The yellowing effect of ivory on Summer skin…

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

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

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

Have your Colour Analyst send 3 e-mails.

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

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

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

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

Are you getting warm? I am.

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

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

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

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

I was trying to be animated, you see…

I realize that I’ve been referring to “undertones”, as in the Eyeglass Frames videos too randomly. I said that the dusty plum of the Soft Summer frames was essentially the undertone of that skin.

Traditionally, undertones are thought to be either cool, neutral, or warm, not coloured.

Overtones are the outside colour of the skin, like the names of foundation, porcelain, bisque, buff, natural, warm beige, etc. Light/medium/deep also refers to overtones. The overtone must be in the top epidermal layer, presumably the relative melanin/hemoglobin/carotene amounts.

You can get any combination of undertone and overtone. So warm undertone + ivory overtone, or cool undertone + ebony overtone, etc. Porcelain and ebony overtones can share the same cool undertone.

Worth noting too is that you can have a false overtone. The red flush in the skin of women with too-yellow hair, or the yellow overtone in the cool dark Seasons when they wear too-warm colour, these are just effects created by bad colour.

Where is the undertone and what exactly is this colour that we are calling cool-neutral-warm? I mean, cool what? Cool grey? Cool blue? A cool colour that varies by Season, but is of the cool classification?

I looked for input from respected sources.

1. Bernice Kentner of Color Me A Season, always ahead of her time, describes undertone as a real colour, a combination of 4 variables. From her book, The Magnificent Eye, she describes undertone as the result of an equation made up of 4 variables:

. the thickness of the skin which varies by Season and determines which colours show through

. the yellow-brown colour of all skin, beneath the top layer

. the meshwork of oxygenated (red) and non-oxygenated (blue) blood vessels beneath the skin

. the velocity of blood flow in those vessels; so Autumn’s faster blood flow shows more red of arterial blood

I don’t know about the blood flow velocity. I would think that ultrasound would have detected those differences among people. If she means how fast the capillary beds are cleared, well, I don’t know.

I absolutely agree with her that Seasonal Colour Analysis is not about overtones. If it were, women who wear the same foundation would be of the same Season.  If it were, yellow skin would wear warm foundation, but it often does not (or should not).

2. Lauren Battistini at Color My Closet makes the fundamentally important point in this post,  that undertone refers to how skin reacts to color. If your skin is most perfected by cool colours, then your skin’s undertone is cool. Not certain if I can extrapolate Lauren’s words this far, but maybe this means that undertone is not a real colour at all, and isn’t located anywhere in the skin’s biological layers. It is a reactionary term.

Personal Colour Analysis is about identifying the precise degree of darkness, warmth, and saturation in the colours of your body, and so in the colours that perfect your skin when you wear them. It has nothing to do with overtone really. We’re looking for the skin’s reactions, or undertones.

In the Comments, Lauren says that each Season has a “core color”, using the example that Autumn is orange. Each Season does have a signature or core colour (Winter=red, Summer=blue, Spring=yellow), but that is not quite the same concept as skin colour, though there’s some overlap.

3. Imogen Lamport at Inside Out Style Blog writes an excellent blog with practical real-world advice. In this post on skin tone and makeup, a client writes in with a question. Imogen offers several examples from her experience as a colour analyst.

If I understand this right,

Now you may be more obvious and have a warm yellow or goldish undertone and overtone and therefore warm colouring, or you may have a pinkish undertone and overtone and be cool.

…means the pure Seasons are those where overtone and undertone accord. She cites examples where the two may conflict – but I’m still confused.

4. Beauty School Blog is written by makeup artist, Jen. I find it a fresh take on makeup blogs, with good lessons, a genuine voice, and a wider spectrum of topics. I found this article very thorough. But I’m still confused. If the undertone is a real colour, then which colour is it exactly, and where is it?

5. The colours of melanin. This, at Dead Dog Cafe, doesn’t fully attack the topic but does implicate different forms of melanin.

Pheomelanin, yellow to red-brown (ie: orange) : small quantity  + blue vessels > green or sallow of some cool Seasons.

”                                  ”                         ”                  : large intensity + blue vessels > warm gold of Autumns and Springs

Eumelanin is the black/brown pigment of non-Europeans.

6. The 12B concept of undertones. The pictures posted along this article show how undertones appear in my head. There is no scientific testing here, only what I see when I look at this skin. (Dark Autumn could be redder. Bright Winter could be lighter and yellower. Light Summer, I couldn’t decide. Close enough to make the point.)

What use is it?

Foundation is matched to undertone (cool/neutral/warm) AND overtone (ivory to ebony). These images don’t help with that.

But these are your fundamental lip and blush colours. These are your from-within, most intrinsic colours. Using them for eyeglass frames, ties, scarves, and accessories looks good, though the viewer would never know why.

Am I way off? Have I over-simplified or over-complicated?

I’d surely love to hear your opinions. This feels like a linchpin in my understanding of skin and colour. It’s really just a theoretical point, but I think about it.

There is nothing demanding a reaction , nothing saying “HEY!! Look at ME ME ME!”.

You met Joce in Jocelyn Is A Bright Winter. You saw her with more makeup than she normally wears and her hair pulled back.

How does knowing that she is a Bright Winter, from her Colour Analysis, guide us in choosing hair colour?

1. No red if it’s not natural in your hair. It is terribly hard to get a real looking red from a bottle. This applies to every Season, except perhaps some Autumns where copper and auburn can be more forgiving. Shimmer, NEVER stripes.
2. No heat from orange, copper, chestnut, mahogany, rust, or auburn. Those colours made her skin muddy, so why would we put them in her hat?
3. Respect the natural colour. I would describe it as medium brown. Medium dark, medium warm. A colorist’s dream.
4. Be very, very careful messing with the natural colour. Winter has this clear skin possibility that is unequalled in its force, but yellow smashes it to smithereens.
5. This Season means that Winter is blended with a trace of Spring. If you look at the personal colour palette for the Season, there is a hint of yellow sunshine. You might not even notice it unless you were holding True Winter’s purely cool palette next to it. So don’t go putting buttercup chunks in here. We are still working predominantly in Winter’s dark realm. This feels like when the days get longer at the end of February. It is still a dark, cold, frozen time, but the sun is starting to hold a degree more warmth. Like the world feels right now, in fact.

It is a testament to Joce’s colorist that she pulled off this colour. I have never, even in a magazine, seen such a correct transformation back to natural hair colour. The half-blonde is gone. The natural colour will grow back invisibly. I still stare at it everyday. Nobody could have achieved a more flattering shade.

When it is right, hair colour can absolutely clear and perfect skin tone,  just like the right drapes can.

Below are Jocelyn’s Before and After hair colour pictures. You can see how the yellow in the hair clouds the face with yellow and dulls the overall sharpness of the effect. Even the lips and whites of the eyes are too yellow. The gorgeous girl is drowned out by that yellow hair that far too many women have. The hair colour is fine in itself, but what’s the point if it’s not pretty on you? There are way more NON-blondes out there than the number of women forcing this hair colour.

Jocelyn’s hair color correction is so beautiful that it’s hard to stop looking. It harmonizes effortlessly with who she is. This is Jocelyn every day, no makeup. Fresh, young, natural, unbelievably right. Power in the best way, the subliminal way.

I’m sure that if we asked her, Joce would tell us that she feels so much more relaxed and sure of herself, finally communicating precisely what it feels like to be Jocelyn.

• that the drapes be precisely coloured to proceed through each level of the 3 properties of colour, namely Light>>Dark, Warm>>Cool, and Clear>>Soft
• that the drapes be used in a logical order so the results can be evaluated accurately

It is a bonus if:

• the system checks itself, so you don’t wander down the wrong road
• the system allows you to find several ways of solving a question, should you arrive at an impasse.

The Sci\ART system provides all 4 elements of a methodical approach to Personal Colour Analysis. There are 12 Seasons, which allows for the subtle variations in colour levels without providing more choice than an eye could really distinguish.

PCA systems with more than 12 Seasons are probably distinguishing the Seasons based on how colours are combined, rather than the colours themselves. That is perfectly  valid. Seasonal Colour Analysis is not just about your skin perfecting colours. It is very much about how the colours are worn to best harmonize with the energy of the person wearing them.

The video below is at YouTube, at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis The Draping Process, if the embedded video below doesn’t work.

1. I have never seen her in a colour that she doesn’t completely dominate, with the exception of dark charcoal.
2. Black (and cool colours in general) clear her skin.
3. She can wear light colours as well as dark.
4. There is great contrast (very light lights and very dark darks) in her colouring.

I try like h.ll to let the drapes guide the Personal Colour Analysis (PCA), and avoid all foregone conclusions. When I see someone every day, and the effects are this dramatic, I can’t help but have suspicions. What did I suspect?

1. Her best colours would be very dark and/or very saturated. (see What Are Clear And Soft Colours? for an explanation of saturation.)
2. There is great potential for clarity in her skin. Warm colours make her skin blotchy, heavy, green-yellow, murky, and thick-looking. Softly greyed colours (pastels) give the skin an allover-grey undertone. It’s Winter and Spring that have the clear colours.
3. Dark Autumn and Dark Winter have some light colours, but not many. They just look better in darker colours. Joce looks fresh and beautiful in the right light colour.
4. We’re probably looking for a Season of contrast, namely a Winter of some sort.

The expression “clears the skin” is confusing. It’s very hard to demonstrate but extremely important in interpreting ultimate skin perfection. You met Joce in  the previous article, Clearing Skin With Colour Analysis and can watch this process on video there.

Joce has a strong natural flush in her cheeks. Isn’t “ruddy” a sign of Autumn? I’ve seen in Autumns, Winters, Springs, and Summers. Not useful information. Ignore it. On Joce, the redness in the cheeks blends back softly into her complexion only in Bright Winter’s colour intensity.

The boobytrap of matching brown eyes to brown (Autumn) drapes is waiting in ambush here. Yes, there was a connection between the two. Skin always takes precedence, and Autumn colours are easily Joce’s worst shades. All too easy to put brown eyeshadow on these eyes. Most shades of brown did not help this skin. Why then paint them on her face? True to her personal colour palette, her cosmetic colour was a blackened brown liner, and it meshed perfectly with her face. On a blue-eyed person, we would have used charcoal or deep sapphire.

She doesn’t have dark hair or the cliché “clear eyes”. Her hair is medium brown, but there are no orange tones in it, and very few yellow (she’s growing out some yellow dye at the moment).  Have you ever in your life seen eyes like this? I promise you I did not adjust anything in this image other than to raise the exposure and sharpness 2 notches. And this is without mascara!!

As a Bright Winter, Jocelyn is primarily a Winter person, but she has a trace of Spring. When you combine the 2 Seasons of highest colour saturation, the energy of these colours in unwearable by anyone else. They will disappear inside such colour intensity, and therefore appear reduced. Never let your clothing send a message that diminishes you – or at least, don’t put down money for it!

This video shows the final draping process.

If your browser won’t play it here, watch it on YouTube at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis Bright Winter Final Drapes.

I’ve been asked why she’s wearing so much makeup in the video. For several reasons:

1. I was taking photos as well as video and have learned that too little makeup is invisible in photos.
2. I don’t try hard to match foundation, others can do that better than I – though you WILL finally know what your undertones are, unknowable without a PCA. I want you to see what your makeup colours look like, as your eye starts to learn this. I apply the makeup colours pretty heavily and I don’t blend. I want you to see how forgiving right makeup is and how it can dramatically heighten the magic in your natural colouring.
3. Bright Winter is a Season of all-out glamour, like no other group. Just as they can carry unbelievably shocking colour intensity, so can they wear striking makeup.

Most importantly, I want you to stretch your preconceived limits of what is possible. I want you to start replacing the old pictures of yourself in your head.

We watch for this effect across all the Seasons. Just like all the optical effects during the draping sequence, it is more obvious in some people. In many situations, we’re looking at a person of cool coloring, and watching for some kind of sallowness to clear away the instant the warm drapes are switched to cool.

The sallow effect may look orange, green-beige, yellow, blotchy and uneven, thick and opaque, muddy, or variations of those.

When the drape changes, it looks as though a yellow filter is suddenly made transparent. The evenly coloured milky calm returns to the skin tone.

Watch Jocelyn in this video.

If your browser won’t play it, watch it on YouTube  at 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analysis Clearing The Skin.

Jocelyn is a Bright Winter. As the Analysis proceeded, we knew she would not be an Autumn because of the yellow overtone in the skin that drained away in the cooler yellow drape. Her ultimate skin perfection is nowhere in Autumn colours.

Take care with these interpretations. Clearing the skin is always a positive thing, but it may happen that when the yellow clears away, what replaces it appears clearer because the yellow is gone, but it’s not necessarily better. In Joce’s case, her skin becomes evenly grayed in the Summer drapes, making the skin look ashy. Because it’s a pale grey, about the colour of her hat and my coat, it can be deceiving. You think ‘the skin is evenly coloured, so that’s good, right?’.  In some people, that greyness makes them look truly corpse-like, it’s that strong.

It’s not good but it’s different. The photos below show Joce in the Autumn very yellow drape again, with the blotchy yellow skin, pronounced shadows under the eyes, and cheeks that are too pink.

One could say that the brown eyes come out in the yellow drape. Going down that road would lead you wrong. The skin comes first. The eyes and NATURAL hair colour will automatically be PERFECT.  On EVERYONE. The Light and Soft Seasons can do things to make the hair more interesting, but the base colour is automatically the right one for you and what YOU are supposed to look like.  The other Seasons usually have their right colour and nothing from a bottle can improve on it. Without Kate Hudson’s skin tone, you can’t believably pull off her hair.

The black drape creates an evenly coloured skin. It looks calm. It FEELS calm. The shadows are gone. Most of us are wearing too much concealer and foundation to fight the effects of bad clothes and hair colour. Yes, you’re right, Joce is 20-something and blessed with remarkable skin. Even what she wears makes a difference.

The black tones in her eyes snap. Here eyes no longer bloodshot and red-rimmed. You’ll see Joce again in an upcoming post. The eyes on this girl have to be seen to be believed.

Well, in Seasonal Colour Analysis, there’s Soft, True, and Dark.

But Autumn’s blends include Soft Summer and Dark Winter too.

Only 1 True Season, and 4 Neutral Seasons all comprise some Autumn colour influence.

Autumn’s biggest misconception is the copper red hair. Usually, these people have brown hair.

The Autumn=copper association is often extended to include clothing colours, skin undertones, and makeup colours.

In fact, the shade of brown used to warm Autumn colours doesn’t attain copper’s heat till you’re way into the middle of the Autumn action.

Let’s start at True Summer. No orange. No gold. No yellow.  The brown is grey and the grey is blueish.

As Autumn starts phasing in, we move to Soft Summer. A little brown is being added. A neutral brown, not orange yet, not even amber. The blue undertone is taken out. The colours appear to have a faint tan.

Soft Autumn comes along next. We see a soft amber brown. Yellows re-emerge, where True Summer barely had any, and they are golden as an amber-brown patina lays over all the colours of this palette.  This is the beginning of the metallic quality we talk about in the skin and hair of Autumn people. It’s hard to describe. It doesn’t look like a tan, it’s much more in the skin than on it.

Finally, True Autumn. NOW the undercurrent is truly orange. Not before. Brown, remember, is just dark orange. This is an orangey brown. It is in the skin. It is also in the eye colour.

Up to Dark Autumn, a trace of Winter is felt. Winter’s colours are cooler and bring in red, the essential colour of the Winter group. The result is the red-orange undertone that defines the perfect disappearing blush and lipstick on Dark Autumn. Colour Analysis is all about cosmetic colours custom-coloured for your skin.

Since Winter is dark, we must add another Winter effect for Dark Winter : the addition of perceptible black. What orange remains is turning neutral brown again, like it was in Soft Summer, but a darker version caused by the black.

Now, we leave Autumn altogether and it’s True Winter. Orange is gone again.

Watch me do it.

Be careful.

Soft Summer’s hair is almost always too light and too highlighted with a colour that’s too yellow. At first glance, they seem like light people and it looks ok. The Colour Analysis drapes soon show us how aging the light hair is for the skin tone. Once it’s corrected, it is much better.

A Soft Autumn can too easily be put in too red hair. It is overkill every time. Unless Nature gave you red, it is VERY hard to get right from a bottle. Like thinking a bottle can replicate your childhood colour. Won’t happen. This is light tawny hair.

True Autumn in light tawny hair looks F-L-A-T. And instantly 10 years older. They need warmth and rich colour. They do not need highlights, lowlights, or other bizarre f/x. The colour should speak for itself.

Dark Autumn often adds a red rinse. You NEED to know if you’re on the warm or cool side of the Season. If the red is too cool, like red wine, it can be very artificial. Artificial works on the staff of the hair salon, not the clients.

Dark Winter should do what all Winters do. Think twice before lightening hair. They can have a dark force that is to be reckoned with. Breaking it up with  frosted tips, well… I’d rather have the force. The skin-perfecting hair colour is a dark neutral brown, most of the time.

What’s the hair lesson? Nature will never give you hair colour that is your skin’s perfection. They accord automatically. Your natural colour is always your best base colour.

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.

Women and men have told me that they buy clothing colour by feel. Both have asked me to remove a drape because they felt sick, one to the point of becoming faint.

Are they exaggerating? Too theatrical?

NO! It’s VERY real. Everybody senses colour, more than we see it. We may not all feel it to the degree of physical revulsion, but we all experience a mild discomfort in the presence of wrong colours. We don’t take the colour choices in our homes lightly for that reason.

Since most people go around in wrong colour, we’ve grown used to seeing it and compensating for the feeling. But why does it happen?

The short answer is “sensory mismatch”.  It means that 2 of your senses are receiving information that your brain feels cannot make sense together. The result is nausea.

Motion sickness in a car means your eyes are seeing “movement” but your brain is getting information from your ear’s balance system and your limbs saying “not movement”. The 2 don’t jive. The brain decides you’ve been poisoned and you’re hallucinating, so it expels the toxin by vomiting. At least, it’s believed to have evolved that way.

To explain it with colours, we go back to the most fundamental principle of how Personal Colour Analysis (PCA) achieves skin perfection and ideal appearance.

Every colour, in you and outside you, answers to 3 characteristics only. How Light/Dark, how Warm/Cool, how Clear/Soft (ask me in a Comment if I can clarify those concepts). Every single shade in you, every single blue and red and purple in you, fits in EXACTLY the same place on those 3 scales. Fascinating in itself, I ponder this often.

PCA finds you a group of colours that also fit in EXACTLY the same positions on those 3 scales. Your Colour Analysis swatch book is simply an exploded diagram of your own precise colours. It’s far, far too complex to do this without a true 12 Season Colour Analysis, for clothes colours or makeup. Then, when you WEAR precisely the same colours that you already ARE, the colour energies are in absolute synchrony and it is strong.

With wrong colours, the sensory mismatch isn’t between your eyes and ears. It’s between your eyes and subconscious colour associations. Your eyes are seeing one set of colour wavelengths emanating from the body’s natural colours. There’s a whole other set of waves coming off the clothes. The signals are all jammed. It feels tiring to look at, and for some, nauseating.

Most people dress in such a skelter of colour that there is no signal at all. They don’t look ON. All the wrong colours together neutralize what colour potential exists.

Is my theory scientific fact? I don’t know. I didn’t read it anywhere. It just makes sense to me.

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.