Soft Autumn Darkness Adjustments
June 24, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 24 Comments
Every Season makes darkness adjustments for hair colour one woman at a time. There will always be individuals who don’t look right in the median colour, and fare better along the outer edges of the curve. I love hair colour that looks believable, like it happened by itself, and that flatters the skin to the utmost. This is when the viewer feels most relaxed.
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.
Hair and Eye Colour and Season
February 5, 2011 by Christine Scaman · 24 Comments
By way of documenting information, since this website serves as a content management system as well as a blog, this is an update in my thinking on this important topic.
In the wonderful discussions in our Facebook Fan Club, my belief that hair color is useless in determining Seasons surfaced in a thread about the unique Season of Bright Spring. Women often ask which celebrity might embody that coloring, and I can never think of one. This is the one group for which no average appearance exists. I think of Mrs. Laura Bush, with her turquoise eyes that tilt upwards. The French actress Audrey Tautou might serve as a dark-eyed example, but she has such sharp darkness and opacity of skin that she is probably more weighted towards Winter, with a smaller fraction of Spring.
Please, if anyone is finding the jargon confusing, do ask in the comments. And if you’re a Fb member, please pardon the reiteration.
While some PCA systems only recognize members of this Season as having clear blue or green eyes, but never brown eyes, I believe that brown-eyes Springs exist, and are usually mixed with a little Winter (thereby making them Bright Springs). Since the 1980s, when 4 Season systems were more prevalent, many very experienced and skilled color analysts believe that hair color and eye color remain important factors in determining your Season. I don’t.
I am not here to say that I am right and anyone else is wrong. Our philosophies may diverge a little. The same could be said of any two practitioners in any field. Having your colors analyzed is still the best, fastest, easiest way of spending less money smarter and looking way the heck better.
Remember that I define Season not by how you look, but by which group of colors make your skin look as perfect, young, healthy, and evenly colored as it possibly can. We figure that out using many sets of very specially colored drapes. When we find the set that enhances you above all the others, what we have really uncovered are the exact pigments already in your skin, in your body. When you then wear the colors you already are, you look like magic because your person and your attire is sending the same wavelength of energy to the viewer. That feels really good to be and to look at.
L to R, True Summer, Dark Winter, True Summer.
So, for hair and eye color to play a factor in Season, they would have to contain the exact same pigments as those in the skin.
We know that the genes that code hair, skin, eyes (eye color and line patterns in the iris, since those quite consistently seen together), and personality are not the same ones.
We know too that some combination of these genes often travel together when the chromosomes divide (or are transcribed together when the proteins are made, or there is some sort of genetic coupling at work), because we so often see certain traits together like blue eyes and blond hair. I think it’s scientifically reasonable to say that these genes are commonly expressed together in the individual or phenotype. If anyone knows more about human genetics than I do, I would love to know your opinion.
When I look at the people whose skin I’ve analyzed, the colors that are in the skin, and so in the colors in their color analysis palette that the drapes matched with, contain the vast majority of eye colours (and certain Season-specific line patterns) in 80% of people. I extrapolate this to say that eye colour and pattern can be correlated to skin pigmentation, and therefore Season, 80% of the time. Since it’s so very hard to correctly identify the precise colours in eyes, that value might be reduced to 70%.
The hair colors are present in the swatch book about 60% of the time. There are True Winters with orange hair. There are Light Summers with pink-red-orange hair. Colour variability abounds, and with eyebrows even more so. This says to me that hair colours and skin colours are genetically linked about 60% of the time (or less, because picking out the exact tones that create a given hair colour is really difficult).
Character traits are consistent among people in a Season pretty often, but are predominant to the Season stereotype only about 40% of the time. Personality traits are too diluted by experience, environment, and so on. Personality is too much of a hurricane to try to figure Season with. It’s a fun curiosity.
Rachel from Truth Is Beauty also made the fascinating point that as races interbreed, the eye-skin color association should fade. I’ll make the strong point that if you have not visited that website, and you have an interest in color, you really should. She has examples of the 12 Seasons, chosen with great accuracy and attention to detail. The information is also organized in a beautiful way.
Shannon Is A Soft Summer
August 11, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 30 Comments
Imagine sitting at a kitchen table on a warm summer day, drinking tea, doing some writing. Rainclouds have covered the sun. Shadows seem a bit darker. The door is wide open to let the breeze in. You notice that a few raindrops are coming through the screen. The air is fresher already, your skin feels a bit tighter. Before you get up to close the screen, you look out at the landscape. The rain really starts coming down now. You notice what happened to the colors that were sunlit an hour ago.
The colours are greyed, right? They are still cool, but there is an overlay of grey with a trace of brown, like fog, like watching colour through a raincloud. This Season is Summer’s version of colour in shade. The whole personal colour palette shares this very faint grey-brown common denominator. Light Summer begins with the True Summer palette too, but the colours are seen in pale sunlight.
Every Season has a True note, a higher note, and a lower note. Noise can’t exist without quiet, or light without shade. Soft Summer is Summer’s quieter, lower tempo. In 12 Season Color Analysis, this is the Neutral Season where Summer is beginning to integrate a breath of Autumn.
Drapes
Seldom do I meet such a perfect example of a Season. The skin, the eye colours and patterns, and the hair and brow colour are very much in the middle of the curve for Soft Summer. What made this PCA fun was that Shannon understood the theory and could see the color effects instantly. She was able to do her own analysis, which I love because the doors open fast and easy and the resistance wall crumbles.
Because this coloring is so medium, it seems the most misdiagnosed. The draping was straightforward. A tired face we saw in Winter colours, completely dominated by the drapes. Quite good in Summer colours, but a sense of being incomplete, of not having located the magic. A yellow face in Spring colours, with no benefit that Summer didn’t offer. A slightly yellow face in True Autumn, less so than in Spring colours, with a good eye color intensity, and a sense of “something here is working”.
There was no contest between Soft Summer and either neighbor, placing Shannon in the middle of her Season. Often, Soft Summer has a remarkably fragile bone structure that doesn’t achieve hi-def till it’s in the right colors. The warm neighbor of Soft Autumn color looks queasy, flat, pasty, blunted, and out-of-focus. The cooler True Summer was too blue-shadowed and pink-lidded.
Impression
This is a Summer more than anything. The watery feeling of the colors still applies, as does the coolness and delicacy. Watermelon, clover, and many water colors. Water and hostas can get quite dark, but they’re never crayon.
Soft Season means that not only is the person Soft to look at, with no big jumps between skin/hair/eyes, and so that is how they wear their clothes. Low saturation colours in low contrast combinations. Gentle colour movements. No trends (too exaggerated) or sudden transitions and dark lines (too severe). Related shades work well, but not necessarily monochromatic. Classy. Subtle.
The Colours Book gives you all your swatches, automatically mix-and-matchable. Your analogous, complimentary, and monochromatic colours are all in there. How they are combined depends on the energy of the particular Season. Neutral skin has warmth and coolness, so they have a warmer cosmetic colour palette (Desert Rose type) and a cooler selection (Dusty Plums). Color analyzed makeup colors are in your Book as well.
The Summer personality is seldom overly demanding. Refreshingly pleasant personalities prevail in all 3 Summer Seasons. Children adore their steady and straightforward manner. The loudest voice won’t belong to a Summer. They are highly civilized and have no problem with impulse control.
Autumn inserts practicality, speed, and strength into the Summer core of these people. The moment Autumn is invited to the party, Summer’s soothing way is replaced by Autumn’s determination. The straightness of the brow conveys it in the eye photo alone. As a triathlete, this woman is nothing if not determined.
Soft Summer Hair
This is an article in itself. It is harder to understand and harder to achieve. It’s coming next. Note that the hair is photographing more red than IRL. In the next part, I’ll show you the real color.
Shannon
Your face, Photoshopped, can be yours for the draping. It’s easy to look at and easy to be. After years of feeling uncomfortable with makeup, Shannon said this,
The colors in my swatch feel right to me, as does the description of the Soft Summer personality – it all fits in terms of how I know myself. The make-up application looked and felt fantastic and, for the first time, made me want to buy and wear make-up.
No Summer+Winter or Spring+Autumn Blends
July 31, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 23 Comments
Hi, everyone. Let’s begin with a hot topic to rev our color motors back up.
In the comments for the article “Handbags for the 12 Color Analysis Seasons”, Donna Cognac, a highly certified color and image professional, said this.
I just wish that you could also address the 4 types that get ignored in 12 type color systems. The types that are a blend of Winter/Summer; Summer/Winter; Spring/Autumn and Autumn/Spring….with the first word the dominant harmony in each type.
In the Sci\ART Twelve Tone System, there are no categories that combine any of the 3 Summers with the 3 Winters, or Autumns with Springs. Most other PCA systems disagree.
Logic would have me begin with Munsell facts, but that’s not the reason that resonates most strongly with me, so I’m going to go evangelical first.
Extensions of Our World
We are children of this planet. Its colors live in us and through us. So do its patterns, its clocks, its and yearly rhythms, from the molecules on up. There is a very strong repetition of the way humans look and how it feels to interact with them, and the Season they represent. They seem almost as extensions of their particular month in appearance and behavior.
If True Winter begins January 1, then
Bright Winter is February
Bright Spring = March
True Spring = April
Light Spring = May
Light Summer = June
True Summer = July
Soft Summer = August
Soft Autumn = September
True Autumn = October
Dark Autumn = November
Dark Winter = December
True Autumn looks, dresses, and behaves as “comfortable, abundant, strong, productive, natural”. Spring, holy cow, does not.
Sure, of course, some people may have both Spring and Autumn characteristics. Some people don’t seem to behave like their Season at all, so the relationship between color and personality isn’t tight. Still, if anyone is going to behave or look like their Season, it’s more often in the absolutes, or True, Seasons, making them harder to merge.
For some, consistency with the planet’s color cycles has no relevance. They might say “If that were true, then why isn’t every color you see in August right for Soft Summer?”
Fair question, but I can only answer it as I see it. Our accord with our Earth’s own palettes and her cycles means that flowing between the 2 warm or 2 cool Seasons doesn’t make sense. Autumn and Spring are on opposite corners of the world’s phase clock. So are Summer and Winter.
Color in Nature
Kathryn Kalisz is the artist who created the Sci\ART system. Prior to her tragic death, I asked her why there are no pure warm and pure cool blends.
She answered,
There is a natural order of color that we cannot and should not change. It follows the spectrum of light (as seen in the rainbow) and when connected at both ends, the color circle is created. In this natural order of color, color moves from cool to warm, or warm to cool. An object never reflects just one single hue, but always three visible tones of the color, from cool (usually the shadow side) through the neutral or true color, to the warm tone where the light hits it. Complementary colors are based on this natural order of color. The 12 tone color system is a natural color order system, which reflects the way colors move in nature.
Color never moves from cool to cool, or warm to warm.
Shopping Well Is Hard Enough
We can talk about how adding to blue to cool must also darken, meaning we move towards Winter as we cool color more. We can talk about how 12 distinguishable tones are sufficient. You could have 40 Seasons but who could tell them apart? Seasonal colour analysis clothing and makeup colour is already hard to match because they’re usually colored in random, market-driven shades. They’re not in the business of making real women look strong and lovely, they’re moving garments off racks and colored powder out the door.
For me, the point is this: No new classification is needed. Sci\ART uses the Munsell system’s 3 dimensions of color. They’re enough. Kathryn created a set of drapes whose colors are calibrated to move through 12 levels of the 3 dimensions of color in all the possible combinations. Straightforward, easy to understand, easy to explain, just like Warren Buffett’s investment strategy.
You get a personal palette that matches YOUR level of the 3 dimensions, no borrowing, no crossing over, no overlaps.
Sci\ART Color Measuring Tools
A.k.a., the drapes. Someone reading this (and disagreeing) might argue that the Sci\ART drapes just aren’t set up to reveal these cool/cool blends. Well, what would that look like?
The cool/cool would be bluer than True Summer, but not so blue as to darken to Winter? And fairly saturated, but not at Winter’s level? I suppose you could create such a palette, but me, I’m not convinced that it’s necessary. Women already have trouble telling Summer’s reds and blues from Winter’s, let alone finding them to buy with confidence. This all has to be learn-able and use-able by real people in real stores.
What about the warm/warm blend of Autumn+Spring? This one, I really don’t comprehend. Autumn and Spring are warmed in completely different ways, one with dull rust and one with clear yellow. A recent client looked to me like he might set this issue to rest. We’ll be looking at him soon.
Best Makeup Colours : True Winter
June 24, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 34 Comments
In 12 Season Personal Colour Analysis, True Winter is the pure Season whose most important color fact is its coolness. The saturation and darkness are fairly high but not at the max. Every color, light or dark, is cold, crisp, hard, frosty, dry like the inside of a freezer.
There are 5 pages of pinks and purples in True Winter’s Personal Colour Palette. 5 swatches on each strip, that’s 25 pinks and purples. They far outnumber everything else.
The color at the core of this being is red-purple, all very clear and blue-based. The palette is so cold that it almost feels a bit unfriendly to look at. There isn’t a shred of warmth. No brown, no orange, no beige, nothing we associate with comfort. Combine that with the relative darkness, and it’s uncomfortable.
Like these personalities can often be, Winter demands that we make some space for it. We feel commanded to notice it but prefer to keep our distance. It likes to argue and will resist any sort of control. And yet, its beauty is awesome and unto itself.
True Winter has some serious strength in their coloring. They can balance much more makeup than most others. They can wear eyeliner along the inner rim of the eyelids and look even more remarkable. On the rest of us, it just looks vicious.
If someone told me they liked my eyeliner, I’d throw it out. When you look at pictures of Laura Mercier or Mrs. Obama, you’re not looking at their eyeliner. Here, the color analysis cosmetic colours would harmonize a sapphire and deep purple eyeliner, as long as it’s not obviously, ridiculously purple. The sapphire has to be pure, dark, and cold. Not teal, just pure deep blue. Merle Norman makes a nice Sapphire eyeliner. Bright Winter can balance this too, with their drop-dead glamour signal. Everyone else pushes the limits of credibility.
It may take time to get used to these fuchsias, rubies, dark plums, and crimsons in blush and lipstick. Begin with sheer colors, but don’t compromise the color. Your makeup will be invisible, or worse, it will be noticeable as some weird, warm, wishy-washy shade on your skin tone. Don’t go there.
The basic eyeshadow is a clean, crisp steel grey. A cool taupe (grey-brown) can work as a good alternative. MAC Satin Taupe is fairly good, but very shiny. This group can handle shimmer makeup, consistent with Winter’s polish, but nobody should overdo the frost, especially after 40. Summer’s cool taupe could work, but it’s not quite the same because of its inherent softness. If these colours look warm on your screen, they’re not intended to.
A Soft Autumn Case Study
April 30, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 43 Comments
You find yourself telling this person your dreams.
They integrate Autumn’s open minded acceptance of new personalities and ideas and Summer’s gentle kindness. Autumn’s very natural disposition, completely without airs or pretense, is still here but tempered to lessen the more abrupt honesty. One feels so comfortable in this presence that our own masks and guards fall away. There is no threat, no tension, and no judgement.
For us all, our best appearance happens when our truest inside is projected on the outside. We find a profound peace in that place. The Soft Autumn’s eyes/skin/hair are of similar colour intensity, which is to say very muted. There are 2 concepts here and we wish to repeat both in personal decoration:
- The colours of the hair/skin/eyes are themselves very muted and soft.
- The transitions between the colours are very muted and soft.
Hair color analysis
For both Soft Seasons, the natural hair colour can be a medium gray-brown. These women feel much more alive with hair colour. Done right, it can amplify everything sensual, almost organic, about this palette.
Hair that’s too pale and yellow, the ubiquitous blonde highlight of which there are too many out there, doesn’t even look like their hair. For too many of us, it began as a few highlights, and pretty soon nobody can remember when they weren’t blond.
Too dark is very severe. It competes with the skin, and wins, setting up shadows and aging effects.
They often have a copper subtlety in the hair or freckles in the skin, and someone along the way will have suggested some shade of red. This can be wildy successful, but red is also tough to get perfect from a bottle. It has to be extremely gentle, so the viewer isn’t even sure if it’s there. Full on True Autumn’s molten, burnished heat isn’t here yet. This is the end of September. (See How The 5 Autumns Add Brown To Hair Colour)
Don’t get frustrated with the hair colour, it is the biggest struggle of all. It takes most of us 4 times to get a shade where we go to the colorist and just say “same as last time”. You really do learn interesting things with each hair attempt. This hair (actually the same colour as in the first picture) may be a bit dark and red, but it has found the warm copper in her eyes. Nobody can do metallic color in the eye except Autumn and it is remarkable. You’d want to keep some of that, either in the hair or in clothes.
The color mistakes
1. Black. It is dark, cold, heavy, dense, everything this group is NOT about. Even black mascara looks fake. Their better-than-black is milk chocolate or maybe a bit darker.
2. White. Stark and draining, it adds years. Like black, white is at the extreme end of the contrast scale, in opposition to the basic concepts of this coloring. Their neutral opportunities are enormous, with the coolness and heat both present. From eggshell and sand, through buff, honey, and caramel, mocha, dove grey, endless choices.
3. Dark lines. Eyeliner, lipliner, eyebrows, any sharp colour transitions. All you see is the dark line. The most dominant colour block will draw the eye. Everything else will recede. Dark lines in makeup, like dark details in clothes, look severe and aging.This Season looks very good in flesh and nude tone lips. On most coloring groups, lips need more definition to add youth on mature faces. Here, softer tones look warm, glowing, and natural even on older women, since that is the basic energy of the group.
4. Avoiding the feminity. Though they certainly look more Autumn, their nature is nurturing. Rather than the soothing feel of Summer, this trait is more about fostering and encouraging the growth and happiness of those they love, very womanly aspects. Their husbands have stopped asking who they’re making asparagus quiche for this week. They know the SPCA staff by first names. Heirloom “it was my grandmother’s” jewelry or floral prints combine the more Autumn personal colour palette with these very loving, deeply female characteristics.
5. Only using metals in jewelry. Antique and vintage jewelry, heirlooms, pearls, hair accessories with flowers or natural beads and stones or scarves are fabulous here. Even textured metal is inherently hard, though it certainly can work in soft gold and copper.
6. Missing out on a gentle bronzer. Their look is not made up. It is natural and real. Bronzer can be so flattering and warming. Much of what’s out there is dark, red, orange, or dull. This should be a light golden tan colour.
Lipstick
You’ll be wanting to know what lip colours the model is wearing. The first picture is Bobbi Brown Rose Brown. The second is Chanel Incognito. You’re not staring at the makeup, right? It is neither stronger or weaker than the face. The skin is calm, even, and real. The harmony between who she is inside, how that is depicted in the color story on the outside, and the all the colors she has added is so perfect that it becomes fascinating. An effort is required to pull your eyes away from hers.
We all have about 4 lipsticks that will look custom-colored for our face – more if you get into subtleties, but most of us would be beyond happy with 4 perfects. A Neutral Season, with both warmth and coolness, can play with this in makeup color (the Colour Analysis cosmetic colours are precisely rendered in the Colours Book, easy to match at the makeup counter). A warm pink is one of Soft Autumn’s choices. A more orange (but not peach, this is an earthy Season) light terracotta, is the other, the pink-orange of a flowerpot in the late afternoon sun. Lips like these cost the industry big coin and a lot of Photoshopping.
Eyeglass Frames
We wondered about eyeglass frames. This is an old pair she sometimes wears.
How about these choices?
These frames repeats the copper-red now in the hair, so effective at intensifying eye colour. There are no hard horizontal lines to diminish a large round eye. There are no hard lines or corners at all.
Great shade of copper. Softened frame shape. A little groovy chic with the upward flare of the corners, a nice soft flowing curved line (the Summer element integrated! coincidence? I think not). Not heavy at the temples. Unobtrusive but elegant, delicate but strong, an addition to the woman rather than a fight for attention.
In our model’s own words
Anyone who has experienced a Colour Analysis learns that looking your most beautiful and genuine is not about what you do or don’t spend. It is about what you do or don’t buy.
My friend is a writer and an eloquent communicator. She sent me these thoughts (you can read her comments in full on the Testimonials page):
In a culture eager to financially capitalize on women’s (and increasingly men’s) insecurities, we are constantly vulnerable to manipulation by the clothing and cosmetic industries. Christine’s analysis brings a halt to this grinding exploitation. Equipped with a new way of looking at color; with, in fact, utterly retrained vision, we are able to say “no” to that which does not serve our authentic selves. And when we say “yes,” it is with self-assurance devoid of indecision and guilt.
Christine often mentions how wearing our true colors makes it easier and more relaxing for others to engage with us. There is an ease; a sense of effortlessness; a lack of obtrusive striving for that which does not inherently belong. I think we all want to experience this “naturalness of expression” in our both our professional and personal lives. We’d like to give it and to receive it; we are social animals, after all. Christine offers the gift of this life-changing awareness. It is a shift-of-consciousness that is transforming and freeing, all at once.
Activewear Jackets for The Light Spring Woman
January 25, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 6 Comments
Because the Spring Season speaks primarily of movement and animation, you look great in active wear.
As always, staying true to your personal colour palette, I like this Zella jacket at Nordstrom.
Turquoise is certainly among your perfect clothes colours. It’s being marketed as THE colour this Season, but only 3 Seasons can wear a true clear turquoise, and the Light Spring is one of them.
I appreciate the flowing lines in the stitching. In 12 Season Colour Analysis, you are a Neutral Season, blending Spring with a little bit of Summer. Those wavy lines integrate your Summer touch with the flowing water effect, while still being gently zigzagged enough to suggest motion. As a gentle Spring, this gentle zigzag is a perfect mirror to your message in colour.
You will express your personality better with some colour transitions. Your Summer trace is monochromatic, but not to this degree. Repeating a colour in the print of a top with a solid bottom will do well. Since you are predominantly Spring, you can certainly mix and match colours fairly freely. The jacket above was made for another Season.
A final great choice, below, the Nike Border Long Sleeve top. The fundamental shape of the Spring Season is the triangle.
The stitching at the armpit to neck conveys the triangle. The asymmetric Nike swoosh, with its lift at the corners, is a great little detail that says movement, and so Spring.
The colour could be yellower, ideally, but if you are on the cooler side of the Season, it may be perfect.
The Reason For The Season is YOU
January 11, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 4 Comments
Among the 4 True Seasons in Personal Colour Analysis, there are 2 groups of people whose coloring has a blue-pink (or cool) undertone. They are the Summers and Winters. Their nature also tends to be less energetic and a little more reserved and slow-moving.
The Warm Seasons of the Springs and Autumns have skin with a yellow-to-gold undertone. They are lively, busy, talkative, and active.
Colour makes us feel certain feelings and think certain thoughts. A big block of why that is comes from the most primitive associations humans have made with colour. It is embedded in our genetics and the evolution of our brains from the beginnings of our consciousness.
Just as the energy of the 4 True Seasons follows the course of the year, from
the short-lived but almost frantically busy, almost reckless, activity of Spring
to
the hazy, flowing, genteel days of Summer
to
the time of yields and returns in the fields, of efficiency, and security, and responsibility in Autumn’s solid personality
to
Winter’s withheld reserve and its contrast of frozen yet shocking beauty. How can such austerity and colour severity be so beautiful? How can something so motionless be so compelling?
So does the warmth and coolness of the Seasons alternate in every 24 hour cycle.
Spring is a colour riot. It corresponds to the early morning’s optimistic business. The light is pale yellow, but there is a definite promise of heat to come.
Summer’s colours are seen between 12 – 3 PM where activity slows as the heat induces a softness and relaxed peacefulness to how we feel, as well as what we see.
Late afternoon light mellows and heats the colours of the world around us, just as it does to the coloring of people in the Autumn seasons.
Winter individuals, whose personal decoration in clothing, makeup, jewelry, and hair colour is stately, formal, and symmetrical, look best in the colours of the darker time when motion settles. This is a feeling of colour restraint worn in simple, contrasting ways.
Though there are 12 colour groups, or Seasons, among human beings, each has their special edge, their special effect. Learn what yours is and your appearance will crackle. Colour is above all a FEELING. People will keep looking for why you send sparks but they will not know.
Your thoughts project outward from you as a vibration. They are like your inner colours. You send an energy vibration by the colours of your body too. You have a wavelength all your own. Wearing wrong colours is a constant irritation because the wavelenghts don’t jive. You’re emanating too many frequencies that are all clashing.
Trying to look like what you could not be never works. Think about how you were INTENDED to look. You came here, meant to look a certain way. Are you close? You’ll feel it when it happens.
Elisa Is A True Summer
January 7, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 19 Comments
Elisa has always believed herself to be a Spring. Her freckles, warm brown hair, and natural flush in her skin caused her, and others, to conclude that the colours in her design followed Spring’s colour rules. When assessing a colour, be it in you or outside you, we ask the same 3 questions, because any colour has 3 properties.
Spring colours are all:
Lightness or Darkness? > light, or at least never very dark
Warm or Cool? > warmed, and by yellow NOT orange
Clear or Soft? > clear, or highly saturated, NOT dulled
The premise of Seasonal Colour Analysis is that every colour in your natural colour composition answers those 3 questions in the same way. Your swatch book is a group of colours that fit on those scales in those exact same positions too, thereby replicating the colours in your design. That is how the magic happens.
I can see how one might look at the light-medium warmish brown hair and see warmth, light, and clarity.
Her eyes are not warm though. They are a medium-dark blue-grey.
The dark brows could make Winter cross your mind.
But nevermind the hair and eyes. We established long ago that they are not used in defining the Season, they’ll just lead you astray. We look at skin.
Without a proper analysis, you can’t really understand skin. You have to watch how it reacts to colour. Are freckles not a sign of warmth? No! They’re another red herring, kind of like the “clear eyes” concept. You have to look beyond them, at the skin. So we’re back to Plan A, with how did the draping go?
Both Elisa’s skin and her eye patterns performed precisely as True Summer does. The moonlit, luminous translucency that only True Summer does so well was there for sure. The absolute inability to handle the slightest degree of heat, or it’s instant pasty skin, was there. This skin tone seems to look turquoise in turquoise, and melon in melon.
In fact, Elisa is a study in contrasts. She has warm hair, dark eyebrows, deep blue eyes, and freckles (which feel warm). She could be placed in any number of Seasons, but none would feel right. Once we neutralized all the variables, it was clear that she is a True Summer.
Makeup often seemed too conspicuous so became something to avoid. We looked at how to accentuate her features with the same understated elegance that is true of her entire palette. These are Grace Kelly clothes and colours. This is the skin and eye colour that was made for BlueGrey eyeliner (Annabelle makes a perfect (and perfectly inexpensive) pencil by that name). Everyone can wear makeup beautifully, but the fragility of this skin is easily overwhelmed.
Elisa has some natural shadowing around her eyes. It was least pronounced in the True Summer colours, but wasn’t obliterated altogether. That’s called Photoshop. Many women fight that (and many other “imperfections”) with too much concealer, which ends up looking caked and even more obvious. There is a little foundation here, but no concealer. I usually apply concealer or foundation, but seldom both. Those products are overdone, and take a lot of time. I want to show you how to recognize your cosmetic colours.
Cosmetics counters and makeup artists are usually good at matching foundation. If they won’t allow you to take a few samples home to try in daylight, don’t buy the product. I ask women to bring their foundation to their PCA. So far, none have been wearing the right colour but they knew that already.
In your right colours, you will see the area under the eye become as illuminated as possible. Wear a little makeup, but allow your face. Ignore our magazine-obsessed culture that has us trying to delete our individuality.
One of the biggest misconceptions about True Summer’s colours is that they are all dusty lavender and Wedgewood blue, “old” colours. In fact, the most important feature of True Summer colours is NOT their dustiness, or softness, or grayishness, all the same idea. It is the COOLNESS.
These are not at all confined to being light colours, though Summer is thought of as light. Relative to Winter, it is lighter, but they can do surprisingly dark colour.
In this graphic, the high saturation (hi sat) colours are on the left, as you can see. The lo sat colours are only softer BY COMPARISON. They’re the colour of denim and flower petals. The True Summer personal colour palette contains these same beautiful colours, at about 50% saturation or less.
The hi sat shades on the left are pigment-saturated, pigment-soaked, pigment-logged. Winter needs them and usually doesn’t wear them saturated enough, in part because they’re hard to find except in workout clothing. Few women over 25 feel safe buying these colours.
Elisa is married to the most mannerly man you’ll ever meet. Aggression and confrontation are disturbing to this personality. Hurry and pressure flusters them more than most. It is very calming to this character to be able to depend on certain things, especially decency and kindness. Courtesy is the most essential prerequisite of all.
Soft Summer Jewelry 1
December 15, 2009 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment
It always begins with the same question. What does this person feel like?
How we decorate what’s INside on the OUTside?
The Soft Summer person
These people are very True Summery in most ways. They are not reclusive, shy, or introverted. They don’t need to be the boss, though they could be good at it. They don’t require center-stage attention. Theirs is a more subtle, serene, quiet energy.
The trace of Autumn puts a different spin on things. The Soft Summer is usually more sporty, with faster and more focused physical energy. They have a cut-to-the-chase practicality that gets the story told or the job done sooner, without True Summer’s inclination to dwell on details.
I love this Petal and Pearl necklace at J.Crew. Love it in charcoal too.
To speak for them, their jewelry must follow the same tendencies. The pieces are less lacy and feminine than True Summer. There is a feeling of more solidity, but they’re by no means chunky. Autumn and Summer combined can make for a very headstrong individual. The jewelry should not feel retiring or lightweight. These can be among the most persistent, immovable personalities so a persevering quality in the jewelry is appropriate.
The metal is silver, unless they border their warmer neighbor of Soft Autumn quite closely. Theoretically, as a Neutral Season, gold could be worn in small proportions. It would be the deeper, more mellow gold of Autumn, rather than Spring’s very yellow gold that just looks cheap on anyone else.
Good behaviour and personal restraint are the hallmarks of the Summer personality. What better jewel to define that sophitication than pearls? I think they suit the Soft Summer colours even better than the True Summer. The colours of a misty morning, of a foggy harbor, with the light of day coming through…I love the feeling of that with a seashell- coloured pearl. Creamy pearls would even work well, just not too yellow.
Soft Summer’s colour code
Just as clothing colour combinations can venture further from True Summer’s best monochromatic (several shades of the SAME colour) look, so can jewelry. Different colours can be combined, as long as they all remain true to the personal colour swatches in the Colours Book.
Remember that while you may mix different colours from your personal colour palette, such as antique rose and jade green or pearl with orchid, how beautiful would that be, all the colours themselves are of low saturation. The whole look of this season revolves around that concept. We saw in What Are Clear And Soft Colours? that these colours are all closer to grey than in the Clear Colour seasons. Are they dull and drab? No way. They’re just relatively a little grayer. They’re willow, sage, and clover, not grass.
I’m so happy to be doing this season, I get to talk about one of my favorite companies, J.Crew. All the pictures are linked back to their site. Love this bracelet. The bracelet is gold, but there’s not much of it. The colours are of low saturation. This mauve or brown-tinged gray is basically your eye shadow. The weight is heavier but there’s a classic and understated feeling.
These earrings are adorable.
The Pearl Twisted Hammock necklace is stunning.
J.Crew doesn’t do a lot of silver in jewelry or I would have posted it. Also, keep watches in mind for all 5 seasons comprising some Autumn, or jewelry that DOES something. Autumn’s song is the “search for the truth and get the job done”. Functional pieces represent the efficiency they exude.
You’ll find more of these pieces. Look for classic with a kick, the summary of the Soft Summer person.
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