When Spring eyes are light in color, they are usually quite light. If they get surrounded by dark eyeliner, hoping to bring attention to them by creating a deliberate light/dark contrast, the problem is that the dark color doesn’t appear anywhere in this person’s natural coloring, so it looks false. And because this person can’t balance such darkness, the effect is to do what a dark line around a light shape always does, to close it in and make it appear smaller.

Don’t make yourself insane looking for red-browns and green-browns and purple-grays and yellow-grays to complement the eye color itself. What you perceive the eye color to be may not be correct, and the effect backfires. What colors enhance the skin enhances the eyes, it’s the automatic guarantee of PCA. They are in your personal colour palette or swatches.

Sorry for all the links, but these images are copyrighted. May take some patience. They should open in a new window.

For all 3 Springs,

1. Makeup cannot be earthy or pastel. A lot of makeup can’t decide if it’s clear or not clear. If you don’t know for sure, don’t buy it. The disaster of earthy makeup on a Spring can be seen here (please excuse the title of the article, but you see the painful effect of orange-brown eyeshadow?) Now add the frost to a color that doesn’t make sense this frosty, and it takes it to overkill. One of those “On whom does this look good??” colors.

Same concept on the model below. For me, the eyeshadow and blush are too orange-brown. It looks unnatural and heavy. We see lines under the eyes, like she’s getting tired from competing with these colors.

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When makeup is too cool, the effect is anemic, here again on Ms. Theron. There’s something ghostly about the skin, rather than healthy and glowing with vitality.

And when it’s good, here, same model. Only the Light Season can do this spun gossamer, sugar fairy look so beautifully. Spring adds yellow light, Summer does not. (The eyeliner is still sucking color out of the eye.)

2. Eyebrows matter. PCA brings attention to your eyes like never before. They’re the focal point of your entire being. The brows are the frame for the eye. Keep them neat and shaped. Especially important for Light Seasons who don’t wear dark makeup well.

3. The waterline of the eye is the inner rim of the lower lid. In your best colors, it will be the same color as the rest of the skin, which is calm and pale yellow-beige. That looks healthy, cleans up the white of the eye, and sharpens the iris. You could put a line of cream eyeliner there.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of jewelry. It is near the face. Violet eyeliner doesn’t look entirely grownup in makeup, but violet in jewelry can be remarkable. As Spring infuses everything it touches with happiness and movement, so can it wear a lot of bright, clear color. Even costume jewelry and plastic beads work very well. They express the exuberance, the enthusiasm for life that is felt even at the outer reaches of the Season.

If you’re young and want to wear violet eyeliner, be sure it comes from your Personal Colour Palette. Don’t buy a purpley grey or brown. It’s the color of the string on the necklace linked above.

5. Mascara is cool brown to black brown, depending on how dark you are. Black looks like spider eyelashes. Some of the dark-haired Bright Springs can wear black. Hard Candy makes a cool brown mascara. Smear a few out and look at them.

6. Wear your eye color and wear its complement color in clothing.

7. Wear a yellow-cream or yellow-peach eyeshadow hilite. It brings out yellow in the eye.

8. Think about accessories. The inside of eyeglass frames can have another color bonded to it. It looks cool, and I find it imaginative. Spring is a bit exaggerated and they can manage this effect nicely. (image linked to source)

Light Spring

These people are usually very fair. Some have ash hair and look like Summers. Some have yellow-green or brown in the eye and believe they’re Autumns.

The woman who gets my vote as most consistently ruined by makeup and clothing. At least, her hair is usually good. True of the Light Seasons, the less they put on her, the better, younger, real-er she looks. Here not too bad, but I searched.

This is a Light Spring eye. Notice that there there is yellow in it. It may be a green yellow, but it is certainly not an orange yellow. The eye belongs to Louise in the article Louise and Stevan Are Light Springs. Notice how cool and ash her hair looks and that she is not particularly light, though Stevan is. Notice too that the lashes are not very dark.

Repeat effects using makeup if eyes are blue or green will be the cream eyeshadow hilite or the cream waterline pencil, but go easy with this waterline thing. It can look bizarre quickly. If you love a pale aqua eyeliner, you’re under 25, and you are not in a professional situation, have at ‘er.

With Summer’s cooling effect, Light Spring still has more greys in their palette than browns.  You want an eyeliner that defines without overtaking. Rimmel Stormy Grey is good. Summer may have left an unexpected charcoal rim to the iris and this repeats it nicely. Don’t ignore your grey clothes, for the same reason.

Keep makeup light in color. Don’t be talked into pops of color that just compete with what you are. Even contour eyeshadows should be light. Louise does not wear dark makeup.

If there’s green in the eye, wear your clear light red lips, even as a sheer. Red and green are complements.

Go easy on the frost. The Summer Spring blends have a deceivingly fragile complexion. Makeup effects can take over and fast. Do a thin shimmer in 1 place at a time, maybe inner corner of eye. Or maybe do a lipgloss over lisptick in a light peach-gold like MAC Instant Gold Lustregloss.

True Spring

These are the fair-skinned, light-eyed, yellow blondes. Uma Thurman, Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz are the stereotypes.

Same repeat effects as Light Spring if eyes are blue or green.

Brown eyeliner is good. Warm yellowed gray also works. As ever for Spring, it is not an orange brown. Can Spring still wear orange? Absolutely, a clear orange. It’s just that the browns are not oranged.

Balance the eye with lively lip colors. Flat and safe looks like Nicole Kidman in pale hair and lips. Spiritless in a Season based on the very opposite concept. The whole face, the entire presence is drained and diluted. True Spring can balance a lot of the right colors and look fantastic in them.

Brown eyeshadow is fine. Light and clear. Picture those women in beer and honey eyeshadow, it works. In flowerpot or antique deep gold, too heavy, doesn’t work.

Wear bronzer that’s not too yellow or brown. It should be a sheer, pale, yellow-golden-beige. This is Stila 01 at Sephora. Sweep it up onto the forehead, around the eye.

Add a touch of cheek highlighter in a light yellow gold if you’re young. This is the face of the glowing outdoors.

As ever, wear your eye colors from your Colours Book somehow every day. A scarf, a pin, an earring, a purse, a hairband.

Bright Spring

The very fascinating Bright Spring never fails to surprise everyone, the analyst included. If the eyes are light, you’re wondering why they look so bad in Summer pastels, which is where you thought you were headed. If the eyes are darker, you’re wondering why Autumn drapes look tragic, while all the lines are eased away by the Spring drapes.

These women can use the light/dark contrast of dark brown or grey eyeliner with light eyes, because the darkness of the hair can balance it. The grey must be clean and crisp, and less dark than Winter. Merle Norman Galaxy and Annabelle Mercury are good.

They never wear brown in eye makeup very well, unless it’s a light taupe like Dior’s Earth Reflections. Notice (linked below) how there is no orange in the colors and they never get extremely dark.

They are deceptively light, though they don’t look it. The same rules of Spring apply, meaning not going overly dark or bold. This remains delicate skin.

Heather Karuza, who writes the very worthwhile makeup/nail blog at Coloruza.com…a Bright Spring could look like this. That could well be that Autumn-looking eye of this Season. The dark hair-light skin contrast makes one think of Winter, but this girl is not really all that dark. The skin on the throat is light and yellow.

Here, in clearer colors, showing also the Dior 5-shadow Earth Reflections.

Here in more Dark Autumn makeup.

You see why they’re so intriguing, ay?

(PS- Heather, if you read this, the e-mails from the site didn’t get to you. Hope it’s ok for me to post these links. If you prefer not, I’ll take them down. C.)

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.

The idea of having your colours analyzed sometimes meets with fair skepticism. I get that. First, you’re wondering if it’s a gimmick and whether you’ll just end up wasting money. It didn’t work overly well in the 1980s. What makes 2010 so different? (That question, and  many others, is answered in PCA FAQs.)

The possibility that a change might be asked of you also creates a little hesitation. I get that too. Your suspicions are correct. Change (is Progress a better word?) will be asked but you can choose to make it as big or small as you are ready for.

Another source of doubt comes from the uncertainty about what actually happens. This is especially so among those who too young to remember the last big wave back of 4 Season Colour Analysis in the 80s.

Back then, more women figured out their season from a book than from an actual draping, so the whole notion of the drapes is quite foreign. The process has been refined to make it far more scientific and extremely accurate. The advent of better colour pigments and reproduction processes produces a swatch book that is light years ahead of what it used to be.

This is what happens.

You are in a grey room. You wear a grey cape like a hairstylist’s cape. I wear a grey coat. Your hair is hidden by a grey hat. I prefer to hide my hair as well.  I like there to be nothing going on in the room colour-wise except the drapes and the reaction they provoke in your skin.

Your face is lit by lamps like those in a photographer’s studio. They emit a full-spectrum light, meaning that they render every wavelength (colour) of light accurately. The overhead lights are turned off.

And away we go.

It begins with coloured boards over which we float your hand. It allows people to start looking at how skin responds to colour. I’ve had women pull their hand away like it was burned when the colour of the board was changed. What they saw was their hand age 20 years before their eyes.

Then it’s on to the drapes. The drapes are the size of big bath towels and we lay them across your chest. It takes time to see how each person’s features will respond. Will they toggle between old/young, oily/glowing, rough skin/smooth skin when the colour is changed from bad to good?  Or will it be something else on your face?

(The colour reproduction has been altered in these photographs.)

There are 21 sets of drapes used for the analysis, and each set might have 3 to 5 individual drapes in it. We would normally use about 12-15 of the 21 sets to arrive at the final answer.

We spend a lot of time at the beginning deciding whether you might fit into one of the 4 True Seasons. We move through a precise system of drape colours and see the response in your skin.

Reactions

I have had people who feel wrong colours to the point of feeling nauseated and asking me to change them quickly. For them, as for me, colour is something they FEEL. Some people see no reaction in their skin whatsoever.

I’ve had women in whose skin I could see little reaction. They make me nervous. I’ve learned to keep going. The drapes will tell me if I’m patient.

Some find the process hypnotic and fall asleep, like a moving meditation. Others provide huge feedback and see the reaction before I describe it.

Some disagree with me. Most don’t. Good thing. I’ve learned to trust myself.

Some people are so clearly of one Season that they’re easily analyzed. Some straddle two neighboring Seasons so evenly that I have to work harder to decide which side of the border they fall on.

Target

What we’re really trying to do is determine what the colours that look most perfecting on your skin tone have in common. They will compose your personal colour palette. Are they light? How light? Are they light and dusty? Or dark and dusty? Or medium in light/dark, medium in clear/soft, and medium in warm/cool? For instance, you could call these pictured below Light and Cool-ish and Clear-ish.

Once we have you pegged to a perfect season, we move on to a different set of drapes. Known as the Masterpiece collection, these are 15 drapes (12 different sets, so one for each season) of your most gorgeous colours and your most stunning fabrics.

I tell people not to look at the drapes. Look at your skin. The first time people see the colours, they can’t help but look at them. Yes, they are very beautiful, but very importantly, people FEEL a sense of recognition or familiarity, of having been truly seen.

We end up looking at the Masterpiece drapes about 5 times. The first time, you look at the colours. The next time, look at your skin. The third time, think about becoming acquainted with those shades in stores, and appreciating how they make your face look. You will learn to recognize the effect in dressing room mirrors even if you’re not sure about the colours themselves. That takes time.

We let your hair out of the hat and look again. If the beautiful skin effect is lost, then your hair colour is wrong.

We put on makeup for No. 5. Even if you don’t wear makeup, it’s worth doing this. Colour-analyzed cosmetic colour ratchets the whole transformation up that much higher.

Aspiration

You will see yourself as you never have before. You will see yourself as you could be, every day.

Result

Or, What Do You Have When You’re Done?

You have

• the knowledge of your position among the 12 Seasons
• a complete understanding of the best shades of every colour that is perfect for you and how to recognize them in clothing and makeup
• a Colours Book of 60 colour swatches, exclusive to your Season only, with which to choose clothes and makeup,
• an 8-10 page PDF document for your Season that describes the particular radiance and edge of that Season, the clothing style that suits you and your colours best, how to choose hair and makeup colours, the pitfalls to watch for, the perfect jewelry, the colour combinations and power look for men, and a segment on personality traits very common to people of this colouring.
• a list of the makeup, including brand name and colour, that you should be wearing in blush, eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara, lipstick, and lip gloss – to help you get started, as your eye learns to pick the makeup that looks custom-coloured for you
• the revelation of having seen yourself as you never have and the knowledge of what you are supposed to look like – your own easiest, most authentic beauty
• the power of knowing what NOT to buy and which trends to bypass (or how to customize them for you)
• the first step of a journey of self-discovery about who you are, and how to use clothing and makeup to tell the world about the real you. This is the “life-changing experience” people describe about Personal Colour Analysis.

Am I meaning “Neutral Makeup” here? No, not in the sense of the nude or flesh-toned, neither-cool-nor-warm, often slightly grayed colours, that most neutral collections offer. Any given colour is still only right on certain people, “neutral colour” or not. Wrong colours will sit on the top of the skin and look like an island of obvious colour.

In the hands of a makeup artist, beautifully sculpted faces are possible with “neutral makeup”. But I’m neither a model nor a makeup artist. Are you? For most of us, neutral makeup just feels safer when we’re not sure what real colour to wear. The problem is that it looks flat and lifeless.

What I mean is “Natural Colour”. When the makeup colour is right, it will disappear into your skin. It will fuse with your face believably because the colour is already there. That’s the magic of Colour Analysis. We can identify the precise shades that are present in your natural skin coloring and give them to you in your Colours Book. Match those shades when you buy makeup and you will never look “made up”.

What if you knew exactly what cosmetic colours would look custom-made for you? No more hit-and-miss or believing wrong advice. No more having 5 tubes of the same shade of lipstick at the bottom of your purse. No more drawer full of makeup you’ll never wear. What if you owned 3 eyeshadows, 2 blush colours, 2 lipsticks, and a gloss, and they looked so perfect that you never stopped at the makeup counter again?  With PCA, this is so easy.

Eyeliner and eyeshadow are any shade of brown or grey. That’s it. Now, that still gives you access to about 50,000 different colours, and includes blends with white, yellow, peach, mauve, orange, and black. How do you know which shades of brown and grey are yours? Don’t worry, the answers are in your Colours Book.

You will never get blue, green, or purple makeup from me. You might get navy or eggplant, but in a shade that will not be obviously blue or purple to the viewer.

Why not? Isn’t green more interesting than grey? Maybe, but interesting in the wrong way. People look at the green line, which demands the spotlight because it doesn’t belong on a face. It competes with what they should be looking at, which is the colour of your eyes. If you’re dying to put turquoise around your eyes, the right shade will be in your Colours Book.

You will never get frosted makeup from me, with the possible exception of a softly shimmering gloss or eyeshadow highlight for Winters, Springs, and their blends.

Why? Isn’t shimmer makeup pretty? Shimmer looks appealing in the package or tested on your hand. By comparison, the matte colour seems terribly dull. On a face, it’s the opposite. It’s the matte colour that enhances without drawing attention to itself. Shimmer can take over. On Summers, it looks hard because the complexion is too delicate to compete. Unless your skin is as tight as a 15 year old’s, and mine certainly is not, painting shimmer over it is a good way of making sure people see every crease and crinkle.

Lipstick should have more colour than “nude”. If you’re 25 or less, with the great lip definition of youth, you can wear flesh-toned lip colours. Even then, the only women who can wear lip colour that is lighter than the skin are on the pages of magazines. If you’re mature, you lose lip colour and lip definition, and a brighter shade looks more youthful.

The trick is getting the brighter shade that is so right that is matches your skin, eyes, and hair perfectly – and you’ll find it, all laid out in the gorgeous choices of your Colours Book. Armed with the knowledge of your perfect lip and blush colours, who wouldn’t choose those? It looks sophisticated, fresh, and younger.

Are there makeup colours that everyone can wear? NO!  Your natural coloring  dictates your perfect makeup and there are 12 different types. If you wear the wrong shades, it’s like wearing someone else’s size or style of clothes. The effect is disorganized, which translates as weak. It does nothing.

Are there makeup colours that are shared between Seasons? Not in a perfect world. Unfortunately, the cosmetics industry offering is mostly disorganized. Even when you know what’s right on you, it can be hard to find.

Why don’t they teach it? The fact is that it cannot be taught. For each woman, it must begin with a PCA. Nobody can tell your undertones, overtones, or true colours without it. Nobody. There are too many variables and too many confusing distractions.

Once you know your precise inborn tones, you’re no longer going out on a colour limb when you buy makeup or choose a hair colour. You’re making educated choices empowered by self-knowledge.

So, do you sell makeup collections for the Seasons? No. I’d have to deal with too many different companies. I do give you a list of specific products and colours to test. I often go makeup shopping for you.