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The Best Skin Finish on Autumn Colouring

Autumn light is long, low, and less, like in the late afternoon. The effect is to emphasize shape and depth, which looks rich and warm. The feeling is safe, cozy, secure, all the reasons why we don't put fluorescent overhead lights in our homes.

On a face, shape and depth take on a pronounced three-dimensionality - hills and valleys. Up close, it looks an uneven surface, a grainy quality - lines, freckles, fullness in hair, thicker looking skin, a feeling of plush and pile. From a distance, this varied natural landscape depicted in such rich, low intensity tones has great resonance.

We're going to use the quality of light and shiny colour to advance and matte and darker colour to recede. This will generate movement backwards and forwards to feel like depth and texture. We don't want the face to look grainy, we'll leave that to fabric, but we do want the appearance of profound strength. It looks deep, synonymous with complex, wise, and penetrating. I think our brains are much more plastic with synonyms than we know and worth unleashing. It's amazing what floats up in the soup.

We know that wearing many layers, along with looking warm and creative on Autumn, looks 3D.

Repeating patterns are successful for reasons based in basic biology and optics. Examples are geometric (plaid), natural (leaves, paisley), or brushstrokes (Impressionist painting style). With two incoming images, one for each eye, the brain has to decided which goes with L and R. When the images are multiple and repeating, some get switched, causing us to see (or think we see) depth.

The 3 Autumns

Soft, the sunny side of Autumn

[caption id="attachment_2170" align="aligncenter" width="300"]sunny autumn field Photo: ColinBroug[/caption]

True, the colours as they are

[caption id="attachment_2171" align="aligncenter" width="300"]orange autumn forest Photo: boogy_man[/caption]

and Dark, Autumn in the shade, and  interesting how much temperature changes with light, darks are darker below and you're looking for a sweater.

[caption id="attachment_2173" align="aligncenter" width="300"]dark autumn woods Photo: johnnyberg[/caption]

 

How do these types of natural colours amplify the many gifts they were given?

Autumn is seldom smooth to look at. This is not a My Little Pony world. Spring's wide-eyed-wonder is not the rhythm of this drum. Autumn is rope, not ribbon. Autumn is not dewy or creamy or anything that reminds us of smooth. Dewy spices, dewy chocolate, dewy rust, they don't make sense. Expressed in Autumn's colours, dewy somehow feels slimy. Dewy curry. I mean, I ask you.

Autumn is hot, dry, velvety thick, and metallic. You could say a rose petal is velvety, yes, but it's not dry or thick. Worth taking a minute to think about the difference between shine, frost, and metallic. To me, shine is smooth and wet and belongs on Spring. The difference between frost and metallic may be semantic or may be about the colour they're rendered in, where frost is cold and icy colour, meaning Winter, while metallic is hotter and medium to dark, as copper, gold, bronze, and their variations, belonging to Autumn.

So wear bronzer!  Spring's is beige based peach-gold. Autumn's is baked earth, dark tan, a more orange-brown type of gold and a darker colour. I like Rimmel SunBronze 02 as a good colour that's not very shimmery.

Autumn is about low lighting. On a face, that means contour! Take the 3D in you and make it more by emphasizing the hills and valleys. Shadows go dark in Autumn fabrics, so should they on the faces.

You can use bronzer or a slightly darker powder than your perfect match. It's interesting that you can go quite a bit darker than you think and create bold shadow emphasis and once blended, it still looks normal. Apply it at the temples, sides of nose, hollow of cheeks, under chin.

A dot of shine here and there over velvet matte layers using deep, rich colours brings more dimensionality. Keep the face suede, which makes sense. Add deliberate shine over the iris. Dimension is created better by deliberate placement of metallic over matte products, rather than large and evenly shiny surfaces. When the canvas is  velvet, coppered, tawny, metallic hints, are hot hot.

Use matte eye shadow to look like velvet. Wear a dot of shiny antique gold above the iris. A coppery, spicy lip gloss would be fabulous and gorgeous in the same face.

Do not cover up freckles ever. They're splendid at every age. Believable beauty is always better. They look textured and young.

The Skin Textures

We did Springs previously. That went as:

Bright Spring = glass

True Spring = persimmon

Light Spring = petal

 

So the Autumns could be:

Soft Autumn = suede

True Autumn = velvet

Dark Autumn = leather

 

3 Autumn Seasons 

True Autumn:

Wear bronzer. You might as well, the skin is that way already. The True Warms look great with bronzer applied as we have heard, 'where the sun lights the face'. On the Autumn Warm Neutrals (Soft and Dark Autumn), a little restraint may be better.

Wear jewelry near the face, both in warm golden metals and deeply coloured stones.

Autumn bone structure is magnificent and strong. Wear rich russet tones in blush and lips.

 

Soft Autumn:

We've shifted from the more delicate muted Summers to Autumn's stronger muted colours and texture, to skin like suede. Colour is gently earthy, retaining some of Summer's grace.

Eyeliners that you thought would be good often go on looking too dark and/or too hot (orange or red). At Shoppers in Canada, Essence liner in Teddy costs a dollar. Using eyeshadow as liner is wonderful on the Soft Seasons to avoid harsh lines, enhance the low contrast effect further, give you so much more choice of colours, and let you enjoy some of your darker tones in cosmetics.

Dark Autumn:

If Soft Autumn is Indiana Jones, then this is the Marlboro Guy. It's a stronger, heavier, thicker look. Stronger and more defined eye liner works, though still can be very smoked.

Use more drama in contrast (Winter coming in) with eye shadow as a darker outer corner, defined brows, and a mouth that stands out from the face. Flesh tones in lips work better on Autumn than any other and for the Dark Autumn, colours are deeper than the True or Soft Autumn flesh tones. They are darker, redder, maybe a little burnt looking by comparison. (I appreciate that in our ideal makeup colours, we're all wearing flesh tones but I mean it here as the browned colours.)

Ideal hair colour for the 3 Autumns is the eye colour or somewhere among the eye colours, an effect very few other Seasons accomplish so interestingly. Gingerbread brown eyes are truly visually compelling. These are the warm dark browns from chestnut to coffee bean.

 

Recap: Autumn looks great in contouring, setting up lowlights. The features are defined from the skin by colours that are warm and velvety and the judicious use of metallic glints.

Spring colours look right when the reflectivity is dewy, setting up highlights. The features are fresh, lively, distinguished from the skin by being very colourful, moist, and vibrant.

 

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