs are very natural people with lots of spunk and spirit and a good bit of daring. These personalities are not caught up in the complicated inner quests. There is often something very spiritual in their life. Emotion runs close to the surface. I seldom find Springs bury a lot of themselves, much more WYSIWYG. They’re hard to repress and anxious to get going. Black’s not good? Fine, give me grey then. They’ll be sending me links to gorgeous products they unearthed within about 2 weeks of their PCA.

- absolutely warm; even the colours we think of as cool have been warmed by comparison to their appearance in the cooler Seasons; like True Summer, True Autumn is more saturated than people think. Most folks’ ideas of True Autumn and True Summer live in the Soft Autumn and Soft Summer palettes.

- muted, but not nearly as much as the Soft Autumn; yes, True Autumn’s salsa and curry are muted compared to True Spring’s fruit punch and citrus, but we don’t think of them as grey ; we do think of Soft Autumn’s cactus as greyed; True Aututmn’s entire palette viewed at once looks like a hot glow, well beyond rosy blush; to emanate that kind of heat, we are moving away from pink and into red

- medium to dark in value; most colours are medium, few are very light, and none darken all the way to black ; the overall look needs some darkness to give the feeling of richness and depth, too much lightness looking too powdery

This series of landscape articles (True Summer, Soft Autumn, True and Bright Winter , and Bright Spring have been posted) serves as an opportunity to see ourselves with objectivity. Unless we transfer colour and clothing decision outside of ourselves, objectivity is too far to far reach for most of us, certainly for me. We are far too invested in our complexities to have any idea how we look to others.

The world is full of odd psychology, a common one being to inadvertently reward ourselves, our kids, our pets, for the very behaviour we’d like to be rid of. We want to look like our friends or like celebrities, but what if we’re imitating them and not really loving how they look? Buy a magazine aimed at your demographic and mark the pages of the women you would love to look like. How many have complicated hair? sparkly eyeliner? sparkly purple eyeliner? frosty pale lips? Is their hair and makeup like yours?

It’s also interesting that in trying to look like our friends, we end up looking less like them and more like us. All those blonde highlights out there accentuate the differences between us rather than making us more similar, which only works in your favour if yellow in hair is flattering to your skin. If you put a room full of women in the same red dress and really looked at the women and not the dress, the differences between them, meaning who looks good in that red and who doesn’t, become easy to see. What looks good on our friends doesn’t help us know what enhances us.

Finding people of similar colouring to ours to try clothes, makeup, or hair on can be very useful if that person can be found but there’s such variation of appearance among members of the same Season that our counterparts are not always available. Or, the celebrities look like the average for the Season and we don’t. Still, some retain enough of themselves to have good real world comparison value.

Keri Russell could be a True Autumn.

So could Susan Sarandon. You can see that their overall colour effect feels toasty, medium on a darkness scale, and glowy. Their natural coppery heat just looks better surrounded by warm, muted, medium dark colour. Scan their Images and decide how dark their best hair is to flatter the face. It’s fairly dark. Many True Autumns wear their hair too light (Kathie Lee Gifford) and the glow be long gone. Red hair is by no means a necessity but these women are very seldom beautiful as blondes or in ash hair tones.

We belong to our planet home at such an organic, elemental level. We each hold wondrous beauty and the divine unknown within us. We each represent a painting of a scene that we know, love, and trust, but we can’t always see the resemblance with ourselves. Like music, colour is a language that tells us information about the world we live in. Like technology or medicine, the value of the language is so much broader when we can use it to live better, happier, freer, stronger, and more connected to the people that matter to us. Oh, and live cheaper, let’s not forget that.

What’s the world feel like for the very timely True Autumn Season? In Canada now, we are given these:

Melinda feels it this way, from this photo:

I love the traditional pictures of fall leaves and sun shining softly through a canopy of colors, but for some reason these pictures just stir up something else in me that I feel so connected to.The first set of pictures, the rocks and bronze river, reach into some deep emotions for me. Warmth, intensity, passion, strength, and solidarity all come to mind. Such a range of emotions that are rooted deep in my soul.

The pictures below speak to my surface, if that makes sense. The bright vibrant trees and the gentle softness of the sun echoes an almost tangible warmth, comfort, coziness, and welcome that you just want to walk into. The leaves add a crispness that just makes you feel like dancing. Joy lives there and you can feel it.

What they all have in common:

- warmth: well, yes, we know this, but replace the word with passionate heat for this article; if your mind says greyed before it says richly glowingly warm, hand the item over to Soft Autumn.

- darkness: it’s getting darker; daylight hours are shorter; in the overall effect of an outfit, there’s still enough light to read by.

- dryness: cooler air holds less water; the grass is browner, the harvest is dry enough to bring in ; not very shiny or reflective, no sparkles.

- dustiness: the Earth is busy and dry.

- productivity, we know there’s cold on the way and we need to get our house in order, but the sun can still warm our back and make colours and faces glow.

- a sense of depth, which you’ll recreate with layers, darkness levels, and patterns

-  the overriding presence of brown in every colour we see; a petunia would stick out like orange pop at a coffee shop ; Autumn is Spring, oxidized, the wine and the nectar, not the fresh-squeezed juice.

- there are no cool blued colours; the reds are not direct red, but indirectly lit as rust, muted red-orange, and browned reds; even the light seems indirect, as though it’s coming from lower down in the sky, which of course, it is.

- texture:  Melinda loves several photos that are stone based and I see True Autumn that way too; the glint of metal is not here yet, not till Dark Autumn arrives, which is still not very flashy, but it’s ramping up, and ramping up more in the Dark Winter, the least flashy of the Winters, and then more as it gets colder; True Autumn can work in small metallic elements well because they look metallic but too much is too hard on a person who really isn’t.

True Autumn Clothes

- never met one who likes clingy fabric, possibly related to age

- that blue cardi in the center may be too muted, may be Soft Autumn, not warm enough for True Autumn, but I like it and I could adapt it here because of the darkness; shopping ain’t perfect; you might love an item that’s close enough; there are swatches that can look pretty similar between unrelated palettes; at the mall, make the very best match you can and know that the rest of the outfit will situate the colour into your Season; makeup may be a bit less forgiving because it’s painted right on the face

- if Winter’s fabric extreme is the scuba suit, True Autumn’s is burlap, the ultimately brown colour, the utilitarian feel

- the camel is really oranged; I like the way a turtleneck frames the face and hair and even better if it’s a great colour that distinguishes it

- coloured and textured and opaque tights should be worn, they’re good

- not quite cute enough to be cozy to me, though many people do get that feeling from these colours. I find them too hot to be that benign, but the colour heat is still comfortable, not reckless. You can touch it without being burned. In fact you can hold it as long as you want.

- about white, remember how it didn’t really fit well into Soft Autumn’s landscape? , it will add yet another 5 years here

- about black, it’s too cold to harmonize with anything, and many colours don’t get that close to black, so I hope that skirt to the left of the amber beads is chocolate; the overall darkness effect should leave enough light to read by; having said that, concessions will make shopping more fun ; if you found a perfect faux leopard short jacket and it happened to have black buttons that were not enormous and the overall effect was of rich caramel, gold, and chocolate brown, and if your hair were medium dark or more, that coat might be absolutely lovely

- red is by nature a warm colour and I love a red coat, it gets noticed and manifests the very strong lifeforce of these persons; seemingly low key, they have some of the strongest moorings I know, levelheaded and reliable as the stone we saw earlier, absolutely nothing darting, fleeting, sporadic, or flighty ; I love neutrals (black ,white, grays, beiges and greiges in the U.K. ) a lot, but on both True Warm Seasons, I absolutely love lots of colour, personifying people that are so alive, busy and loving their life, not fussing, just getting on with it

- not the military style that suits Dark Autumn better, who is a much more straightened out, direct, vertical person, approaching Winter’s stationary vertical line (Bright Winter’s line will shift to the diagonal, Spring’s is becoming horizontal, explaining why horizontal stripes look so good to me on a Spring, and in my head, Summer’s line is horizontal wavy, like a ruffle) ; this character isn’t so “with intention” as the Dark blends, who lock onto a target; that rigidity is muted in True Autumn, as the colours are, so you have a straightforward person no doubt, but not shot out of a cannon

-  what’s the theme song? It’s a steady beat, not as threatening as the Jaws movie theme, a Winter gets that, more defined contrasts and all,  Dark Winter, I’m guessing. I’m looking for a steady drum, maybe Adele  Rolling In The Deep? Close, but not hot enough…The Circle Of Life, maybe… heat makes molecules agitate and move faster. Thinking. Not Spring’s reggae. Hotter, darker, tribal, smoked light, uncontrolled heat (this is the part where the True Autumns say “Who me?”) Hotter than Soft Autumn’s Hot August Night. This is pretty hot,

Dhoom Again

Once Dark Autumn arrives, Winter will put the cold clamps on and there will be heat but it won’t be on such display.

- what do they drive? A Dodge Ram 1500? Too truck. Classier? Cadillac Escalade? Too flaunty. A Navigator? Better. A Jeep Wrangler Rubicon? Feels about right. Dark Autumn drives a Jag XJ. Dark Winter drives an Audi A6 Avant after they trade in their 2010 Nissan Maxima, having found an Audi that comes in Batmobile black. True Winter? Black Porsche. Bright Winter? Lamborghini with the doors that flip up. Bright Spring? A Merc E Class convertible in a smart and snappy colour. Back to our topic.

- I like the bow in the jacket at the mid-top, it’s not too ribbony, it’s solid and square in a very browned neutral; strength and femininity together are curiously magnetic, I feel

- no real pinks present; mix pink with pumpkin puree and that’s True Autumn pink, looking much better in clothes than makeup where browned colours are better unless the pink is very golden

- no pinkish reds; if you take tan leather and dye it red, that’s the cool red, maybe like a red Frye boot ; that’s the red lipstick too, like paprika, not as dark as chili powder ; I like a browner day lipstick – if Soft Autumn’s was the rosy cinnamon stick floating in the warming pot of apple cider, then True Autumn is the cider itself, and Dark Autumn is the clove

- Spring thought about peach, blossom, and candy; Autumn thinks of the jars of preserves, not the raw salad (Spring); Autumn thinks about strong, heavy, straighter now that Summer has gone, mead and liqueur, Bailey’s, Kahlua, a duller finish but lots of touch information (fur, flannel, corduroy, tweed, leather), nectar (colour is getting thicker, more opacity), the hive, the honeycomb (repetition, industry, work = functional (Spring=fun, Winter=flash, Summer=feminine); the bumblebees of the world, going about their business, these are the builders; think of blocks, bricks, order, structure, steps, strength, progress

- colours start at medium, not light; only the beiges get very light and they’re still browned, like vanilla whipped into cream, like brown buff, light wheat, light brown peach; cottage cheese is too light and mozzarella too yellow

- I find it harder to know if I have lots of golden heat when I assess a possible True Autumn colour vs. Spring, where I can always tell max yellow heat. What I look for is a bronzed brown glowing feeling, like hot copper overlay, which how the person’s skin tone looks. I want to sense abundant sultry heat, not greyness, not lukewarm, not summery, though still very hospitable, nothing hostile.

- very little blue, just one bronzed colour; the blues are quite greened because the yellow contribution harmonizes better in warm coloured outfits while cool blues don’t; I love purple with the warm hair tones, it’s unexpected and not very red because Winter isn’t here yet

- there are warmer and cooler greens; the cooler greens really are green, not teal or avocado, and a little dull, like Green Bay Packers green

- as more distance between colours on the wheel are fabulous when combined, we get a very rich cornucopia effect; profusion was Spring’s word, abundance is Autumn’s

- animal prints in small surface area supports the lifeforce without looking swallowed; Dark Autumn can balance a whole item better and same with metallics as Winter’s hardware orientation arrives; this woman isn’t that decorative and feels overdone in glitz, she’s got 1000 cookies to bake for the Cookie Exchange, is hauling the boat out of the water by herself, wants to fit a bike ride in this day, has a pie crust to roll out, and would love to hear about how you’re doing once she’s finished what she set out to do; she sure looks gorgeous with a  metallic thread in a scarf, a copper glint to her lipstick, a gold or brass buckle on a belt or purse, or stripe in a shirt

- using matte and dull finishes makes the odds of getting the colour right higher automatically by creating some muting, as some of the shoes below; the green heeled sandal at the top of the Polyvore below may be too emerald but in sueded fabric, it could look like dull teal and fit into this painting

Here are the shoes, the belt, the bag, the HAIR!! (See also True Autumn’s Best Hair Colour). Warm, rich, lustrous, and brown. There is nothing faded about this palette.

She wears a purposeful watch, maybe a menswear style,

to go with solid functional bag, square like a briefcase or at least not completely slouchy,

shoes you can live a real life in,

and a necklace with weight.

Supremely business stylish, this lady is up-to-the-minute, resourceful, and lives in the present. Autumn is grown-up, self-sufficient, and mature. Her male counterpart is Indiana Jones, though they dress him as a Soft. U2′s Bono sans glasses seems True Autumnish.

Think about the quiet light and stony strength of the pyramids, not the blinding jackpot glare of El Dorado. Marketers have a much better handle on what young women want and how to sell it to them. If True Autumn has trouble finding clothes, it’s because the styles in shops are too young and her colours are often limited to brown and green. Imagination belongs everywhere.

The pieces have some weight and bulk, not Spring’s hearts and lucky charms, not Summer’s lacy water, or Winter’s hardest-substance-on-Earth jewels. To add interest, touches could be Egyptian, Bollywood, hot stone-lava, old coins, wood, jade, brass, enamel and ceramic which remind of firing and heat, and natural semi-precious stone. Even stones should be noticeably browned down. Leather looks great, strong without being hard, in Southern Comfort colours.

She can accessorize endlessly, with items from many categories at once. Scarves were made for this woman because they look textured and warm and give the impression of depth. What she does best isn’t really to accessorize, like Bright Winter who can wear jewelry on her neck, ears, and wrists, all at once. True Autumn layers.

It’s easy enough not to stumble into Dark Autumn, just keep black out. Colour can go pretty dark but you should be able to see that it’s not black in all but the dimmest lighting, and this applies equally to shoes and eyeliner.

Reptile can work if it’s quiet, not too cold and slithery. True Autumn is more plain-spoken. Dark and oily don’t belong in this brew, they look like a black panther marching up the forest path in the photo above. Panthers don’t march, they prowl. She might do crocodile, though Dark Autumn better. Snakeskin is best on Winter, but if the colour is very gentle, even a Soft Autumn can look great. The texture offering is good, it just needs adapting because of the message the wrong version can send.

Periwinkle is supposed to be an Autumn classic but it doesn’t send thrills through me. I do love the Soft Autumn in their version.

Going back through this to pick out random keywords that could define this colouring: abundant, deep as in plush, deep as in layers, medium-dark, texture, strong but not maximally hard, work, build, structure, browned, coppery, golden, matte, small to medium metallic or fur or animal element, functional, opaque, molten, rich hot glow.

Spring  may be excited, but more than any other, oooee, baby, True Autumn is exciting.

So, we arrived.  And because we were late, we did not waste any time jumping into it.  Lauren asked me about my previous PCA experiences. I told her, and she said, “Well, I think you might be some kind of winter, but whenever I start a PCA, I throw everything I expect out the window and start like I don’t know anything about what season you might be.”  Good advice for many endeavors, I would say.

The warm drape was obvious – I was NOT warm.  No big surprise there.  Then the neutral drape.  Hmmm, not as good as I expected, but then, we started with the lightest colors, so difficult to tell.  Then the lighter cool drape.  I tried to be open-minded from the start and give the cool drapes a chance.  Hmmm, not bad.

There were four sets of test drapes for warm, neutral and cool, and cool won out every time.  By the time we got to the deepest cool, a beautiful purple, I couldn’t deny the clearing of the skin, it looked so smooth and even.  Though I (and I’m sure Lauren, too) was pretty sure of the outcome by then, she still ran me through all the paces of each season, showing me how BAD the autumn drapes were, even compared to spring drapes, and how BAD the summer drapes were compared to true winter.  It really wasn’t much of a contest, but I’m really, really glad I got to see the evidence with my own eyes.

After the draping, we got out my makeup.  Lauren went through all the colors, and finally decided on the brightest fuschia lipstick I owned, Revlon wild orchid, for my lipstick.  Bobbi Brown pale pink (not really pale, actually, quite hot in my opinion) would be the cheek color, and we used hardly any eye makeup at all, partly in the interest of time.  Still wearing the grey gown, I looked at myself in the mirror.  Was that me?  Did we get it right?  But I knew we had.  I had seen it with my own eyes.

Then Lauren began draping me again with the true winter drapes and the makeup.  And I’ll admit, I looked into the mirror with that lovely pine green drape and the tears came, unbidden as always, and with some measure of surprise.  What was this?  Why was I crying?  Was it the relief of finally knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt?  Or was it that as I looked in the mirror, I looked different, and as I have said before, different just looked too different to be good?  After the emotional moment passed, I looked again and thought, “Who IS that woman?  Is that really me?”

Well, of course it was me.  I knew that.  My bottom hadn’t budged from the draping chair, even when Lauren graciously offered me a water and bathroom break.  No thank you, I’m good, I replied.  Keep going.  This is fascinating.  Besides, I’d waited a long time for this experience.  No breaks needed, please.

But still that face … that reflection, did not seem mine.  Pale skin, practically glittering eyes, deep pink lips … that reflection possessed a combination of delicacy and radiance I certainly wasn’t familiar with.   Very high contrast. Striking I could deal with, and often felt on some occasions.  But delicate?  Radiant?  I was reminded for a moment of the makeup colors used in films to depict geisha girls, only this reflection possessed an energy and strength more vibrant than any Oriental stillness.

I couldn’t decide … was it the eyes that surprised me?  Or the pale skin?  Or the vivid lip color?  I decided it was the eyes more than anything.  I had on so very little eye makeup that my eyes felt vulnerable, center stage, almost.  And even as I write this, I am reminded of a winter trait I read that true winters don’t mind being seen except when they don’t want to be .  Very accurate, that one.

So it was the eyes that threw me, as they had others in analyzing me.  Those eyes that had learned to be sensitive as a child, to read the signs around me, and act accordingly.  I learned to play it safe, because being good, fitting in, being perfect = being safe (maybe).  I became, underneath all that poise, the anxious child who learned early on at the appearance of negative emotion to “fall back on her safe but limited repertoire.  [I] did not take chances ….and turned my back on the unknown”  (Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness).

I won’t go into my history here of how these dynamics played out in later life, as daughter, wife and mother.  It is interesting to me, however, to notice the times in my life I lived and felt in harmony with my TW colors vs. the times that I didn’t.  Many women have written eloquently here of those stories.  They are worth reading!  But suffice it to say, looking back I do notice a pattern of how color mirrored my perceived expectations of how I should act and be.

And now, here I was, face to face with a woman I knew, but not in her fullness.  I come from a long line of strong women, but their strength is more in what they endured and not necessarily in the strength to be their authentic selves in a consistent manner.  My mother was fortunate enough to enjoy that kind of freedom in her later years.  I am so proud of her for that.

I realize that sometimes we get so busy and on auto-pilot that we become  vulnerable to outside expectations.  We forget the power of choice is still within us.  We forget the lives of intention we dreamed about as young women.  We just get on that treadmill and go. (Or maybe this is just a true winter thing?)

I left my draping feeling freed yet vulnerable at the same time.  I think one reason I subconsciously wanted to be DW was I felt the autumn colors would ground and empower me, as well as make me more approachable with their warmth.

I wrote to Christine that evening: Way back when we were making collages with the Style Statement book, someone mentioned the phrase ‘vulnerable strength’ in regards to mine. At the time, I was struck by the phrase but didn’t want to own it. After seeing the drapes on me today, I realize my vulnerability, that delicacy, is one of my strengths, when I allow it to be. But it is also what I have most feared … I still can’t believe that kind of delicacy can balance those strong true winter colors, but it does … there was NO denying the drapes.

Christine replied: But ultimate vulnerability and ultimate strength DEFINES True Winter. The most extreme opposites must exist at once. That’s the contrast that the colours speak of. It must have been a beautiful experience for you and a big leap towards making peace with yourself, what we’re all trying to do.  

 Well, I would be lying if I said I am ‘already’ totally at peace with myself and my true winter colors.  In clothing, I think TW is easier for me to embrace than in the makeup, perhaps because I have always loved makeup and enjoyed using it to achieve a certain ‘look.’  I’m sure I’m not alone in this … it is the mindset, the foundation, that cosmetic sales are built on.

A template, or model, is usually helpful, at least when one is trying to visualize a season IRL.  And I found one in the most unlikely of places … Christine’s mention of Elizabeth Taylor as a possible true winter.  That example just clicked with me, which is odd because my husband and others are constantly telling me I look like Sela Ward, but even DH admits Sela has a hardness about her when compared to me.  He says my demeanor and expressions are more like the French actress, Marion Cottilard, whom our own Rachel feels might be TW.

So, why Elizabeth?  I look nothing like her, I am built very little like her, but I found in her the epitomy of extremes that define TW.  If you look closely at her acting and the roles she chose, there exists the ultimate in vulnerability, and strength, and oh my goodness, the range of emotion that woman could access and display!  And it was in being true to that range of emotion that she was always herself.  She was vivid, radiant, even striking at times, but also, undeniably human, so she felt just a bit more accessible to us in her films than she would have otherwise.  We trusted her because she was Elizabeth, always.

So, I ask the question again, Why did I cry, beyond the relief of finally KNOWING after a year and a half of WONDERING?  I understand and live every day the notion that winters are about control, and oh, the relief and elation of knowing moved me.  But I also felt a LOSS of control as I viewed myself, at least initially.

I knew, even before I walked into that room, that I would have a choice to make.  I could fight the results, or surrender.  And I had already made the choice to accept whatever the outcome might be.  On reflection, I think I cried at the sheer beauty (and relative newness, at least for me) of the experience of surrendering to what was.  I’ve lived long enough to know that it is only through accepting and validating what is that we can move on to what can become.

I’m not sure how this newfound sensibility of BEING true winter will impact my life with myself, my husband, my children, and others around me.  I’m done with being something I’m not, whether consciously, or by habit, or to remain safe.   No one really liked me that way, anyway.  What’s that lovely Dr. Suess quote?  “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter won’t mind.”   

 So, as I review the pictures of myself and remember what the drapes told me, I ask, “Is all that delicacy and strength and vitality and radiance mine?”  You betcha.  And nothing can change that.  Not to be overly dramatic – but I am a true winter after all, so here goes — it’s a part of me no one can take away.  I’m feeling less than myself?  I’ve got my colors to remind me who I am.  Someone is messing with me?  Yip, colors still there.  Struggling with a problem?  My colors are there to remind me of how to access my strength and creative, even joyful, solutions.  We all need that tangible reminder sometimes, of the energy that is ours, that energy that is part of our unique offering to the world.

In his book, Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman wrote:  In a commencement address to a Canadian girls’ school, Robertson Davies asked, “As you come up to accept your diploma, what is the word in your heart?  Is it no, or is it yes?  The last twenty years of my work are summed up by this question.  I believe there is a word in your heart, and that this is not a sentimental fiction.  I don’t really know where this word comes from, but one of my guesses is that it forms drop by drop from the words we hear from our parents.  If your child hears an angry “no” at every turn, when she approaches a new situation she will be anticipating a “no,” with all the associated freezing and lack of mastery.  If your child hears an abundance of “yes,” as e.e. cummings sings:

yes is a world

& in this world of

yes live

(skillfully curled)

all worlds”

So, given all this, I choose to say yes to my colors.  I say ‘yes’ to those extremes of feeling vulnerable, and being strong, and all the places in between, because it is only through acknowledging my vulnerability that I can develop compassion for myself and others, which compassion I believe to be the root of all strength.  I say ‘yes’ because I CAN – yes to playful and serious, soft and strong, wise and confused, sassy and kind.  I say yes to these things because they are ALL me and because the choice is mine, radiant little control freak that I am .  The choice really was mine all along, but PCA provided me with an undeniable experience of seeing how I could live with more intention vs. living in the shadow of my and other’s perceived expectations. I think PCA helped me to let go of living in that shadow because my PCA so didn’t turn out how I expected.  But what did materialize was even better …

In Part 1, we talked about the draping process and offered some makeup suggestions. Today, we’re on to the person, the hair, and the look.

In 12 Season personal colour analysis, True Spring is the springboard for the clear and warmed-by-yellow palette. Spring people in general have the attribute of looking young for their age for a lifetime. Youthful skin, pointed effects (like a heart shaped face), or upturned features (like Julie Andrews’ nose or the outer corners of Mrs. Laura Bush’s eyes) are often found in this Season and its five blends. When you’re reminded of faeries and elves, you’re often in the presence of Spring. It’s the cuteness sometimes, and more often the light humoured, lighthearted, easy possibility of magic. The whole thing – the lightest touch, the sprinkle of gold dust splashing from the end of a wand, the musical trill, and the reminder that life’s limits are all imagined. Spring is enchanted to the point of being not real.

I put thought into avoiding the stereotype pictures on this site. It uses up barely any mind space because those stereotypes are quite hard to find among real people. Today’s beautiful Emma may be more Spring-like, but I expect someone could have said Summer or even Soft Autumn.  There are many  Spring indicators. You see the sublime skin quality, poreless, flawless. Spring is able to illuminate the skin from within, like a light backlighting the face, better than any other group.  The hair colour (more later) is strongly Spring. The warmest colours in a so delicately chiseled face – it’s not a big step to fairy princess. And of course, she is not yellow in True Spring’s drapes. Everyone else is, even the Spring blends, and I don’t mean just a bit yellow. Only a True Spring can clear the jaundice in those colours.

The Person

I once said about True Spring something like “I lost the keys, forgot the map, didn’t get money, but I’m ready to party. What are you so mad about?” But that was wrong, they’re not dizzy in the least.  That was before I had ever analyzed any. This is much more of a “Come on, people, now, smile on your brother” personality.

I once expected this person to be a bit manic, like a day on a rollercoaster. I put too much emphasis on the stereotype, forgot to balance the picture, and came out with Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. We all do this with the personality traits. Once I realized that my dentist is a True Spring and then I had analyzed some, I fixed that notion.

True Spring is a relaxed and peaceful individual, one who can hold the faith that the world can work in our favour. They are undeniably cheerful, but not cheerleader. They easily trust in the value of play rather than work. They are more informal and less sensitive and focused on the details than Summers. Winter’s drama and intensity of character are not here, and neither is Autumn’s keep-your-head-down-till-the-job-gets-done drive.

If they have trouble choosing, it’s because every choice is a good choice. They can see the positive side of anything. Spend a little time with them and you find yourself as contented by life’s little joys as they are. This isn’t a sugar rush. It’s a carefree optimist with a song going in their head all the time. A summer day, a pool, and a beer are enough.

The Hair

Remember that hair is the feature least tied to skin colour. Everything I say about hair colour goes after the disclaimer of Usually…

Besides covering grey, I can’t think of a time when chemistry improves base hair colour from what Nature gives us. That’s the colour we had at 25, before we darkened with maturity. It’s the most believable, flattering, low maintenance colour we can wear. Some look great with lights woven in, many don’t, in any Season. Highlights are not a necessity, just a marketer’s dream.

The hair base is beige, though may be dark. Emma has outstandingly beautiful hair colour, a very successful base colour for many True and Light Springs. There is warmth and weightlessness in this colour, a translucency compared to the heavy, rich warms of Autumns. This is not Grizzly brown. Many True Springs have darker hair, sometimes brown enough to cross over into Autumn type browns. Absolutely no absolutes with hair.

When red exists, it’s yellow-based, so carrot yellow-orange, not squash brown-orange. Nicole Kidman, not Miley Cyrus. Shiny brand new penny. A reader helped me with the information that this colour is called Venetian Red in some lines of hair colour. It has a peach quality, where you can feel the pinkishness. Gold in hair colour is a heavier warmth, not what any Spring blends strives towards.

Spring is all about light, more so than any other. Yellow hair, varied like the colour of PeachesNCream corn can work here, but I suppose we all outgrow it and its maintenance at some point. For many who have highlighted their hair for so long that they can’t recall the base colour and the whole head is a highlight, look at the nape of the neck. Reset the head to that, or a shade or two lighter. Weave in filaments of sparkle. Stop.

Grey can be a tough transition for the pure warms because it seems inherently cool. Lighten the highlights at this time so the grey disappears into them. Eventually, a creamy grey that’s not platinum like Helen Mirren’s could be gorgeous. When she wears a more a natural grey, she seems more Summer in some ways, but you can see the yellow in the skin. She may soften to Light Spring, may lighten and soften the makeup then too.

Hair styles are fun to think about, but depend on so many things. Spring hair is beautiful when it moves, when it makes light dance. Ponytails, layers, swingy bobs, lots of ways to do this. When I think it suits the person less is when it’s heavy and lies too flat, like the straightened hair so many young girls wear. Spring is so much about the celebration of life that hair should join the party.

Pixie hair styles suit pixie faces, as in the very adorable (big big Spring word) Michelle Williams.

Interesting thing to think about for a minute: wispy hair suits wispy faces, something I see a lot in Soft Summer (Shannon Is A Soft Summer) and Dark Winter (Victoria Beckham). There’s some overlap here, people you’d wonder which they are, like Winona Ryder or Katie Holmes. A digression.

The Look

This is the fun part. When the colours and styles you add to you are a natural extension of you, that’s when it feels most right to look at you (and to be you). How do you become a continuation of a crystal green sea, a cloudless day, of what this feels like?

Words like hibiscus, frangipani, bamboo, orchid, sun, palm, banana, reef. Heat, scent, and colour to load the senses, at no risk.

1. True Spring should always inject colour. Try a purple bar on rimless or half frame eyeglass frames instead of silver or gold. True Spring does things out of the blue. Colour shouldn’t be too safe, there’s no need for it. This is not the budgie, it’s the Scarlet Macaw.

2. Adds movement. Think about several beads dangling off a hoop earring, a few light shiny bangles, or a charm bracelet or necklace. Lots of ways to be imaginative and grownup at the same time.

3. The natural colouring doesn’t feel linear, serious, or hemmed in. Neither should the clothing. To adapt a menswear jacket, choose light crisp cotton with a sheen and a colourful fabric detail in the roll-up of the cuff.

4. Tunics, smocks, hippie stuff, embroidery, the whole Peace Free love& Sandy feet thing.

5. Jeans are bright and blue. Denim’s fadedness seems contradictory to Spring’s clarity. But denim is about relaxation and holiday. These are great, intended for fun and amusement, not weeding. They are neither overly faded (read grey) or dark.

Denim can be about work too, what makes it so versatile. Avoid rugged cuts and weights.

6. Fun and funky. Aviators, colour pops, oversized purses, colourful coats and footwear, this is who can wear them and look terrific.

7. Suits are light shining on grey, tans, and bright navy. PCA puts you very far ahead by just knowing what to not buy. Keep it light to medium in darkness. No steel, soot, scalpel, ice, or black.

8. Spring is warm but delicate, especially when the facial structure is as porcelain fine as our Emma’s. Her face so puts me in mind of a young Sissy Spacek. Though her intrinsic colours are hothouse blooms, a colour riot or a very bold design may overwhelm her. For all of us, our neutral greys, browns, taupes, and so on, are the anchors for the more animated colours. They help quiet multicoloured prints and often include our hair colour tones, toning the busy-ness and looking more organized. This tunic uses warm colour in a delicate way, has random not repetitive design, and has many angular effects, like wings.

9. The colour of the dress is fresh and green, like you’d find inside a greenhouse. Spring’s message expresses youth and movement very strongly, and this dress does both in the tiered ruffling, but toned down for a grown woman to wear.

Could the green be too blue? Maybe, might be good on a Bright Spring, or a True Spring on the cooler side of her Season. Not every item in stores will be perfect in every way, as you already know very well. A shiny gold necklace, a warm pink lipstick will pull it into True Spring.

We often talk on facebook about knowing whether you’re on the warm or cool side of your Season, since in the real world, you may have to compromise your palette in one direction or the other. The concept is confusing to many but needn’t be. Your Sci\ART draping makes it clear whether you tend warm or cool by which is your runner-up, second best Season. Just buy that Season’s Book to give you a very clear sense of its boundaries and how to make the crossover with your own Season. You’ll greatly expand your understanding of your own Season and make shopping all the easier

10. The jewelry – the person looks like happy magic and so should the jewelry. I loved this, on another True Spring, our third beautiful Emma.

The necklace detail,

The picture of another person won’t help you find your Season. The variability in human colouring is too wide and the common key, hidden. But pictures are wonderful to help you visualize the Season’s special radiance and right colour’s ability to transport a face to a new, other place.

After two years of waiting to see this Season, my last two clients were True Springs. One was a 12 year old girl, choosing her colours nearly perfectly with the well-tuned colour pitch that children have, the second a 50 year old woman of Icelandic descent. Though I still learn from every PCA, True Spring skin was quite special.

Here is our first Emma. (Her eye close-up is the True Spring eye 3 in the Our Eye Album: Spring article.)

The Draping

The first drapes we compare, of the 10 to 20 sets we will go through, are a set of 4, representing each of the True Seasons. I spend a fair time at the beginning of a client’s session deciding which True Season(s) I’m looking at, and which I can forget about. I’m also teaching our eyes what this particular face does in the presence of wrong colour, because they’re all different.

Usually, True Season skin is different from the outset, in that only one True Season drape of the four seems to flatter, instead of two, or maybe three, with the Neutral Seasons. The skin tone’s perfection demands absolute colour heat or coolness and it does not compromise, even at the earliest stage of the draping.

Describing my Icelandic lady’s draping: Weirdly, both Spring and Autumn seemed ok. I even had trouble deciding between them, which happens very rarely. Spring’s drape made the skin brighter and more evenly coloured for sure, nearer to the face that’s already wearing perfect foundation and concealer, the result we’re striving towards. The difference just wasn’t as obvious as it usually is. On all the Spring blends of my previous experience, Autumn’s drape was very wrong. Not so here.

Spring was better, but why the difficulty deciding that? Because I’d forgotten the What’s Most Important rule. For True Spring and True Autumn, heat is most important in colour. Saturation, not so much. Lightness/darkness, a little more, a little less, fairly forgiving. When heat in colour is at the max, good things happen, whichever kind of heat it is. By that, I mean that Spring and Autumn have very different heat. Hold in your mind a buttercup (Spring) and a rusty nail (Autumn). Very different look, feel, aura, everything.  Spring’s yellow, Autumn’s gold (darker, richer, greyer) both seemed far better than the pure cool choices.

True Winter and True Summer, I was very sure about…hopeless, ghostly, tired. Like Bright Spring, True Spring looks a bit dead in True Summer pastels. It’s dramatic. Why? Because now two colour dimensions are off. True Summer is max cool and pretty muted. True Spring is max warm and pretty clear. Many Springs are wearing Summer colours because they feel safer and buying pure colour is not easy to do, especially pure and light and yellow colour. In Summer colour, they age themselves tremendously.

Once the drape colours became more specific, it was easy to choose between Spring and Autumn. For me, the next revelation came when I realized that this was the first time I was seeing a person not becoming yellow in True Spring’s drapes. You can see that Emma doesn’t look yellow, and believe me, in True Spring’s test drapes, everyone else does. I’d seen the easing of lines and luminous eye that a Spring blend will have, but I had to ignore the yellowing of the skin, teeth, and white of eye. In True Spring drapes, the skin colour is suffused with vitality and life, while it is bland and pale in the Spring Neutral Season drapes. In right colour, especially the bright clear orange-red, you can watch a bloom rush up into the cheeks and the shadows go away.

The Makeup

This skin takes a lot of colour, and noticeably yellow colour, to come fully alive. Cosmetic colour cannot be wishy-washy, not dusty (looks dead), not earthy (looks like a rug), and not creamy (cream-of-wheat face). This colouring is strong. It will fade Light Spring’s beige-pink lipsticks to make them paler, even greyish (because remember, Light Spring’s colours are a touch greyish from their Summer bit).

The misty sunbeams of Light Spring are not here. This is tropical colour. The lagoon, the Bird of Paradise, fruit punch, Kool-Aid colours, full on yellowed heat. True Spring’s pure, golded, ripe, fresh colour will be hard to come by in the earthy, flesh-toned world of the cosmetics counter. Not impossible, but it will take an empowered woman with a mind released from marketing chatter to make these choices. And like everything in life, it will take a few overshoots and undershoots to perfect. Nobody got anything right the first time. Your best makeup and hair colour are on the other side of your mistakes, not on this side.

We’re putting makeup on Cameron Diaz and Robert Redford here. Could be Amanda Seyfried and Wayne Gretzky, they’re pretty yellow, but not as yellow. They’re probably Light Springs. As you see from the photos, not every True Spring looks obviously yellow. The majority don’t. But the colours that work on Ms. Diaz have a good chance of looking glorious on all True Springs.

PCA is not about what you look like, it’s about how your skin reacts to colour, right? Ms. Diaz is the stereotype for the Season, our prototype to try and transfer data from. None of us can really picture anything on ourselves. It works better to visualize on someone whose skin acts like ours, someone in our Season. If you’re not sure about a colour, think of who you’d put it on – Diaz or Lindsay Lohan.

Most of the time, a Season’s makeup colour will be believable and attractive on every face of that natural colouring because the colours are chosen to be the same as those already in the face. That’s the whole point of 12 Season personal colour analysis. These are the colours that could have just happened by themselves. Every woman makes her darkness adjustment depending on intensity of hair and eye colour, rest of the makeup, comfort level, age, occasion, and complexion, but the colours always come from that Season’s palette.

Eyeliners

- MAC Duck and Uniform (a green)

- Clinique Roast Coffee (darker) and Brown Sugar

- ELauder Bronze

- Grey is brilliant in makeup but can be hard to understand and to find the one you want. If we ignore the dark, sharp, and blue greys and look for medium colours (since sunny grey will take some searching), ELauder Graphite may be good.  Many eyebrow pencils are greyed and Lancome Sable is a nice, soft one.

- True Spring can carry a lot of colour without looking parrotty, and navy eyeliner may work well. Clinique Navy is great, a bright, true navy. No dark colour should ever be so dark that it appears to hold black. Light is supposed to come out of the Spring palettes, not be absorbed into it. The more saturated, darker Deep Cobalt is for Bright Spring.

Eyeshadow

- looking mostly for yellows, peaches, the colours of Rice Krispies and parchment. Colours for Charlize Theron, not JLopez. Not red or orange browns, but yellow and peachy, all the way to dark peach.

- ELauder Sandbar Beige, Riviera Rose, Wild Sable, and Cafe Au Lait, Ivory Lace, and Buttercream Double Wear. The Stay Bronze pot could be a good liner, but this stuff dries almost instantly and doesn’t move without more eyelid pulling than I want.

- MAC Cork.

- EArden Vanilla, Teak, and Wheat.

- Lancome Positive and Chic.

- Grey? nothing I loved. Grey is inherently cool, and I see it as liner better than shadow. MAC Omega was decent but I don’t think I’d buy it.

Blush

- clear, candy, lollipop, warmer than Barbie pink. No greyness (smear it on paper towel and wait 30 min. to check). Gladiola, not sweet potato.

- Shiseido RD 103, PK 304 (very nice).

- MAC Fleur Power.

Lipstick

- Lancome Rose Mystique is a lovely red in lisptick and gloss, may go on too blue for some. Revlon Love That Pink is good too.

- Lancome Jeweled Pink.

- Maybelline Color Sensational Hi Shine Coral Luster.

- L’Oreal Always Apricot and Charismatic Coral.

-  Tarte Lipsheer Thursday

- Merle Norman Popsicle, Persimmon, SunKissed

- MAC Crosswires and Sheen Supreme Made To Order; See Sheer is a possible, similar but toned down from the discontinued Viva Glam Cyndi (and from the opinions of True Springs, too muted and brown – try MAC Ravishing instead)

- Clinique Rose Toffee (sheer), Ambrosia (more golden orange), Sugared Grapefruit (light)

Mascara

- medium to dark brown.

Important Heads Up

I haven’t applied the makeup above to any True Spring faces. I just went shopping with the swatch book. Don’t buy anything without trying it.

If you want colours from an artist who has test-driven the colours, be aware of Darin Wright’s fantastic products, custom-coloured for all twelve Seasons at eleablake.com. For tough to find Seasons like True Spring, this is one-stop successful makeup. The eyeshadows for True Spring look shockingly beautiful from the website.

In Part 2, the hair, the person, the look, and and our second Emma.

If you have watched an analysis performed, you could accept any result as amazing, surprising, but completely plausible. The Sci\ART process forces you to just see what is, not what you think should be, a reality check.

Your eyes only need to see this once to go through to the other side, where the Season stereotypes have evaporated. You know the feeling of being dragged to your colour frontiers, resisting all the way (because the change we resist the hardest is the one we need to make the most to reach our next level), and surrendering the preconceptions. After that, like with all change, you realize it was harder to think about than to actually do.

But enough philosophy. Hanka responded to some doubts in the Comments of the previous article. People very rightly ask for visual proof. I’m not posting the blonde photo here, I’m hoping you’ll see this one first, and let it imprint itself in your mind (and you’ll turn inwards and find an awareness of the pathways your mind immediately starts to set out on, with so little substantiation; until you’re aware of that, you can’t have a roadblock ready for next time.) Hanka has done a lot of work in voice and theater, and sent me this photo from a performance a short while ago.

I never analyze skin from photos, far too many variables going on, so I look for other things.

1. Am I looking at makeup or the woman? The woman. I see intensity of colouration, whites are sharp, colours appear highly saturated, no soft, misty feeling. No sunshine, no earthy feelings, even in the skin, from what I can see.

2. Did dark eyeliner close in the size of the eye, because it would on someone who couldn’t balance the darkness? No. In fact, the eyes seem bigger with crisper outlines and better definition from the face. Our eyes are the focal point of our body. When our appearance expresses us truthfully and most beautifully to the viewer, others are looking at our eyes and listening to our words, no tensions, no distractions from busy colour F/X elsewhere. The eye wanders around the composition with ease, very happy that all the colours belong reasonably together, no feeling of a colour battlefield.

3. Does the hair colour steal colour from the face, or clear the skin to look clean and fresh, but not yellow or grey? Seems clear and fresh, not older in any way I can see.

4. Does the hair colour dull or drain the eye colour, or intensify it? Intensifies it. The eyes can balance and corroborate that hair colour. They are able to vouch for each other and seem believable on the same head. I’m not saying that Hanka should darken her hair, which I have never, ever seen improve a person. For most of us, our best hair is the colour we had around 25, when we’d settled into our Season but before we darkened with maturity, and then lightened a shade or two to soften the concentrated pigments of chemical colour. My opinion only, very open to being convinced otherwise. Like lipstick, though, wigs are an interesting means of ‘draping’ and seeing what happens. You can be surprised.

5. Do my eyes keep coming back to a too-bright lipstick, or am I looking at eyes, but having the lipstick in the same visual field and feeling good with that? The latter. Is the lip perfect, maybe not, but there are certainly some things about it that work.

6. Flip the lip colour to something nude. Does the face lose definition and freshness, or is it a relief? No relief, it would be boring and flat. I like lip intensity to approximate the intensity of hair and clothing, adjusting darkness a bit for complexion and occasion. On a lighter Season, our eyes would be stuck on these lips and keep coming back to the lips, unless we applied an effort we could actually feel to drag our gaze elsewhere.

7. Look at other things in the photo. They will have an effect, which is why PCA is done in a grey room. That wall plaque behind her may be throwing some heat into the skin. Does it feel like it belongs with her, could she wear a turtleneck that colour and would you feel good, or feel like “Uh, Hanka, have you got anything else to wear?” Maybe I’m not sure. You don’t have to always know. If I can’t make a decision with certainty, I don’t make it. I keep going. It might not be her best outfit, but something about it might work…the darkness level? the rosiness? Not sure. I like it better than the yellow-brown doorframe off to the right, and I feel better all of a sudden when I block it out with my hand.

8. Is the makeup just making the hair colour work? Again, not sure, but the face is not so different from the body, except that it photographs whiter as makeup always does.

9. If you have progressed far enough in your understanding of personal colour to agree that hair colour can be variable (even if you can’t get to admitting that it should have a place in the Season decision), if I showed you this woman first…would you still say Spring? Or were you really just seeing a blue-eyed blonde and got stuck in the trap they taught us oh, so, well, way back when.

PCA is about skin and one photo tells you next to nothing about skin. Colour is understood by comparison because pigments x, y, and z in your skin, though they look like everyone else’s skin, will react totally differently to colour A than Hanka’s pigments, or your BFF’s. Skin may all look similar, but it reacts differently. It can’t be predicted, expected, or assumed. Stereotypes are assumptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candice Bergen Life Magazine, USA, July 24, 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanka Kralikova is a newer member of the Sci\ART family of colour analysts. I’d like to introduce her to you by letting you read her story, in her words. Even colour analysts have to climb the wall of who they think they are and who they’ve been told they are, to meet themselves as they really are. We have also stared dumbfounded as the evidence that comes from our own colouring, that has always been there to be unveiled and understood, becomes less and less deniable. For an analyst, I think it’s extremely important to have personally lived this experience. I expect that many readers will recognize Hanka’s journey.

Hanka is opening a studio in Prague. Should you wish to have a consultation, she can help you with accommodations, another reason to visit this most beautiful city. You can email at hanka@topimage.cz. A website is in the works.

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Here are older photos to show my natural colouring.

I have been a freelance make-up artist for several years and became a certified Image Consultant last year. I realized that I needed to get the colours right as they are the core for everything. I first tried colour analysis as a client about ten years ago – not the best experience. The analyst told me I was a warm Season and since I am blonde and blue-eyed, I must be Spring. Full stop. I bought some make-up for Spring, used it several times, did not like it, and left it at the bottom of my cosmetic drawer. I decided colour analysis was good for nothing.

Couple of years later, during my make-up artist course, we also talked about colours. The tutor even analyzed us. This time it was different – they were already using the 12 Season analysis system. The only problem was – someone translated it from English and misinterpreted bright as shiny. Again, I was blonde, there were no standardized drapes (everybody trying to do analysis picked their own or bought them from someone who did so), no proper lighting, no neutral surrounding. So the result was: I am light and more cool than warm but True Summer colours are too muted for me – I am probably Light Summer.

Next time at a style course I was told (without any draping at all) that I was Light with no predominant warmth or coolness. I could choose if I wanted to be Light Spring or Light Summer. I tried both since each had something that worked. I liked the brightness of the Spring and coolness of the Summer but never was able to find a good lipstick for myself. I should have realized by then – cool and bright are quite good indications, but first I was blonde and second, hardly anybody can be objective about themselves. I always thought about myself as kind of wishy-washy, light and quite soft looking.

At the end of 2009 I was searching the Internet for some information on colour analysis, convinced there must be some system that could tell me exactly who I am. I really mean that. Knowing my colours really helped to better understand and accept my personality. I found it. It was called Sci\ART, it was based on real science (both my parents are physicists so I must have some science somewhere in my genes) and it made sense. I bought the book Understanding Your Colour and received it with a personal note from Kathryn. I loved the book and at the beginning of 2010, I put the money together to go to States and learn it. Unfortunately I was too late. Kathryn was not there anymore. I had never met her but still I felt as I had lost a friend.

I struggled with colours for another year when I gave it another try. I searched the Internet again and found several people who were Sci\ART certified trainers. I was lucky that one of them, Terry Wildfong, had been thinking about retiring and she was looking for someone to train who could then buy the business from her. We exchanged several e-mails and in the end of March, I was in Grand Rapids waiting for my life to change. And it did.

At the end of the first day of my training after we went through all the theory, Terry did my draping and showed me how to perform the analysis. I was expecting her to confirm I was Light, finally decide between one of the two Light Seasons, hoping that the Sci\ART ‘scientific’ palettes would have the right colours for me. I had my hair and clothes covered with grey so I could see just the face. The draping began. Terry did not need to say much. The first test drapes showed I was cool – there might be a little warmth but not much (“so, I will most probably be Light Summer”, I was thinking to myself). But then came the shock. We compared different Seasons drapes in between each other and I could see which ones were better but still was not able (or did not want to) to put it together. I looked great in brighter colours – I had never realized how bright my eyes were – and much better in cool colours then in warm ones. Black was not bad at all, crisp white looked perfect. Still, my brain was not willing to accept it. Then Terry said “So, do you know which Season you are?”

I went through all the results one more time – cool and quite bright, I can handle quite dark colours, I look great in icy pastels, there might be a little bit of warmth but not enough to make me a Neutral Season. No, it cannot be – but what else? Can I be a True Winter?  Terry agreed. I was in shock. “It is not possible, I am LIGHT. How can I be WINTER?” Terry put some winter make-up on me and we went through “Ooh and Ah” session with a set of luxury drapes. I have never looked so good in my whole life.  Thank you, Terry.

What was I going to do with my wardrobe full of pastels, those coral T-shirts, and a jacket I bought only recently? My head was swirling around when I was leaving that day. I slept very poorly that night. When I woke up the following morning, first thing I did was hold up my new True Winter palette next to my face and looked in the mirror. “Ok, I am True Winter, then. Let’s start new life.” That day I was analyzing people Terry had scheduled for me. I was very happy that I learned my lesson the day before. Some people can be very obvious – the moment you see them you know what Season they are and the draping just confirms it. With others you get surprised. I do not try to guess anymore, I wait for the drapes to tell me.

Instead of lunch I went shopping. I bought a pair of black jeans, white T-shirt, black tunic, bright blue, white and black dress with geometric pattern, and a bright pink lip gloss. It felt great. I had not worn black for ages and I fell in love with the deep berry lip gloss I never dared look at before. When I got back to Prague I spent a day sorting my clothes and found out one interesting thing. There were some pieces, mostly impulsive buys, which were spot on or very close to my Winter palette, mostly in purple, my favorite colour. I also had some brighter blue T-shirts and tank tops, one pink sweatshirt, and a dark chocolate jacket and suit. The jeans could stay, too. In the end I got rid off of some clothes, mainly in coral and some soft colours that I never wore. I could wear and combine what was left easily.

I still want to add some black and white, new for me, and also some other colours. I never go shopping without my True Winter palette anymore. I do not bother looking at things that are not in my colours. And above all I get compliments on how well I look even from people I would never expect to notice such things And one more thing – I have started to experiment with my hair colour (naturally mousy medium blond somewhere between 7 and 8). I got rid of the highlights and tried something a bit darker than my natural colour. It is still not perfect but I am getting there. I have got several comments that my eyes are looking brighter with the darker hair so I think I am heading in the right direction. BTW I had always thought my eyes were dull.

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Here are the ‘dull’ eyes, dearest readers. They contain stars.

And since this amount of cuteness would brighten any day, here is the child’s colouring.

Don’t let your left brain see patterns it is convinced that it recognizes, and proceed to dictate to you what they mean. Left brains try to do that, but they’re best relegated to data processing. Data assimilation is better done by the right side. Your eyes see snow and your left brain tells you that you are seeing white. Your right brain sees what really is, that snow is affected by the colours around it, including that of the light, and can be blue powder, a violet cloud, a sparkling yellow carpet. Patterns led to confusion and lack of trust in colour analysis, but they sure are hard to resist, even when you’re aware of their ambush. Approach every person as though they could be any of the 12 Seasons.

If you have questions or comments for Hanka, please add them to the Comments. She’ll be checking in here and on Facebook.