I did a very fun talk for our local Red Hat Society. From the speaker’s perspective, this is a uniquely beautiful experience. Everyone wears a red hat, often marvelously decorated with liberal use of a glue gun, and purple clothes. It’s brilliant to behold.

Some look out at the world and see the hand of God. I see color. It connects me to everything else somehow. In the article linked here, called “Personal Color Analysis and the Law Of Attraction”, it strikes me that in knowing and fully accepting ourselves, we find the peace and beauty we all carry inside. LoA and PCA are both about knowing that so-elusive truth about ourselves. Until we see how we sabotage our own happiness, calm, and success, and we all do it oh, so well, we can only attain a very weak version of each of those.

There are 12 Seasons in Personal Colour Analysis. Those I missed will be featured in an upcoming video on Sunglasses.

You would never decorate your house by adding whatever strikes your eye at the Home Dec store. It would look and feel like living in a flea market. No calm could be found, and it looks cheap and a tad squirelly.

Like the difference between a stereo system using parts from 5 different companies, or one where every module repeats the others.

A kitchen with 7 very different appliance finishes, or one where the counters and appliances all coordinate.

A house where every room has different flooring. It feels uncomfortable and looks slightly deranged to anyone viewing it.

You see what I mean. You feel what I mean.

Walk into a house where every colour and item was chosen to work with all the others, and you stop in your tracks. A whole different energy. Like on Colin and Justin’s Home Heist, when the people walk back into their house.

For the same reason, when you decorate yourself, the effect is so much more arresting when the elements all interlock with one another, and respect the framework of the house itself.

Once you dovetail your best personal colour palette with how you use it, you will look better than your friends. This is YOU, empowered.

So remember, when you get your Personal Colour Analysis, be sure to know if you fall on the cool or warm side of the Season. That means : when we’re finally down to testing between your last 2 Seasons, are we testing your #1 BEST Season against its warmer neighbor, or against the cooler one? Perhaps THE most exciting part of the analysis. Everybody tingles at this point.

In Wrong Colours Away From the Face, I said that I don’t buy into wearing colours that are not in your #1 BEST Season, unless people will only see you sitting at a desk.

To present a unified whole, you can’t have 1 big block that’s way off. The colours want to connect together to create a force, but they can’t if one is flowing against the current.

How you combine the colours of your personal colour palette depends on the energy of your Season. The colours themselves should all work together because they are all the same in 3 respects – how Light/Dark, Warm/Cool, and Clear/Soft they are.

If you’ve been reading here, you already know what I mean by that. For anyone new, let me explain. Any colour is described by where it sits on those 3 scales, its Light/Dark , its Warm/Cool, and its Clear/Soft  positions. The colour might be one the blues, reds, purples, etc. in your body, or in the world outside you.

Colour Analysis finds those precise colours in your body and replicates their precise position on those 3 scales. We then give them to you in a so-brilliant  Colour Analysis Swatch book. They’re called YOUR colours for 2 reasons : A. They’re the colours to shop for. And B. They literally are YOUR colours, in your own body.

Let’s look at Dark and True Autumn colours. Neighbor seasons. Some people straddle between the 2. But the MOST important aspect of Dark Autumn’s colours is their darkness. True Autumn’s MOST important feature is the warmth.  Any 2 neighbor Seasons do NOT share the MOST important dimension in their colours. You screw up the whole accord by throwing in another dimension.

You will see clearly and easily during your Personal Colour Analysis how far behind your perfect season the runner up is, even when you border closely. Some shades may be permissible, but none will be as good as any in the perfect one. So, in our Season example above, the Dark Autumn may look pretty good in True Autumn’s darker shades, because darkness in general is forgiving. It still won’t look like magic.

When the off-colour is worn on the bottom half, away from the face, it STILL disrupts the harmony of the whole body presentation. When the off-colour is way off, the flow of the appearance is distorted in favor of the more dominant colour. That’s why Light people gain 15 lbs on the bottom half in black pants.

Of course, your skin tone perfection will suffer less when the off-colour is far way. Still, the viewer will perceive disagreement.

I know it’s hard to find good colours. Winters can’t find saturated colours. Summers and Lights can’t find professional clothes. I know the fashion industry and cosmetics colour offerings are disorganized and incomplete. They are desperately unevenly weighted. As you learn to excel at colour decisions, you’ll buy your clothes when you find them, rather than by Season. I was looking at Ann Taylor’s website recently. Soft Autumn will do very well. True Summer, head over to Banana Republic. The 3 Winters, wear what you have (unless you need something black or charcoal, always available).

It helps to know whether you’re on the cool on warm side of your Season (your PCA will tell you) so that you know how to err. If you can’t find your perfect red, you’ll know whether to allow cooler or warmer shades. In a perfect world, the stores would be colour-coded, but IRL, their palettes are far more restricted. They might bring in 4 of the same style shirt, but not 8. They do NOT want you knowing anything about what suits you. They want that merchandise out the door, preferably the day it came in. You may have to be close sometimes, but you’ll learn how to do that too. We’ll talk about it a lot when we meet.

It takes months to learn to match colours precisely, even with your Book. Since we ultimately understand colour by visual comparison, not by me or anyone else talking about it, it helps to gather several similarly coloured items in the store and compare those to your Book. You’ll be better able to tell if the match is perfect, and if it isn’t, then how it differs. Is it browner? duller? darker?

It takes a month or 2 to start to enjoy the empowerment when you shop. It gets stronger and stronger as you bypass trends and disregard advice you know to be wrong. And both are everywhere.

I so understand the frustration in the beginning of feeling like nothing is right and wondering when it ever will be. But even at the start, you are better than you used to be. Then, the pieces start coming together, and your good decisions far outweigh the bad. Your eyes will get better and better at recognizing it. That will FEEL like magic.

Like so many women, in every age group, Emily doesn’t wear makeup. It’s easy to understand. Very few women can accurately choose what cosmetic colours suit them best. Many have tried but the result didn’t speak for them, so they felt like impersonators; or the sales pressure was too intense, and the upsells too mind-boggling, to honestly express uncertainty. We’ve all seen, or been, the woman at the makeup counter looking completely overdone. You can FEEL her thinking “Get me home before someone sees me.”

Emily would like to know what clothes look best and some help choosing makeup that doesn’t make her feel painted.  She has the sense and good taste to want to be noticed for the right reasons.

When the colour is wrong, you can never achieve the magic, no matter how lightly or heavily you apply it. When you start hearing “Just apply a thin layer and blot it to a stain”, forget it. If you need all those shenanigans, the colour is wrong and besides, it won’t last 10 minutes. We all know what makeup- sitting-on-top-of-skin looks like. When the colour melds with the skin, you can apply quite a bit before it starts looking fake.

Put a light, wishy-washy colour on a True Winter and unattractive things happen. Their eyes are dull, almost empty. The person so dominates the colour with their inherent colour intensity, that all you see is a face that appears ill. The skin is dull and shadowed. What happens to the skin happens to the whites of the eyes. As they yellow or grey, the crispness of the eye colour is terribly diluted. It makes you FEEL sad to look at that face.

Emily’s colouring is so strong that she wore many of the Bright Winter drapes well, the most brilliant shock colour there is. Bright Winter requires a little heat in the skin, which Em doesn’t have. As a result, the Bright Winter drapes drained the colour from her face and turned her skin grayish, like the walls of the room.

Though I’ve often said eye colour isn’t relevant to Season, I want to clarify that. Any Season can have any eye colour and that remains a fact. But just as the drapes are looking to make a connection with the skin, so are they searching for the like colours in the eyes. They are astonishingly and precisely coloured to  A. force a reaction in the skin, and B. to detect an exact colour match in the person’s skin. When the association is made, it’s electrifying. Em has navy blue in her eye. Watch it come out when like colours find one another.

Lessons

1. If you’re not used to lipstick, use sheer colours but stay true to your swatches. The blue-eyed winter with a soft feeling about her may do better in soft fuchsia than red, but too much colour would be outside Em’s comfort zone. We used Cover Girl Amazemint in 615 (Cozy Plum) and it’s lovely.

2. Even young people should use shimmer makeup very  carefully, if at all. Even on a young True Winter, it makes Emily’s upper eyelid too prominent. Frost is attention-getting.  It says “Lookit me! Lookit me!”. Classy makeup doesn’t do that. It’s your supporting player but it is not YOU. Let your makeup be a diffusion of your own colours floating over your face, but let people look at your eyes because they are the shine in your face.

3. Here is an example of Winter who might deepen her hair to match the brows, but always remaining true to the base shade. Nature will never colour you wrong. Her hair is the right colour but Emily could enhance the dark brows/milk skin effect more by deepening her own shade a touch. It will look real because the brows are dark, but more dramatic (not necessarily better, just a stronger visual effect).

4. This is also a place to think about how bad it looks if a Winter were to lighten her hair. The dark brows become more prominent, and look severe. Severe=aging.

For any Season, even if you don’t do much with your brows, there will be more attention on your eyes than ever before. Finding a stylist who can remove stray hairs without altering the shape to look like Pamela Anderson is good.

5. As a Dark Winter, my eyeliner is browner and lighter (MAC Grey Utility). Em will wear a crisper darker grey (Graphiti).  I don’t believe anyone of lighter complexion than Frieda Pinto can wear black eyeliner, certainly not in the daytime. True Winter’s grey consists of black and white. It’s a pure, true grey.

6. You all know I think blue/green/purple on a face that can be seen as a color is a cartoon, right? Don’t ever wear it to a job interview, and only to work if you are an artist of some sort. Estee Lauder Black Plum and Merle Norman Sapphire are examples of colour that doesn’t look like colour. They are less hard than black and the viewer doesn’t strongly perceive purple or blue.

When she saw her pictures, she didn’t recognize herself.

It takes a certain courage to step up to a personal colour analysis. Like having your fortune told, as empowering as it is, you may hear some things you’re not ready for. I’ve been told that I read palms. What I really read is potential.   To see yourself as you never have, both inside and out, takes endurance. It also brings the responsibility of answering the question “What are you going to do with it?”

Em will travel her own colour journey. It won’t look like mine or yours or anyone else’s. Some of it may not gel for years. Doesn’t matter. She’s got a lifetime to refine it. She’ll feel confident and beautiful wearing makeup and know that people see the real Emily. It takes more time to convince yourself of all that it can be, and how powerful the final effect is, when every element meshes.

Once you get to the makeup counter and are told that you don’t really need to follow your personal colour swatches, you really have to dig deep and find some fortitude. Why would you NOT use them? Why would the sales assistant NOT use them? If they’ve never had a PCA and watched the process, they don’t understand why you’re holding the book you have, or what the other Books look like. They’re tremendously good at what they do, but colour analyzed skin tone perfection is a key that can only be turned one way.

You have become empowered to know things about your skin and colouring that they simply can’t know. But YOU know. YOU saw it. This is one situation where close enough is NOT good enough.

True and Neutral Seasons

A PCA (personal colour analysis) session devotes a fair bit of effort to sorting out whether the person is one of the 4 True Seasons (True Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter). We knew right from the start that Spring was going to be the worst of the 4, and that probably included any of Spring’s blends. There were heavy brown shadows under her eyes and her skin was yellow, with too much redness in the nose.

Summer was manageable but Winter was better. Autumn and Winter were about the same. The intensity of her eye colour was dramatically enhanced in the Autumn drapes but her skin was unevenly yellow.

The Red Drapes determined that Pam is neither a purely cool season (Winter), or purely warm (Autumn). In the neutral drapes, we began to see how remarkable Pam could look. I LOVE this part, because one of these red drapes is going to so click that I’ll take one look and think “oh, boy, this is going to be amazing”.

When we like the skin effects of one season but the eye effects of another, the skin wins. This endeavor is always about creating the most perfectly illuminated skin, cleared of yellow, ash, ruddiness, shadows, or blemishes. Pam is very clearly a Dark Winter.

The photographs show calm, evenly coloured skin. Yes, Pam has skin to be envied. But Pam’s also a Mom with 2 young kids. She doesn’t sleep well every night. Still, in her perfect colours, you can see the luminous, flawless, poreless, Snow White skin, the white teeth, and the crisp whiteness of the white of the eye.

Pam’s colour memo to the world

You know that I’m all about how colour FEELS. We react to it because of how looking at it makes us FEEL.

Look at the expression in her eyes. She FEELS comfortable. These are the colours that she recognizes BECAUSE they live inside her already. Pam is experiencing what it’s like when colour speaks for you. It’s telling the world who she really is and it feels familiar, like a truth you’ve always known but have never heard spoken before.

She is easing into her Winterness. Winter is not an informal, casual, or scruffy season. The individual’s energy is tailored, simple, and elegant. She will completely dominate overly relaxed clothes. To the viewer, that would FEEL like “hard on the eyes” because of the continuous conflict with Pam’s own energy. This season is not frilly or fussy; if anything, it borrows a little of Autumn’s masculinity and adds a faint menswear touch.

In Winter’s appearance,  there is no movement, playfulness, or softness. You can see why these colouring schemes were named after the seasons. Outfits in a single dark colour convey the dark and serious look. Details are minimal or absent. When present, they are simple and expensive. Dark-light contrast should be extreme. One colour garments that repeat the hair colour are truly majestic. Nobody can compete with the power of this look on Dark Winter’s energy.

These colours allow her to look as she is. Pam is calm, a little remote, a little shy, but now, she is aware of her beauty. She is a little formal. You won’t know everything about Pam in the first hour. This is very typical of the Winter character. Add a little Spring to Winter, and you up the emotion. Add a little Autumn, and you increase the determination. Pam does not back down.

She looks a little detached. She looks aristocratic. Pam won’t carry off a beach blonde look. She’ll look odd in exotic prints and fabrics. She isn’t made for lavender and lace. That would look almost crazy, like putting a True Summer (say, Bo Derek) in a man’s suit and plaid shirt. So, instead of jeans and hoodies, Pam is empowered to know what colours will intensify what is special and distinctive about being Pam.

Dark Winter makeup and hair

Pam usually wears no makeup. It feels too fake, too dark, too conspicuous. That is not who Pam is and it feels clownish. In these pictures, she has a dab of concealer blended with moisturizer under her eye. She is wearing a fair bit of blush to add some life and shape to the face. Eyeshadow  (medium-dark cool gray-brown)and eyeliner (black-brown) are minimal. The final touch is a plum-brown lipstick, covered with a Caramel gloss to tone it down so she won’t feel too obviously made-up. This is beyond movie star skin but it looks natural. It took 5 minutes, 5 products, and it looks effortless and real and natural.

Pam’s hair is a dark ash brown. What would highlights do? The same thing they do to any Winter. They look terrible. The whole dark force is disrupted with light stripes. The same thing happens when Winter wears light, frosted lipstick. They look flat, chalky, weakened.

Does Dark Winter have a lighter side? Oh, yes. It’s just a little contained.

Your colour feeling

The trick is to find what you CAN do, what is consistent with who you are inside. Why is that so hard to know? I wish I knew. Why is it so hard to know your deepest obstacles, those you put in your own way, since that’s where most of them come from anyway? I don’t know that either.

After a lifetime of playing it safe, you have to ease into saying so much about yourself. As Marianne Williamson said “It is not our darkness we are afraid of. It is our light.” Many people are wearing someone else’s clothes and spending a lot of time and money to send out signals that detract from who they really are. Many others are trying to send out no message and render themselves invisible, so they live in comfort clothes, but that’s an equally detracting memo about who you could be. In the eye of the beholder, both say “doesn’t feel good, look away”.

Colour is deeply imprinted on human beings. With an understanding of your personal palette, you develop an understanding of how it feels FEELS to be you.

When I was looking for a room in a spa or salon to do PCAs, I spoke with 9 different businesses. 8 were run by women, 1 by a man. Know how many were even curious? Know how many said “That sounds interesting.” or “I remember it from the 80s and it didn’t work. Has it changed?”, let alone saw an opportunity to expand their own business? One. 1. That’s it. (Proud to say she was a woman.)

I encounter so much more resistance to the concept of colour analysis from the women who sell to other women than I do from anyone else. More than from men who sell to women. More than from the clients themselves.

I understand caution about new ideas. I have it myself.

I understand that retailers have negative memories from the old days. Women would come in with those annoying swatches. If the item didn’t match the swatch, they wouldn’t buy, and neither would their friend. What a headache. When it finally died down, they celebrated.

Clearing the air

There is one source of doubt that I’d like to dispel.

Colour Analysts are not your competition. We are not selling clothing or hair colour. We are selling knowledge that can’t be acquired any other way – but information that is invaluable to you as you advise your client.

Your GP is not competing with your dermatologist. They are helping you in different ways.

Nobody is saying that you are not good with colour. You are as good as anyone can be without a true analysis of the client. Nobody can see anybody’s undertones. The more people you analyze, the clearer that becomes. It’s not a flaw or a fault. Nobody is capable of it by just looking at someone.

Elementary marketing

It is not an accident that the genius marketers at Macy’s employ colour analysts. It is a new spin on the very prestigious and successful concept of personal shopping. They’re not firing them for lack of consumer interest or any other reason.

A good marketer sees selling opportunity everywhere. They don’t fight a rising tide, they ride it. If your antennae are up, you can turn anything to your business advantage.

Consumers will want you to understand how PCA works. You can’t wait it out or pretend it’s wrong. Other stores will join in. Your client will shop at those stores because she’s happier with every single purchase. She’ll go out of town to shop because the big stores will get in on this first.

Just as corporations were finally forced to learn and participate in social media, anyone who dispenses clothes or makeup advice will eventually have to make some room for seasonal colour analysis. In the beginning, the corporations didn’t know how to talk to their market, so they stayed silent. They paid a price for that and are still trying to catch up. Is your business so good that you can ignore this marketing occasion? There is barely any investment. What in the world is there to lose?

Use this to your advantage. Step out from the crowd and start a conversation. PCA’s can help you help your client. If you empower your client, she will love you. If you save her money, your word will be gospel. If you save her time, she will tell all her friends about you if she hasn’t already. She will return again and again and spend money because she is never disappointed.

If we allow our marketing juices to flow, we can help each other. Our clients will be overjoyed.

Knowing how to achieve a beautiful and powerful exterior is completely within your control. It begins with a Personal Colour Analysis. Learning your unique personal colour palette is the foundation for every colour decision you will ever make about yourself. Guessing at your best colours will mean you will be wrong most of the time. Why choose that when you can deliberately influence the impression you make so effectively? PCA is easy and empowering. Once you know what to buy, you will feel comfortable in your clothes because your image will express who YOU really are.

The book of colour swatches you receive once your PCA reveals your season is unique. It is unrivaled in the industry because it is made using archival inks. These are guaranteed to be lightfast for 100 years. The book is flexible and washable.

Very importantly, the colours are applied to cotton canvas, rather than being made from fabric. This ensures that the colour appears constant in any lighting and can be reliably used to colour match any type of fabric.

Your Book is entirely exclusive to your season. It contains 60 different colours for each of the 12 Seasons. The book fits easily into a purse or clutch, within a durable, protective plastic envelope.

The colour analysis swatches can be used to easily match clothing, cosmetic, accessory, and shoe colour. Shopping will be a pleasure once you learn to use your Colours Book. That will come quickly. You will find that you remember the most youthful version of you that we found during your PCA. You will remember also that in your most gorgeous drapes, with cosmetic colours that look so natural, they seem to fuse with your face, you saw yourself and your potential as you never have before. You will be able to replicate that with the help of your Book. You will be amazed at the self-discovery doors that will open as you venture into colours you never would have tried.

You will receive by e-mail a document that outlines the particular edge and radiance of your season and how to achieve it. You will find information about choosing makeup and hair colour that accord best with your seasonal color analysis, and pitfalls to be avoided. There is a section on jewelry choices and, just for fun, about the personality traits often found among individuals in your Season.

You will find answers to the most commonly asked questions about your PCA appointment at www.12blueprints.com/pca-faqs/.