Lockets come in so many styles for one type of jewelry. They are at once classic, Victorian, and vintage. Styles vary from very time-honored simplicity to jewel-encrusted modern. They emanate a sense of ancestry that feels grounding, well-bred, and perfectly belonging to this time of year of tradition and family.

At Heartsmith, I found a wealth of styles and a poverty in my ability to choose just one style for each Season, which I failed to do in many cases, as you’ll see. The name of each design and the photo are linked back to the product page.

A sincere thanks to Heartsmith for allowing me to reproduce the photographs.

Let’s look at some very beautiful jewelry.

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SPRING

Heart shapes are in keeping with Spring. They are young, romantic, pointed, and delicate. The adjectives romantic and delicate are often given to Summer, but they are appropriate here too. Spring’s romance is more magical than Summer’s Bosoms&Roses style (as a young friend of mine once described her True Summer Mom’s reading taste). Spring is delicate as youth and fairy wings.

True Spring

Mrs. Potter 3/4 Gold Locket&Diamond.

Because True Spring is the sun.

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Spring is airy, floaty, skyward-directed like growing new plants reaching for the sun’s light. Many members of all 3 Spring groups have small features and a petite aspect to their features. A small, floating heart is so pretty, for any Spring or its blends.

The Alia Floating Heart Pendant.

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Light Spring

Juliet Gold Heart Locket has a brushed center to integrate the Summer element, but the flower petals could be the wings of butterflies. For the Light Spring who resembles a Summer, this style is also available in a white gold.

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Bright Spring

For me, this Season is crisp but delicate, like frozen lace. They are the frost on the window, the ice that coats evergreens and bare branches after an ice storm, the pattern in the thin ice over a puddle when you step on it. In the Season that blends Spring’s sparkle and Winter’s polish, metal must shine.

The Destiny Lace Set Diamond Locket.

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Audrey is stunning too, larger and less yellow in the metal.

If the Wishing Star pendant comes back into stock, put your name on a list.

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SUMMER

True Summer

True Winter is minimal in its ornamention. Pieces are important but they don’t move. I see True Summer as more detailed and decorated. The circle is Summer’s essential shape. The metal is brushed.

Elizabeth Sterling Silver Victorian Locket expresses the gentle strength of this group. Summer is highly capable without needing to control everything around it (like another Season we know).

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Holy Spirit Locket

I loved this one too. I like it when I have to think about it a bit. This design felt a bit unexpected, and others may have a different interpretation of the look of a True Summer. Pushing the limits of your own taste is an expression of your creativity, of thought becoming matter.

True Summer is often a reflective, pensive personality. I loved the darkness, because True Summer is so often stuck in lightness, and they are not that light. The weight felt good, because True Summer is not light by weight any more than it is by colour. The swirling ivy lines are perfect. The peaceful message of the dove is highly Summerish, as is the grace and flow of wings in flight.

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Light Summer

Alternating polish and matte silver integrates the Summer muted and Spring shiny elements. The size is small and there’s a minimum of fuss to allow the essential heart shape to take center stage.

Laurie Chasing Hearts bracelet

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Soft Summer

In this Season that is essentially Summer, with a dusting of Autumn, the refined sophistication of Summer becomes more solid, thanks to Autumn’s strength. I love the weight of the chain, the pearl, and the stronger closure. The small blue stone in the heart is perfect. I find this piece gorgeous.

Claudia Locket Bracelet

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AUTUMN

True Autumn

The Brandy Bracelet is fantastic. It is muted in colour and shine, antiqued, of mid-darkness, with good weight.

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Soft Autumn

Autumn’s lights and darks give a sense of depth. We see this in plaid, for instance, where there are advancing and receding elements. Autumn’s strength is expressed here, as we look for more sustenance in this Season (as we do in the foods we eat as the cold approaches). This is muted in colour and metal, not too hot or cold, feminine but substantial.

Chantilly Charm Bracelet

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We’ve been talking about which Season is which element in our Facebook group. The symbolism of the Seasons, and how these are depicted in their human examples, fascinate me. Sometimes, an association gets stuck in my head and I can’t dislodge it. For me, Soft Autumn is the tree. Are they the wood element? Yes, probably, I could make that extension.

This piece is perfect for a Neutral Season, with the gold and silver. Both are muted, as looks best on Soft Seasons. If you wear metal (or makeup, or clothes) that are shinier than you, you just got duller by comparison. The gold is earthy, not light and shiny. Love this piece.

Tree Of Life Pendant

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Dark Autumn

Beautiful, in silver with gold accents. You can see how absolutely lovely this item is in the video on the product page. (With citrine, topaz, or diamond options).

Isabelle Locket Garnet

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WINTER

True Winter

True Winter is controlled and controlling. They are not all over the place. Floppiness is hopeless. They do not move their bodies in a floppy way. Like the royal family, they are contained and ceremonial when they look their best. Pieces are symmetrical and balanced, an exact equilibrium.

Hannah White Gold Oval Locket

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Bright Winter

Yes, the metal is yellow, but Bright Winter is a Neutral Season. They have yellow in the skin, and it is this light, shiny gold. It is well balanced by the darker lower half. The jaw-dropping opulence, especially in a piece of this size, is balanced better by the Bright Winter than any other.

Roxanne Locket

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Safety is nowhere on Bright Winter. It disappears completely. If you are brighter than your jewelry (or makeup, or clothes), they are duller by comparison. This is the ultimate go-big-or-stay-home Season. Glamorous hairstyles, dramatic necklines, they just look better.

April Diamond Locket

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Dark Winter

Lenore Garnet and Pearl Pendant

The contrast of blood and snow is always Winter. The medieval weighted hardware of Autumn. The imperial luxury of Winter. The deep red undertone of Dark winter skin. The darkness in the metal. The overall feeling of cold and hard. Not too shiny, as Autumn mutes textures as well as colours. An amazing piece of jewelry.

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The post Lockets for the 12 Seasons appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

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 (grayed) 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.

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 am 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 would still stay within that Season 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.

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The post Soft Autumn Darkness Adjustments appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Rarely do the people whose natural colouring fits into this Season realize it. When Julie Andrews played Mary Poppins, she portrayed the average of this appearance and character to perfection. Her hair was dark but the overall effect was of light and clarity. Even her speech and manner were clipped and brisk. She was elegant and groomed and made riding the carousel in a sidewalk chalk picture normal and natural, elegance and magic at once. In Mary’s world, imagination and reality were the same and make-believe didn’t exist.

The word Season describes your natural colouring. In the colour world, there are 12. A personal colour analysis tells you which is yours. Why use the word Season, it sounds so dated? Because you are a child of a planet whose landscapes change as it circles (actually, ellipses)the sun on an axis, and we call those changing scenes seasons. The pigments of your skin fit into certain of those landscapes without beginning or end. There is no me, there is no you, there is no line that separates us from our world. I didn’t make that up or believe it from a yoga video. They’re called mirror neurons and they’re quite real. For honouring and celebrating the amazing coolness of being here, Season is a great word.

Your pigmentation causes the same frequency and wavelength of light waves to be reflected from your body (because that’s what colour is) as those reflected from your seasonal landscape. Nature’s wizardry doesn’t end there. The waves that move in that frequency and wavelength can be absorbed by the retina of another being and create electrical energy that becomes biomolecular energy. This generates an image in the brain tissue of that other. Were that other’s eyes closed and you could stimulate those eye neurons in that same way, you’d generate the same image in their brain.

Season is not about how skin looks, it’s about how it reacts. It needs to be given something to react to, like drapes or makeup or clothes. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue. You could argue that human pigmentation can’t possibly be narrowed down to 12 groups. Sure enough, you could have 20 or 30, but at some point, a very powerful way of improving your closet and your bank account would be too weak to work. There would be too many similarities among them to make each unique. The fact is, an eye isn’t able to tell that many similar colours apart.

The pigments that make up a Bright Spring person look a lot like the True Spring colours, meaning they’re clear and pure, warmed by yellow, and fairly light. When those colours get mixed with a bit of Winter’s, they become even more clear, but less warm and less light. With input from 2 True Seasons, Bright Spring is called a Neutral Season. They have warmer and cooler versions of each colour in their skin, hair, and eyes, and so in their colour palette.

Though the Spring presence is biggest, Winter always deals a strong hand. Often, these people resemble Winters, have been told they’re Winters, and dress like Winters. Once their hair turns white, they move over to Summer’s wardrobe and would look better if they’d stuck with Winter.

Landscapes

With the great distance between the parent Seasons of Winter and Spring, the landscapes are as variable as the individuals. The colours speak to me as lush and wild, so the landscape the same, like a jungle. The overwhelming collective life force of Spring and the violence of Winter co-exist. Winter places a cool veneer on the surface but the invisible reality is of life energy gathering force to sustain the frenzy of freedom and bloom that is coming in True Spring. Tension is building, for when this spring uncoils, True Spring will very truly have sprung.

These people have a thousand variations. My picture is pretty hot, or at least building up a lot of charge. AC pictures the melting snow running among the newest flowers. In the comment dated August 23 following The Brown-Eyed Spring article, which is also about Bright Spring, she said

One of the pictures that I have of Bright spring in my mind is of a landscape with frost and the first yellow and purple spring flowers peeping through the snow, the sound of water running under the clear ice, the crisp clear wind, the feeling that it may all freeze over again, but also the knowing that eventually it will be spring. Life will prevail.

She is in fine tune with her colours because she is on the cool side of her Season, so it’s apt that her inner landscape be cooler. Most interesting that the picture she resonates with coincides exactly with her position among the Seasons.You can follow a link to her very beautiful face in the comment mentioned above. Perhaps, her colour story looks like this.

The Persona

Tinsel.

This person sparkles. They have wit, conversation, joy, and humour. Winter gives them formality, organization, and some seriousness with the darkness in their appearance, but it’s not heavy-handed. Spring’s sunshine relaxes them, still with enough cool to give them quickness of movement.

Playful, cold, and clean, it’s all fun and games but there are many reasons for not wanting to get in this water. Winter means risk. Winter element brings an edge, something that isn’t too comfortable. Winter will never make everything too easy for anybody. Like neon, we brace for this colour. In the beginning, you need to roll the dice and have a little faith that you look years younger. Don’t look at the drapes, look at the face when you’re choosing a Season.

These persons look more delicate than they are, like the finest icicles and waterfalls. This is not daintiness, frills, or fragility. Rather, think of the morning after a freezing rainstorm. The branches are coated with a thin layer of ice, looking like frozen feathers. The world looks more tough than soft, but we feel no threat. The sun is getting warmer, we can hear the music of melting ice, and we know the tough part is temporary, almost pretend. In scenery that seems so tight and yet is so easy to snap lies a contradiction that feels excitable and exciting, almost high-strung, to know everything could change in an instant with the right touch.

Light bounces everywhere. We know the thaw is imminent. Just a little more sun, a little more time, already we anticipate the gladness of Winter’s passage, and might even miss its majestic and solitary beauty just a little. While still quiet and cold, the colour information tells you this is not November.

This is a charming and very social person. Spring’s easy smile greets you, more friendly than you really expected. Spring’s love of dialogue appears, less reserved and more joking than you really expected. You’re carried along by an optimistic and open personality, but one who never fully lets themselves go. Winter still has a hand on the wheel and decorum will matter. It crosses your mind to wonder why this dark landscape is so sunny. How can it feel so right to have the sun out at night?

The Clothes

Since who we are not is 90% of the inventory of any store, 97% in Bright Spring’s case, let’s get a sense of what that looks like: earthy, heathery, dusty, misty, hazy, dilute, creamy, undefined, slouchy, rough, rugged, chunky, cozy, faded, subdued, faint.

The person is: spirited, vivacious, happy, charming. They’re the can of ice cold 7Up. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ready for action, curious, and interested in everything. The body carriage is upright and perky, movements are quick and snappy, and none of this goes with the adjectives in the preceding paragraph.

What would it feel like to be standing by those crocuses above or in the jungle at sunrise with your eyes closed? The air is clean and brisk. It’s soft and sharp at once. You smell wet ground and new life. You’d prefer to keep one eye open, having no sense of being snug or sheltered, but it’s still ok. You’re pretty sure nothing’s coming to get you. Birth always brings so much hope and promise that this feels more like a party. Life is so vital right now that it feels a bit unsteady. When you open your eyes, you expect that it will look different than moments ago. How might you do that with apparel?

Bright Spring is :

Funny, quirky, unique, unexpected, bold, bright, artistic, varied. Wear a deep and pure blue-purple shirt with silver writing, whirls, or sparks.

Unconventional. If you do floral, make the flowers blue or green or extreme purple and turquoise (black flowers are a harder take on life, leave them to Winter). If you do tweed, make it pink (tweed being Autumn’s texture, but everyone needs warm clothes; think of a one-of-a-kind Chanel suit).

Bright Spring 1 by christinems featuring leather bags

The problem with plaid is the same as with paisley, it is widely recognized as a workday fabric. It says practical (Autumn), not playful (Spring). The prominent squares say functional (A), not fun (S). Flannel is another less-than-perfect fit. By its texture, it dulls colour and says grounded. Bright Spring might feel useful, sensible, and pragmatic, but others see decorative to ornamental. Crystal is not down-to-earth. The Zen moment is when everything you add to you keeps your compass pointing the same way. Compliments become holistic, about the whole you, because no element sticks out, pointing away from your True North. Pick shiny over muffled in fabric.

Winter looks right when they’re overdressed for the occasion compared to everyone else. BSp carries some of that, though they wear informality better. High end workout clothes are great. Jeans are often (not always) too rough. This person shines. They’d look good in a dress made of tin foil. It’s light, delicate, shiny, and hard till you touch it. Softening effects, like scalloped edges, are less good. Youthful looks work on Bright Spring with care, keeping enough formality to balance the Winter that looks bigger than it is. Polka dots to satisfy Winter’s classic style could be great in a formal and still symmetric design, or it becomes too young.

Spring is young. Modern textile is better. It takes up more dye, not dulling fabric. The same colour is more muted in wool than Lululemmon knit.

I want to direct you to a comment AC added, dated Sept 11, is this woman getting a handle on her colouring, I ask you? After How Winters Intensify Eye Colour. She has realized that her colouring is assembled like a triadic colour scheme, meaning 3 colours equidistant on the colour wheel. Of course it is, the brilliant woman! Triadic colour schemes are brilliant on Springs. Anything based on a triangle is, but take care. Bright Spring isn’t that zingy. That scheme is very invigorating at any darkness level. This natural colouring is more settled. Use the 3 colours but keep one element smaller in proportion.

The palette shines light outward, while Winter palettes always absorb more than they reflect. As light gets hotter and we approach True Spring, the sun will heat up even more. Below, you see Bright Winter on the left, Bright Spring on the right.

Anything too crayon/child’s drawing/cheery/playful is the extreme to avoid. Winter is very grownup, formal, majestic, regal, like kings and queens. Find the balance that still says elegance and excellent taste. You can wear a lot of colour well, but use those grays, small areas of B&W, and some darker colours that feel more serious.

Colours that are too soft, too pastel, too grayed – from a distance, those elements would all flow together, which is Summer’s watercolour look. Bright Spring facial features are very distinct from one another. Outfits look better when they are too, with adjustments for your own personal appearance. Bold elements and intense colour are better. Following The Brown-Eyed Spring article linked above, there is some great discussion for those interested in the use contrast, with links to Imogen Lamport’s excellent explanations (If you don’t know her blog, you should. I find her better than anyone at explaining fashion concepts and their practical, real world, real body, real budget application). I’m sorry, I’m not very helpful, my brain locks up, but grateful that Fil, Imogen, and others can help.

Most of you easily have the darkness to wear black. When it’s solid, it looks too heavy and dark. When it’s lightened up, it looks more delicate and crystalline, and if ever a word described you, that would be it. This Pointelle Cashmere Cardigan is great. Every Spring should take advantage of transparency, in clothes, makeup, jewelry, hair laminates, wherever. Wear a bright shell underneath, not black or white or neutral, all of which are too serious and not invigorating enough. As much as crystalline is real and right on you, the other big word for me is glaze. So thin it could crack, transparent sugar.

Bright Spring Makeup

Winter’s red influence is far-reaching. Logic might tell you that this person will wear their warmer bright melon well in blush and lipstick because the Spring element is dominant in their colouring. To my eye, the pinks look better. They can be warmer and cooler but they feel more right than orange variations.

Every Season has their extremes, True Spring tambourine jingling hippie, Soft Autumn Earth Mother, Bright Spring harlequin, bells on the hat and all. The makeup takes some courage here, at least the lip colour. Start with sheer since transparency works. Hair can be very dark but the skin usually is light and bright and needs that in makeup. Lauder is one of my favorites for clear colour in lip products. Wild Rose, Lush Rose, Rich and Rosy, gloss in Fresh Berry and Wild Coral.

Mixing MAC Dollymix and Fleur Power is good. Shiseido RD 401 is a nice blush. Smashbox Radiance is too.

Eyeshadow is harder than anything to find, especially if you prefer matte textures or have mature skin and wear them better. Nothing here you’d call brown. The greys in the beads in the choker and in the diamond shaped earrings below are examples of good colours. The colour is mostly grey and neither earthy (which is usually an orange grey or brown, like a saddle, or a green grey or brown, like army), nor Winter’s hard, dark, cold knife grey.

Examples? Help me out here if you know of any. Become the artist and mix your pigments. Use Clarins Vanilla Beige or MAC Chamomile under the brow, and then again to lighten and yellow MAC Print a little, turn it into that cleanest yellowed taupe. MAC Mystery was suggested, a really good clean brown. Make your life easy, and mine so I don’t have to scour the makeup counters in search of something hard to find on a good day, and buy Mediatrix, Conversationalist, and Upbeat from eleablake. I’d have to buy Daisies and Diamonds too, to make colours I already own right and to bring out the yellow in these eyes. (and check out Dishy blush while you’re there).

Bright Spring Accessories

Do not have a brown or black purse. Connected to a person so sparkly, it looks like luggage. Ditto the generic brown or black shoe, suitcases on feet. Black is fine if it’s not chunky and usual.

Choose patent leather over suede.

Wear fun and colourful exercise type shoes (and clothes).

Wear coloured coats and shoes, ballet flats in fun patterns, sparkly accents, gold or silver threads woven into scarves.

One part of shopping is crazyeasy for Brights : jewelry. Wear lots of it. It looks good. You sparkle and so does it. Not matched? No problem. From Harry Winston to costume jewelry. Fancy, cheap, pretty, silly, all fine if it reminds you of the thinnest layer of crackling glass.

Look for delicate, not heavy and complicated, not 10 interwoven strands of pearls and chains. I looked for purity of colour, for colour a person would notice within 2 seconds of shaking your hand, for movement, jingle, like bells on a velvet rope, like crystals suspended in mid-air. When I think of Winter, I keep coming back to dry. Spring, I get sugary, so I looked for a little sweetness in the frost.

I like hearts. Above, they’re little twinkles. Bright Winter is big glitter, harder words for a colder Season. This is frost, not ice. Swarovski is all you really need.

Learning and becoming your Season is like hearing a language you grew up with. I had a Russian grandmother. Understood it fine till I was 10 and we moved from Montreal. Now, I get the odd word, but there’s still roots in that soil. At first, it will feel very foreign, very “I have no idea what this colour language is saying to me.” Look inward for truth and you’d admit it plucked a string. Something felt a ping. From there, you keep moving towards it. Because you already are it, you’ll move fast. You’ll find a place waiting for you that will enfold you, while another person would always stay the square peg. You can choose to stand still, but life is much more fun if you keep moving towards the heat.

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The post The Consistent Bright Spring Landscape appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

In 12 Season personal colour analysis, there are 4 main Seasons, or True Seasons, named after the 4 natural seasons. True Autumn is the homeland for the most flattering colours of the person whose natural pigmentation is made of colours that are:

– absolutely warm; even the colours we think of as cool have been warmed by comparison to their appearance in the cooler Seasons; like True Summer, True Autumn is more saturated than people think. Most folks’ ideas of True Autumn and True Summer live in the Soft Autumn and Soft Summer palettes.

– muted, but not nearly as much as the Soft Autumn; yes, True Autumn’s salsa and curry are muted compared to True Spring’s fruit punch and citrus, but we don’t think of them as grey ; we do think of Soft Autumn’s cactus as greyed; True Aututmn’s entire palette viewed at once looks like a hot glow, well beyond rosy blush; to emanate that kind of heat, we are moving away from pink and into red

– medium to dark in value; most colours are medium, few are very light, and none darken all the way to black ; the overall look needs some darkness to give the feeling of richness and depth, too much lightness looking too powdery

This series of landscape articles (True Summer, Soft Autumn, True and Bright Winter, and Bright Spring have been posted) serves as an opportunity to see ourselves with objectivity. Unless we transfer colour and clothing decision outside of ourselves, objectivity is too far to far reach for most of us, certainly for me. We are far too invested in our complexities to have any idea how we look to others.

The world is full of odd psychology, a common one being to inadvertently reward ourselves, our kids, our pets, for the very behaviour we’d like to be rid of. We want to look like our friends or like celebrities, but what if we’re imitating them and not really loving how they look? Buy a magazine aimed at your demographic and mark the pages of the women you would love to look like. How many have complicated hair? sparkly eyeliner? sparkly purple eyeliner? frosty pale lips? Is their hair and makeup like yours?

It’s also interesting that in trying to look like our friends, we end up looking less like them and more like us. All those blonde highlights out there accentuate the differences between us rather than making us more similar, which only works in your favour if yellow in hair is flattering to your skin. If you put a room full of women in the same red dress and really looked at the women and not the dress, the differences between them, meaning who looks good in that red and who doesn’t, become easy to see. What looks good on our friends doesn’t help us know what enhances us.

Finding people of similar colouring to ours to try clothes, makeup, or hair on can be very useful if that person can be found but there’s such variation of appearance among members of the same Season that our counterparts are not always available. Or, the celebrities look like the average for the Season and we don’t. Still, some retain enough of themselves to have good real world comparison value.

Keri Russell could be a True Autumn.

So could Susan Sarandon. You can see that their overall colour effect feels toasty, medium on a darkness scale, and glowy. Their natural coppery heat just looks better surrounded by warm, muted, medium dark colour. Scan their Images and decide how dark their best hair is to flatter the face. It’s fairly dark. Many True Autumns wear their hair too light (Kathie Lee Gifford) and the glow be long gone. Red hair is by no means a necessity but these women are very seldom beautiful as blondes or in ash hair tones.

We belong to our planet home at such an organic, elemental level. We each hold wondrous beauty and the divine unknown within us. We each represent a painting of a scene that we know, love, and trust, but we can’t always see the resemblance with ourselves. Like music, colour is a language that tells us information about the world we live in. Like technology or medicine, the value of the language is so much broader when we can use it to live better, happier, freer, stronger, and more connected to the people that matter to us. Oh, and live cheaper, let’s not forget that.

What’s the world feel like for the very timely True Autumn Season? In Canada now, we are given these:

Melinda feels it this way, from this photo:

I love the traditional pictures of fall leaves and sun shining softly through a canopy of colors, but for some reason these pictures just stir up something else in me that I feel so connected to.The first set of pictures, the rocks and bronze river, reach into some deep emotions for me. Warmth, intensity, passion, strength, and solidarity all come to mind. Such a range of emotions that are rooted deep in my soul.

The pictures below speak to my surface, if that makes sense. The bright vibrant trees and the gentle softness of the sun echoes an almost tangible warmth, comfort, coziness, and welcome that you just want to walk into. The leaves add a crispness that just makes you feel like dancing. Joy lives there and you can feel it.

What they all have in common:

– warmth: well, yes, we know this, but replace the word with passionate heat for this article; if your mind says greyed before it says richly glowingly warm, hand the item over to Soft Autumn.

– darkness: it’s getting darker; daylight hours are shorter; in the overall effect of an outfit, there’s still enough light to read by.

– dryness: cooler air holds less water; the grass is browner, the harvest is dry enough to bring in ; not very shiny or reflective, no sparkles.

– dustiness: the Earth is busy and dry.

– productivity, we know there’s cold on the way and we need to get our house in order, but the sun can still warm our back and make colours and faces glow.

– a sense of depth, which you’ll recreate with layers, darkness levels, and patterns

– the overriding presence of brown in every colour we see; a petunia would stick out like orange pop at a coffee shop ; Autumn is Spring, oxidized, the wine and the nectar, not the fresh-squeezed juice.

– there are no cool blued colours; the reds are not direct red, but indirectly lit as rust, muted red-orange, and browned reds; even the light seems indirect, as though it’s coming from lower down in the sky, which of course, it is.

– texture: Melinda loves several photos that are stone based and I see True Autumn that way too; the glint of metal is not here yet, not till Dark Autumn arrives, which is still not very flashy, but it’s ramping up, and ramping up more in the Dark Winter, the least flashy of the Winters, and then more as it gets colder; True Autumn can work in small metallic elements well because they look metallic but too much is too hard on a person who really isn’t.

True Autumn Clothes

– never met one who likes clingy fabric, possibly related to age

– that blue cardi in the center may be too muted, may be Soft Autumn, not warm enough for True Autumn, but I like it and I could adapt it here because of the darkness; shopping ain’t perfect; you might love an item that’s close enough; there are swatches that can look pretty similar between unrelated palettes; at the mall, make the very best match you can and know that the rest of the outfit will situate the colour into your Season; makeup may be a bit less forgiving because it’s painted right on the face

– if Winter’s fabric extreme is the scuba suit, True Autumn’s is burlap, the ultimately brown colour, the utilitarian feel

– the camel is really oranged; I like the way a turtleneck frames the face and hair and even better if it’s a great colour that distinguishes it

– coloured and textured and opaque tights should be worn, they’re good

– not quite cute enough to be cozy to me, though many people do get that feeling from these colours. I find them too hot to be that benign, but the colour heat is still comfortable, not reckless. You can touch it without being burned. In fact you can hold it as long as you want.

– about white, remember how it didn’t really fit well into Soft Autumn’s landscape? , it will add yet another 5 years here

– about black, it’s too cold to harmonize with anything, and many colours don’t get that close to black, so I hope that skirt to the left of the amber beads is chocolate; the overall darkness effect should leave enough light to read by; having said that, concessions will make shopping more fun ; if you found a perfect faux leopard short jacket and it happened to have black buttons that were not enormous and the overall effect was of rich caramel, gold, and chocolate brown, and if your hair were medium dark or more, that coat might be absolutely lovely

– red is by nature a warm colour and I love a red coat, it gets noticed and manifests the very strong lifeforce of these persons; seemingly low key, they have some of the strongest moorings I know, levelheaded and reliable as the stone we saw earlier, absolutely nothing darting, fleeting, sporadic, or flighty ; I love neutrals (black ,white, grays, beiges and greiges in the U.K. :)) a lot, but on both True Warm Seasons, I absolutely love lots of colour, personifying people that are so alive, busy and loving their life, not fussing, just getting on with it

-not the military style that suits Dark Autumn better, who is a much more straightened out, direct, vertical person, approaching Winter’s stationary vertical line (Bright Winter’s line will shift to the diagonal, Spring’s is becoming horizontal, explaining why horizontal stripes look so good to me on a Spring, and in my head, Summer’s line is horizontal wavy, like a ruffle) ; this character isn’t so with intention as the Dark blends, who lock onto a target; that rigidity is muted in True Autumn, as the colours are, so you have a straightforward person no doubt, but not shot out of a cannon

– what’s the theme song? It’s a steady beat, not as threatening as the Jaws movie theme, a Winter gets that, more defined contrasts and all, Dark Winter, I’m guessing. I’m looking for a steady drum, maybe Adele Rolling In The Deep? Close, but not hot enough…The Circle Of Life, maybe… heat makes molecules agitate and move faster. Thinking. Not Spring’s reggae. Hotter, darker, tribal, smoked light, uncontrolled heat (this is the part where the True Autumns say “Who me?”) Hotter than Soft Autumn’s Hot August Night. This is pretty hot,

Dhoom Again

Once Dark Autumn arrives, Winter will put the cold clamps on and there will be heat but it won’t be on such display.

– what do they drive? A Dodge Ram 1500? Too truck. Classier? Cadillac Escalade? Too flaunty. A Navigator? Better. A Jeep Wrangler Rubicon? Feels about right. Dark Autumn drives a Jag XJ. Dark Winter drives an Audi A6 Avant after they trade in their 2010 Nissan Maxima, having found an Audi that comes in Batmobile black. True Winter? Black Porsche. Bright Winter? Lamborghini with the doors that flip up. Bright Spring? A Merc E Class convertible in a smart and snappy colour. Back to our topic.

– I like the bow in the jacket at the mid-top, it’s not too ribbony, it’s solid and square in a very browned neutral; strength and femininity together are curiously magnetic, I feel

– no real pinks present; mix pink with pumpkin puree and that’s True Autumn pink, looking much better in clothes than makeup where browned colours are better unless the pink is very golden

– no pinkish reds; if you take tan leather and dye it red, that’s the cool red, maybe like a red Frye boot ; that’s the red lipstick too, like paprika, not as dark as chili powder ; I like a browner day lipstick – if Soft Autumn’s was the rosy cinnamon stick floating in the warming pot of apple cider, then True Autumn is the cider itself, and Dark Autumn is the clove

– Spring thought about peach, blossom, and candy; Autumn thinks of the jars of preserves, not the raw salad (Spring); Autumn thinks about strong, heavy, straighter now that Summer has gone, mead and liqueur, Bailey’s, Kahlua, a duller finish but lots of touch information (fur, flannel, corduroy, tweed, leather), nectar (colour is getting thicker, more opacity), the hive, the honeycomb (repetition, industry, work = functional (Spring=fun, Winter=flash, Summer=feminine); the bumblebees of the world, going about their business, these are the builders; think of blocks, bricks, order, structure, steps, strength, progress

– colours start at medium, not light; only the beiges get very light and they’re still browned, like vanilla whipped into cream, like brown buff, light wheat, light brown peach; cottage cheese is too light and mozzarella too yellow

– I find it harder to know if I have lots of golden heat when I assess a possible True Autumn colour vs. Spring, where I can always tell max yellow heat. What I look for is a bronzed brown glowing feeling, like hot copper overlay, which how the person’s skin tone looks. I want to sense abundant sultry heat, not greyness, not lukewarm, not summery, though still very hospitable, nothing hostile.

– very little blue, just one bronzed colour; the blues are quite greened because the yellow contribution harmonizes better in warm coloured outfits while cool blues don’t; I love purple with the warm hair tones, it’s unexpected and not very red because Winter isn’t here yet

– there are warmer and cooler greens; the cooler greens really are green, not teal or avocado, and a little dull, like Green Bay Packers green

– as more distance between colours on the wheel are fabulous when combined, we get a very rich cornucopia effect; profusion was Spring’s word, abundance is Autumn’s

– animal prints in small surface area supports the lifeforce without looking swallowed; Dark Autumn can balance a whole item better and same with metallics as Winter’s hardware orientation arrives; this woman isn’t that decorative and feels overdone in glitz, she’s got 1000 cookies to bake for the Cookie Exchange, is hauling the boat out of the water by herself, wants to fit a bike ride in this day, has a pie crust to roll out, and would love to hear about how you’re doing once she’s finished what she set out to do; she sure looks gorgeous with a  metallic thread in a scarf, a copper glint to her lipstick, a gold or brass buckle on a belt or purse, or stripe in a shirt

– using matte and dull finishes makes the odds of getting the colour right higher automatically by creating some muting, as some of the shoes below; the green heeled sandal at the top of the Polyvore below may be too emerald but in sueded fabric, it could look like dull teal and fit into this painting

Here are the shoes, the belt, the bag, the HAIR!! (See also True Autumn’s Best Hair Colour). Warm, rich, lustrous, and brown. There is nothing faded about this palette.

She wears a purposeful watch, maybe a menswear style,

to go with solid functional bag, square like a briefcase or at least not completely slouchy,

shoes you can live a real life in,

and a necklace with weight.

Supremely business stylish, this lady is up-to-the-minute, resourceful, and lives in the present. Autumn is grown-up, self-sufficient, and mature. Her male counterpart is Indiana Jones, though they dress him as a Soft. U2’s Bono sans glasses seems True Autumnish.

Think about the quiet light and stony strength of the pyramids, not the blinding jackpot glare of El Dorado. Marketers have a much better handle on what young women want and how to sell it to them. If True Autumn has trouble finding clothes, it’s because the styles in shops are too young and her colours are often limited to brown and green. Imagination belongs everywhere.

The pieces have some weight and bulk, not Spring’s hearts and lucky charms, not Summer’s lacy water, or Winter’s hardest-substance-on-Earth jewels. To add interest, touches could be Egyptian, Bollywood, hot stone-lava, old coins, wood, jade, brass, enamel and ceramic which remind of firing and heat, and natural semi-precious stone. Even stones should be noticeably browned down. Leather looks great, strong without being hard, in Southern Comfort colours.

She can accessorize endlessly, with items from many categories at once. Scarves were made for this woman because they look textured and warm and give the impression of depth. What she does best isn’t really to accessorize, like Bright Winter who can wear jewelry on her neck, ears, and wrists, all at once. True Autumn layers.

It’s easy enough not to stumble into Dark Autumn, just keep black out. Colour can go pretty dark but you should be able to see that it’s not black in all but the dimmest lighting, and this applies equally to shoes and eyeliner.

Reptile can work if it’s quiet, not too cold and slithery. True Autumn is more plain-spoken. Dark and oily don’t belong in this brew, they look like a black panther marching up the forest path in the photo above. Panthers don’t march, they prowl. She might do crocodile, though Dark Autumn better. Snakeskin is best on Winter, but if the colour is very gentle, even a Soft Autumn can look great. The texture offering is good, it just needs adapting because of the message the wrong version can send.

Periwinkle is supposed to be an Autumn classic but it doesn’t send thrills through me. I do love the Soft Autumn in their version.

Going back through this to pick out random keywords that could define this colouring: abundant, deep as in plush, deep as in layers, medium-dark, texture, strong but not maximally hard, work, build, structure, browned, coppery, golden, matte, small to medium metallic or fur or animal element, functional, opaque, molten, rich hot glow.

Spring may be excited, but more than any other, oooee, baby, True Autumn is exciting.

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The post Wearing The True Autumn Landscape appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

You can use lipstick to help you narrow down your Season among the 12, and in some cases, you tap the nail on the head. You would have to use those colours that nobody else could wear as well. You need to stick close to TMIT for each.

As when test drapes are truly useful, they may or may not be colours that you’re supposed to love or go out and buy, though you could. They’re intended to create a colour reaction to help make a clear either/or choice. You need the extremes. If you’re a Light Season, pick a light lipstick colour. On everyone else, it will erase their lips and undefine the face, especially at maturity.

David Kibbe wrote Metamorphosis in the late 80s. It’s still brilliant. If you had a salon for women to discover their Image Identity, it would be near impossible to do by trying clothing styles, though it can be amazing how well that works taking photos of yourself in dressing rooms mirrors. In your salon, you’d need too many sizes and styles.

Can it be done with makeup? The makeup guidelines didn’t seem different enough in Kibbe’s book. Watercolours vs sculpted looked much the same because the face beneath was sculpted or it wasn’t. I can’t imagine finding your KibbeType with makeup.

Jewelry, now, that could be done. Maybe hats too. Choosing True Winter was a way to keep colour out of it to make the lines more audible. There are a couple of colours used if they shift the perception as pink >> soft, even icy pink. Oh, to be a True Winter. Black and White and you’re on the mountaintop.

Removing colour also adds the stillness quality so beautiful and true to Winter people. I tried to keep a frozen in time quality, since symmetric and smooth are not right on everyone. Even the rough pieces have something sleek or motionless.

On TW, a strand of pearls doesn’t match the presence of the person. Just by their natural colouring, this person is edgy looking, however soft their body’s lines. Simple pearls need something extra to make the same statement as the person, even a double strand is better.

The Classics

This is True Winter. Even when its line are soft, it should look hard in density. I love about that SC necklace the way the pearl is balanced. That’s such a strong Winter association.

Psychology Section

I’m using this article as a place to say something. Please skip if not into self-discovery conversations.

I read messages and questions from women learning their new Season and feeling more discouraged with themselves than ever. I am so happy to see that such a community of support and good advice has evolved on so many facebook pages. The free and generous cheering for one another is a most beautiful expression of an abundance mentality. Women have shared their experience and knowledge without pausing to realize that they are contributing great gifts of service to others. Putting goodness out into the world counts.

The Naturals

Like all forms of growth, you have to give yourself 6 months to learn to use your new colour palette. Your mind needs time to untangle how it has seen stores for the last 20 years. Practice patience. Think of this like exercise, which works for every single person who stays with it. You will find your best self because everyone else did. It always works. Women who have had a Sci\ART analysis would not go back to how they used to shop and neither will you. Give any doubts about that to the wind before you read another word.

You have to put in the time to get the reward. Like asking someone else to meditate for you, it just won’t work that way. You can’t miss the journey. The journey is the whole point, there’s no final destination. You have to engage it with conscious thought, not skim the surface or expect an automatic lock ‘n load. Don’t think about the endpoint or wish to be there till it’s fairly earned. Focus on moving closer and closer to defining your center. That right there is the entire point. You will get very, very good at your colours. Expect to return a few things – on those days, you’ll know even more about yourself. Move towards those moments.

I want you to be happy to be all of you, not just your natural colouring – which I guarantee you is beautiful enough to bring tears to the eyes of anyone who takes the time to really look.

The Gamines

Broken lines and  many small points are the deal here. Connect the dots, dashes, seeds, beads. Add in swirls for soft and multi-directional lines for Flamboyant.

We all have these, I hate abcd about myself.conversations, me just as much as anyone. Please don’t anyone email me and tell me I’m not sensitive to women’s body issues. I’ve got first hand knowledge of having your most basic survival foundations shaken by anorexia (high school but I can go back there in my head in an instant), of being beat around as a kid (school, not family). I get what humiliation at the hands of others and my own feels like. I fight it every day too.

Thing is, everybody does. Nobody’s life is all charmed. When I learned my Season, and when other women do, I noticed that it had a calming effect. The expression in the eyes at the end of the PCA is peaceful. I just figured that was recognition of that which lives in us and letting it have its voice.

Then I learned my Kibbe style. Again, that was calming. There seems a frantic rummaging that goes on, being unable to let it go till the puzzle is solved, followed by a strong, receiving quiet. Again, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be closer to the real you than where you were.

The Dramatics

Note to self: Soft Anything means smoother and rounder. Also smooth does not equal sleek.

We have seen or been the woman going into stores with her new colour palette and finding nothing, leaving her with an “I’m not this, I’m not that, I’m not anything.” type of discouragement. And then joins on the appendix “And besides, I hate my shape.” So, to find that allowing, satisfied calm about your shape, I think you have to learn it, just like it works with colours. Doesn’t matter if you find the perfect answer or the perfect jacket. It’s about starting to ask the questions and getting closer to who you are, sometimes through the Who You Are Not maze. This appears to be calming and empowering to everyone who experiences it.

Saying

“What good are these colours I have? I can’t find them in stores. If I see something close, I’m either not sure or the style is off. All I see is the black they said I can’t wear. I hate the weight that won’t budge, I’m so tired of having big arms I’m always hiding them.

What I feel is really far away from finding a way to communicate with me, like she’s actually trying to get away or hide so I can’t find her. Who I thought I was, her seat is empty, as if everybody left without telling me and I got left here alone trying to figure this out. I don’t even know where to start.”

doesn’t feel as good as

“It will take time to break away all the hype I now believe about colour and me – and decide what of that I want to keep that does speak to me and for me. I have new knowledge and new tools. I don’t have to worry. It’s all happening right now in my subconscious, even when I’m asleep. It took time to get how it was and it’s going to take time to go back. I’m going to calm down about it. I make a devotion to me to stay in the boat and give myself that time.

Spending more time in stores is just more depressing. What I need is to find the places where I feel good. Maybe that’s new makeup instead of clothes. Maybe it’s time with women who’ve lived it and are there just to listen. What the women on facebook notice about me never seems to be my thighs. Should I start thinking that I’m the only one who sees them? They see how I barely need foundation and the shape of my lips. If I learned a bit more about me, would I find more good stuff on my own? It sure would feel better to be paying attention to that.”

You might just feel so good and right in your own skin and everything you buy that you’ll have to work a wee bit harder at keeping your humility grounded and your joy contained.

The Romantics

Your truths are where your power is. What is true about you is what is strong about you. By the time you’re 35, you’re going to need a shovel to get at that. It won’t bubble up on its own for most of us. Those brave, intelligent, and very giving women of facebook didn’t start that way either. They started by talking the talk, hearing themselves in the stories and advice of others. They taught each other. They have come out on their other side, easily and steadily and continuously walking the walk. You will too. Just join the party. Look for the least contaminated truths you can find inside you when you talk. It’s really hard to do, but do it anyhow. Put yourself in a place of learning, only that, and make it good enough. If lovely clothes start finding their way into your life, fine, but make the primary purpose to learn who you are. Your most beautiful lipstick is waiting for you to do that.

The road to Heaven isn’t paved with high achievers, right? It’s a one-at-a-time brick road of finding your Self, and never living one moment beneath or beside that again. We have many selves. In our past, they get pulled out like the pages of a book and left behind. The restlessness you feel will settle when you gather them back where they belong. The Kingdom of Heaven is, has always been, and forever will be, inside. Anything that helps you find what is true and real and authentic about you will bring you closer.

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When I wrote the articles about True Season children two years ago for a previous blog, there was no Autumn article because I didn’t know any Autumn kids to watch. I still don’t know many. I know many Autumn grownups these days. They’re so levelheaded, so reasonable, that it’s hard to think of those elaborate parts of their character that can be quirky or funny. To them, what is, is. Not more, not less.

They’re like everything that’s great about trees and home baking. Not fancy or fussy, I love their company so much for the WYSIWYG, sound, comfortable, real-world advice they offer. Their constancy and durability give us a feeling of people who are extremely trustworthy, reliable, and rock-steady. There’s no zigging and zagging.

gentle eyes, a soft face, perhaps some Summer; she could even be a Soft Summer but the eyes look too orange

Autumn Children

Capable. This is the kid you want yours to be with if they go horseback riding. If yours falls off and is having wrist issues, the Autumn child can catch both horses, lead them home, find a grownup or a phone, call the parents, and get the right kind of help.

Life goes smoother if the other kids could just agree with them. There may be no physical attacks but there will be direct words spoken and order imposed. She’s doing the talking at the lemonade stand. Not bossy, not show-off, just doing the job.

Least likely to be picked on. Assertive from an early age.

dark but somehow soft (muted actually) ; the strong facial lines, smile lines

True and Soft are social, not solitary. Dark may isolate himself more and talk to dolphins while all the other kids are trying to tip the raft. Winter needs time apart.

Might be stocky or sturdy, especially the boys, and boy, can they eat. Regardless, boy or girl, these children are strong and willing to use their strength. They are powerful athletes and real survivors. Their stamina and endurance stays with them into adulthood as 50 year olds who can still outskate all the kids in pond hockey.

someone was smart when they put him in orange; notice the orange tones in the hair and a very strong face, even for a baby

When the Soft Autumn child tells a story, the emotions involved will be inflated higher than anyone else’s version because their Summer-ness felt them so deeply. The Dark Autumn child will have more worries about the events in the story and their meanings and repercussions. The Winter in him will keep him worrying about it for days. The True just tells it like it is. The most exaggerated thing about this person is that they have no exaggerations.

Need time to process surprises and really wishes you would not. His Spring sister’s idea of euphoria would be a surprise a minute.

building, digging, stacking, carrying, exotic eyes

They must have their own experience of something to change their mind. They are the original can’t-tell-them-anything kids.

strong and striking, Autumn and Winter ; not romantic or cute (Summer and Spring)

The Autumn child is straight up. He doesn’t conceal, cannot deceive. He’s not a jokester and is never devious. His Spring brother, who takes life less seriously and has a big imp streak, has figured out that when Mom’s on the phone, he can climb out a window, double back around the house to the kitchen, and sneak his fifth Popsicle of the afternoon. The Autumn child might walk very quietly into the kitchen, but if noticed and asked, would be compelled to admit 5.

Spring fills us with the wonder of the moment. It is immediate. Summer is the cradle that keeps us safe while pushing us to meet our highest potential.Wi nter symbolizes mental capacity, to reason, to rationalize. Autumn is the work we do on Earth, to enrich, to build, to create, to leave something better than we found. Autumn completes our wholeness as the power of the physical body, inseparable from emotion (Summer), spirit (Spring), and logic (Winter).

Without the balance between them, we cannot heal ourselves because each one is assaulted when the other feels injury. We also cannot fulfill our human potential. We cannot have been put on Earth with the abilities we have to live as cavemen. We must be here to live up to a higher ideal. The pendulum between the four powers sways but our answers are not behind us. Once we learn our center as a humanity by respecting all four energies equally, we will find a sustainable way of living and the answers to longevity.

Autumn Grownups

Sensible, practical, no-nonsense, peaceful. Harrison Ford. Martin Sheen. Their steadiness makes them shoe-ins for feel-good TV presidents. The Summer contribution of do-the-right thing to Autumn’s save-the-day strength.

The Dark Autumn boy will explain, indeed expound, actually expostulate, on his topic, with no awareness that nobody has had a chance to speak for 20 minutes. The Dark Autumn man is not very different, but he speaks more slowly so he has time to formulate his thoughts. He is the professor to Dark Winter’s philosopher.

strong and capable at every age

What happens when a Summer and Autumn live together? Felix&Oscar.

Soft Autumn’s husband asks that you not tell her that a family member is in personal crisis or he’ll be sent back to the Farmer’s Market. The rest of his morning will be spent making ham sandwiches. He already delivers an asparagus quiche to the Art Gallery once a week. She combines Summer’s love and upstanding decency and Autumn’s foot on the gas to nurture the entire world.

True and Dark Autumn will be on time. Let’s get to it. Then we go on to the next job, though we tell ourselves we are going to rest. We can chat after, but I won’t be late for my next appointment or make you late for yours.

If a client has all her children colour analyzed, she could be a True Autumn. She sees the sense and the savings, and is completely open to change. Light Spring will do the same, a mix of her Summer desire to make her family happy and her Spring enthusiasm when she spots a good thing. They will adopt their new palettes very quickly, without Winter’s tendency to contest or Summer’s to resist.

hazy eyes, hushed skin, a future Soft Autumn

If it is a plain and honest opinion you want, go shopping with an Autumn. Summer’s deep streak of kindness will embellish with the compliment, any compliment. If you’re ok with the cold-blooded comment, a Winter can tell you that your suit is fine if you don’t mind looking like a birthday cake.

And then you say to them, Now, how would you feel if someone spoke to you that way? And they say Fine. I wouldn’t care. They’re telling the truth. They are thick-skinned (so they balance matte and opaque cosmetics), while Summer is thinner-skinned, as sensitivity of skin and emotion, as wearing a softer, lesser pigment deposit (so tinted moisturizers), as being more touchy of feeling internally and of texture externally, as tactile, with highly developed brain-hand connections and sense of touch. Summer skin is soft matte. Spring’s looks best dewy. Just as everyone’s busy is different, everyone’s Golden Rule comes out different but it’s still the same rule. Winters should shop with other Winters. Buy them the book Getting To Yes for Christmas. It will help them in life. The kindness of Summer and sweetness of Spring might see this Winter, meaning me and only me, as having the heart of that first cockroach that crawls out of a nuclear accident zone. On the other hand, I won’t tell you 3 months later that I really didn’t love you as a blonde but didn’t want to hurt your feelings, knowing what that hair cost you and all.

Autumn’s face (left) speaks to us of resilience, bravery, and grit, in colours that are darker and more muted than the lighter, brighter skin on the right; Summer on the right is dreamy and swoopy. On both girls, gorgeous base hair colours for Soft/True Autumn and Light Summer

Will promote what she believes in gladly. A Soft Autumn looks great wearing Autumn colours in Summer’s way (analogous, flowing, floral, soft). Dark wears her palette in the Winter way (bold, more contrast). So integrate your smaller contributing Season by wearing their style in jewelry with clothing and makeup in the colours and style of your own Season.

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Strong Beauty

Makeup Colours

Soft Autumn, try out Lancome RIL 230M and 240M, your natural lipcolour is one of these or in between. Also NARS Mayflower lips, Body Shop 11 and 07 lipstick, and MUFE RAI 19 (for TA too) lipstick.

On Dark Autumn, NARS Pigalle, MUFE HD8 blush, Lauder Maple Sugar and Rich Currant lips. A good, dark,warm, barely muted blue eyeliner is Revlon Colorstay pencil in Navy. Dark Winter could wear this very well too as they have warm tones in hair and eyes.

True Autumn : MUFE HD10 blush, Givenchy Gold Brown lips (really nice, this lipstick, but sample it at Sephora first, big $$).

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Still lunar and fluid like all Summer, still vaporous, but with a dimensional quality, like a silvery apparition, the hologram we discussed in Part 1. Soft Summer does not have a feeling of steps. What these fairly-light and fairly-dark colours do is flow smoothly.

Paisley asked

Can the Soft Summer archetype as you model it have a warmer embodiment? Mostly we’re compared to water spirits (which imagery I do love). I wonder if we could have a warmer side that’s maybe more of a mountain spirit? I do have warm-leaning eyes and some warmth in my hair, but yes, the SA drapes turn me yellow. Even so, gold, brass, copper, and rose gold are better on me than silver or pewter, which tend to just sit there on me.

She makes an important point that applies to many Soft Summer. That warmer incarnation is certainly in my head, but maybe not always in my words and images. Something that comes up often for me is that I see many who are very borderline Soft Summer/Soft Autumn. They’re like the neutralest of the Neutrals, positioned almost even between those two Neutral Seasons. To see the eyes alone, you’ll pick the warmer Season for sure, except that the skin yellows with drapes. On these women, silver (not overly cold and shiny) and gold (not overly yellow and shiny) are about equal.

Soft Summer warms and solidifies significantly relative to True Summer imagery. In my book (over in the right column), we went from a lake to a forest. Hopefully, the Polyvores below portray that.

About shimmer, Paisley said,

As long as the iridescence doesn’t take the color too high, I think iridescent makeup is gorgeous on us. Also your makeup style depends on your Kibbe. Having been identified as a Romantic, I was relieved to read Kibbe’s recommendation that even daytime makeup should have some sparkle. I think very softly glowing making adds to the misty factor, as do finishing powders that are pearlescent. The point being to keep it soft-focus — it’s can’t go toward metallic in any way. But glowing and pearlescent is gorgeous on us, IMO.

And IMO, you’re exactly right, Paisley. I can not say it as well as a woman who lives it.

Seems to me that part of the shimmer, maybe all of it, is explained by the equiluminant property of this palette. Rendered in B&W, it would appear to be just a few shades of grey and much of the detail would disappear. Bring in colour and the combinations are pure melody. Everyone of the 12 Seasons soars depending on what you can do with it. For Soft Summer, it’s in the allure that happens when these colours are worn together on this type of colouring.

Why? Because vision in our brain operates on two parallel tracks. The colour system recognizes faces, objects, and details. The B&W system sees movement, depth, and position. In equiluminant compositions or outfits, the colorblind B&W track won’t quite be able to tell the location of the elements. But the colour track will see the elements well. This disconnect gives these compositions an unstable, shimmery, unearthly feeling. We talked about it in Part 1. Sorry for repeating, it is so amazing to me.

The SD body has presence. The horizontal shoulder line is substantial and the vertical line equally so. I am not a Kibbexpert, but narrow, petite, or slender wouldn’t be words I’d associate with Soft Dramatic. If someone picked those words for you over Amazonian, I’d have to wonder about another Image Identity. If you look at Images for Raquel Welch, she is luscious-yes, dumpling-no. Compared to other body types, these are a little burly. A lot of size, strength, and length in the upper and lower body.

Kibbe Soft Dramatic (SD)

• broad shoulders, a strong horizontal line
• a long bold sweeping vertical line
• drape, flow, light fabric ; soft plush – so far, great on Soft Summmer
• shiny fabric – for Soft Summer, this looks like the lustre of pearl and abalone shell ; go past it and your colouring will make the fabric shinier than it is and the fabric will make your face more muted

Many Summers ask if they look good in pearls. They absolutely do, taking into account your body’s geometry. Classics wear the classic strand(s) better than one big-huge piece. Dramatic bodies need big and geometric shapes to include the necessary angularity that balances who they already are.

We’ve talked about what looks like black and white on you in Black and White for 12 Seasons. Once you learn to manipulate what you wear to look like B&W or black&red or whatever on you without actually wearing those colours, you have cracked the code. You can achieve any look without ever venturing into unflattering colour by knowing how your own colouring exerts influence over what you wear. How do you do this? Wear your 12 Season Sci\ART palette. Job done.

Mr. K talks about bold and dramatic colour combinations. Great. Use your palette and go wild. Don’t compare your bold and dramatic to how Mr. Spock would get there.

Contrast levels are high here. First, it increases the drama and boldness. Second, I’ve rethought this whole contrast thing – 3! videos coming up about that in another post.

• Head to Toe.
• T shape with rounded edges, always the vertical and horizontal lines.
• Luxe and glamour.
• Colour repetition works well to give flow and continue a vertical line.
• Not stiff, tight, shapeless, sharp of drape.
• Lots of length. Strong geometrics with soft edges.
• If you don’t like the muted purples, don’t wear them as clothes. But they make darn good eyeshadow.
• Wear your hair colour on your feet.

Enlarged the jewelry to be big. With her size and the very generous amount of Yang, jewelry needs to be scaled way up or she’ll dial it down into a dime store trinket.

For the day of the week you go to the office, not the opera, there are shoes here that won’t punish your back and feet. The guys wouldn’t put up with that. Why should we?

Soft Summer Hair Colour

This came up on facebook but this is a good place to insert it. Whatever your Kibbe or Season,

When do highlights in the hair look right? When the distance between the lightest and darkest approximates that in the rest of the colouring. That’s how the hair can be a realistic extension of the head.

Summer light colours are pastels, more colourful than Winter icy colours. Also, their darks don’t get extremely dark. So there is not a big distance between the lightest and darkest colours. Soft Summer begins from a darker base colour position than the other Summers. Applying the pastel concept, their highlight will be darker than the other Summers too. Message for colourist: don’t overbleach or add back toners that are too light.

Use a taupe highlight, like medium mushroon, for a tone on tone look. The colour is in your swatches. It is cooler than it is warm. But be careful. Someone sees warmth in the eye and the very neutrality of the skin and overestimates the warmth. Soft Summer is often getting coloured way too light and yellow so the face goes oily and yellow. This is not a butterscotch light, it’s taupe.

Also be careful again. That dusty quality in the hair is essential to bring the roses out of the skin. I mean, essential. Don’t stare at your hair colour and not see the whole like we do. Don’t compare your hair to anyone except other perfect Soft Summer hair, like Princess Kate. Would she look better with saturated hair? No way. Highlights? Absolutely not to me.

Start with a colour a couple of shades lighter than the base, usually a medium ash brown And be careful once again. Chemical colour is often very saturated and looks darker than expected, like saturated cosmetics do. So you might even go a few shades lighter than the base to compensate.

If you can keep 80% of the hair as totally unprocessed, much better to give the skin harmony and perfecting potential that chemistry so skillfully removes with chemical pigments. Make highlights filaments, not chunks.

How about this?  Look at the before. Cooler than warm but not pure ash cool silvery brown. The highlights on the right side of your screen (not the model) are pretty good in the lower half of the hair. On the other side, the eye can get caught up on the too-light strands. Soft Summer’s total expression is Summer colours in shade. Still, those too light strands are at least cool beige, not platinum, not yellow or orange. The base is pretty darn good for a Soft Summer. I like it. (IDK if this model is a Soft Summer, it’s just about the hair).

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The post The Soft Dramatic Soft Summer Part 2 (and Hair Colour) appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Having just returned from a week in my native city (Montreal), I’m reminded of how much more grunge/tough-chic urban dwellers are compared to me. I live in the exact center of a clump of trees which grow in the exact center of 90 acres of corn.

The anonymity of city living may explain in part why all the grey and black. Perhaps also the multisensory assault and the need for some quiet somehow. Imagine if everyone were very colourful, or if they all had different coloured coats. It would be too much to take in. I don’t feel it in the small town where I live, but I sure love visiting cities. Montreal is a brilliant city with lots of character. Where you buy  a screwdriver is beyond me. It’s all restaurants and bars.

I’m a Dark Winter in colouring. If human colouring were divided into 12 groups, or Seasons, mine would come from the Winter palette of jewel tones. To that, you’d add a few drops of crude oil to darken, dull, and warm slightly. The dull black of crude oil is what happens when Autumn’s deep rich gold mixes with sapphire and ruby. Picture the difference between the matte Batman black (Dark Winter) and the bluer and shinier vinyl record (True Winter).

For Dark Winter colouring, industrial/combat looks almost fall together. Though this won’t apply to all body types, the functionality, simplicity, toughness, masculinity all ring pretty true. I’m not a fan of all black but here, you have white, darker than usual blush (eleablake Accomplished, MAC Fever, this is no rosy cheek look), lipstick, and a ring the colour of blood. The lipstick is sheerly dark because this a natural/young/minimal look (Merle Norman Stolen Kisses).

Muscle tends to be easy for the 3 Autumn types of colouring, who do a cargo/military version. And Heaven knows if there are great boots for them to choose from.

It seems hardest to put this together for Spring. The heavy use of neutral colours always feels too drab on Spring, on whom I find colour is a better neutral than the traditional gray range. Even in their own grays, the excitement isn’t quite there. I still can’t visualize a Spring version that makes sense. I struggle with the toughness as well for True and Bright. Still, it just takes some adjusting. More colour, less metal and leather.

What about a Summer? Overall, this colouring is great in neutral colours and monochromatics. Some Light Summers are surprisingly edgy and G.I. Jane. They know it too but in trying to express it in Winter colours, the whole thing can come off too butch. Below, some adaptations.

Soft Summer

Should be easy, she has the same relative darkness, dullness, and texture to True Summer as Dark Winter to True Winter.

She’ll do less distance between lightest and darkest, looks way better on Summer colouring.

Ombre and fade effects are nowhere better.

Wear the bracelets on the same hand.

Could do a mascara version of soft black for the boot.

Equestrian boot are too glamourous and Uggs make us walk too shuffly and mushy.

Denim is so ubiquitous that we barely register its colour unless it’s pretty saturated.

You can’t see the model in the Tshirt because she’s unlikely to be a Soft Summer so she’s disappearing.

Don’t buy the makeup on the Polyvore, I haven’t swatched any of it.

Anybody but especially the boy-body nerd > messenger bag.

True Summer

Amazing in her teals.

Those earrings are lakes.

The eyeshadow is matte.

Anybody but especially the field hockey player > backpack or hobo.

True Summer is such a clean-water Season, it’s hard to make it look messy.

Light Summer

Cate Blanchett on the other side of the subway platform. With this wicked good haircut. In this clothing, I’d stare shamelessly.

But without the high-class natural makeup. There’s something too wholesome or healthy about it. I kept peach out of the blush and lip.

Eyeliner is important and you need one that allows you to wear a lot without closing down the eye size. Our makeup should be as much as us, not more. And not less, personal taste depending of course.

I’m completely attracted to biker jackets. Engineer boots too.

Bracelets on the same hand. Warm and cool together are good on Neutral Seasons.

The belt is bubbles.

She has double piercings in her ears.

The Spring in her makes her great in tye-dye. I picked watercolours of galaxy earrings today.

The blue beanie, because marled wools look terrific, because blue disappears on Summers, like a non-colour so it doesn’t really add another colour block.

Purse too saturated? Yup. Coat too something else? Probably. As if a woman wearing this is going to pass up a great purse because it colours outside the lines. Where we do and don’t draw our lines makes us more interesting.

Personal Shopper + Colour Analyst = VALUE

Shopping takes hours of planning and thinking. Which I enjoy more than I can say but seldom have the time. I know you don’t believe this, but many people have way more money than time. I meet them all the time. I get links to Theory suits and Burberry trenches to advise about, shopping bags full of Cle De Peau makeup to sort through, and offers of all-expense paid travel if I’ll go analyze colouring and take on the shopping thereafter.

Believe this too. It’s not because I’m good at it. All I have is the ability to choose colours that flatter because I can  measure the person’s colouring, i.e.: I know their Season. That alone sets me apart from all the other stylists. I work from airport waiting lounges, Starbucks, shopping malls, wherever and whenever, with nothing but an iPad.

Sound like your path? Consider training as a colour analyst. Fashion advice without the ability to analyze colouring accurately will be like Hollywood, trendy and unpredictable. If you love shopping and can analyze colouring, you are a different commodity, higher in the value chain, even at the celebrity level.

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The post City Looks for The 3 Summers appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

1. When you can’t be anything else

In his very famous Stanford Commencement address of 2005, Steve Jobs says that your heart and intuition always know what’s best for you. I believe that to be 150% correct. That is, if you can connect with them before judgment arrives. Once judgment settles in, it’s over. No more right or truth can happen. We’re stalled in a character that has reverted to a less mature form.

I watch this video quite often for the reminders.

I began seeing Jennifer for facials two years ago. Before too long, a pattern emerged. Before starting the car, I’d sit in her driveway for 10 minutes writing down all the things she said about how to think (and not think) towards what I want my life to be like.

I’ll experiment with any advice, from Deepak Chopra to Alan Weiss. A woman I adore suggested a Vision Board, among my present projects. Fascinating to me that I wasn’t sure how to make one effectively, so send along your good resources. Experiments tend to work or not pretty fast.

From Visit 1 with Jen, I supervised my mindset according to her guidance and my life direction began to materialize faster. Presently, I’m reading The Power of Framing by Gail Fairhurst, in which she discusses priming the pump of our subconscious so that we can have rehearsed situations for our best reaction as they happen, not a day later. To describe in left-brain language what Jennifer’s guidance does, it would be that.

She listens to me talk for about 60 seconds, evaporates all the irrelevance, and extracts the highest calling. She can link me to my greatest good and the situation to its best outcome near immediately. If her words don’t make sense at the time, I wait 48 hours. Once it took 2 weeks to get the “So that’s what you meant.” light bulb moment.

Sometimes, we begin with a card reading (not Tarot or Zodiac) to give us something to talk around. The results of the four cards I choose are always freakishly related to one another and to new directions that are opening up or something I’m worried about. They might be a confirmation. They might feel uncomfortable and I start with the excuses, but I’ve learned that sooner I stop talking and start listening, sooner things arrive. She can get me out of my own way faster than anything I’ve ever encountered.

As with colour, we sabotage ourselves in so many ways until someone who sees us clearly says,  “This is your colouring. This heat, this darkness range, this softness.” Until the physio says, “Stop hiking your right shoulder and your left hip won’t hurt.” Until an intuitive person says, “Stop right there, that’s a judgment and I hear you apply it every time you bring up that situation”.

Jen taught me how to meditate. The usual ways were boring. I can pay attention to 2.5 breaths max. She said, “Try listening for the most far away noise you can hear.” That was fantastic. You know your eyes and brain relax when you look far away? This is exactly the same. It also creates a big, empty, open space between you and the place you’re listening in.

This is not the usual psychic “you have sorrow in your life” or “money is coming to you” reading. Jen’s readings are clearly “you gotta give something to get something and here’s what you gotta give.” When I leave, I have the jobs for the month. My jobs are the ways that I will hold and transform my thoughts. If I’m willing to do it, change is willing to come.

This isn’t only in person. She’ll do readings just by hearing you talk. She’s at Cloud 313  (www.cloud313.net). Below, she describes the difference between psychic and soul readings:

Regular psychic readings are more likely to tell you what is coming to you in the near future, which will be based on the vibrational energy & thoughts you have been sending out into the universe. Soul sessions/readings are geared more towards me tuning in to your soul, retrieving and interpreting information on the level of soul. When we “hear” the truth from our higher intuition it resonates perfectly with us on every level – we can instantly FEEL a change physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We can use this information to begin to practice new ways of being, allowing us to be easily joyful, confident and loving in all our moments as we move forth towards our soul’s true purpose. Our soul does not require us to analyze our past, present or future meaning. We do not need to focus on our darkest secrets or fears.

She looks quite amazing, not a face you see often or a presence you feel often. You probably have no idea what personality she has. Well, she’s completely down-to-earth and very direct. She enjoys colour but feels most grounded wearing black (oddly, that’s when I feel most tethered – which is the same as grounded, come to think of it). Her house contains more shades of red than any other colour. No question, she had the priestess presence of Zyla’s Soft Winter. Winter that she is, she is completely and unquestioningly internally guided. She will wear black exclusively. That’s her way to be Bright Winter. It’s a success story.

Jennifer had to be a Bright Winter. This mixture of faith and trust that normally resides naturally in children, people who have complete faith in magic because they see it all around them, takes a form in adult bodies. Material magic is in the Bright Season neck of the woods.

I expected her to feel all sorts of energy things during her PCA. No. She was a model for a colour analyst training course, probably the fastest student-directed PCA ever done. Jen flicked away all the other colours like pesky spirits trapped in a middle world to confuse humans. We all saw that every other choice was so far behind that we could barely recognize its presence. Even True Winter was, “Yeah, whatever, get that one off, put the other colour back.”

Variations on the Bright Winter Theme

I have said: “Add Spring’s wonderful humour to Winter’s formality in jewelry that sparkles, belts that are crayon-coloured and shiny, or imaginative hair accessories.”

Bright Winter colouring often reminds us of storybook characters, Snow White being the most familiar. That Katy Perry face, the child in a grown-up body, will follow that advice.

Nothing is for everyone.

Every woman expresses her colours in her own way.

She’s not always Sweet Queen. Sometimes she’s another type of queen. She might be the person that is bigger than life, big, strong, and flamboyant, a super heroine. She will wear the big, bold, bright colours in large areas easily. Pucci designs in prints. Platinum rings that look like silver lava. Shiny zippers and buckles make sense on her. They express a truth about her. They are a rational continuation of her energy. I think of Sci\ART Lauren Battistini of Color My Closet in Houston.

When the image is more mysterious, as the fortune-teller, she enjoys Winter’s ability to wear dark drama like no other colouring can. Try the dignified version in huge eyes and crystal clear-as-glass details (transparent buttons, lip gloss) to convey consummate clarity. These words, divine everlasting infinite immortal omniscient omnipotent. Wear a Zodiac medallion (eternity) on a violet (higher realms, highest Chakra) cord.

The character might be even darker, sensuous and mysterious. Morticia Addams has been suggested. Yes, like that. She was extreme, but still stunning, like a slinky and more dangerous Jessica Rabbit, pale as the most seductive apparition. Subtle, snaky wit and fierce loyalty describes most Winters I know. Morticia radiated power – perhaps that’s the part we’re not ready for.

It was she who said,

You have enslaved him. You have placed Fester under some strange sexual spell. I respect that.

and

Our credo: “Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc.” We gladly feast on those who would subdue us. Not just pretty words.

Winter is the gorgeous Goth, oxymoronic somehow. Some do it so well that their beauty is shocking, as deadly as Morticia. Friends and family may be uncomfortable because it’s just so believable, such a good extension of you, that you seem to be in costume when you’re not. They’re not sure what to think.

If you want to tone it down, wear the hair differently from Morticia, maybe in a sexy secret agent loose bun or a sporty teenager messy bun. Move the hair up, or add shorter, face-framing layers, or add bangs. Avoid black. Add sparkle here and there. Wear a very subtle complexion warming product like Givenchy Croisiere 1, Spring’s pale peach gold, adjusted to be invisible on your skin and set your makeup too. Wear peach-red gloss and blush, not blue-red.

Some folks don’t really remind of any character. And some don’t embody a story character but they certainly have some of those properties – a stunning and beautiful profile and impossibly long fingers that move like feathers, highly theatrical and romantic at once.

Jen is another expression of Bright Winter, quite beyond the naivete of Snow White. Design = Colour + Line. Fully half of a PCA session is concerned with the lines. This colouring can be painted into lines that are very adult, with a far-reaching wisdom, fully grown and ripe with experience, if you see where I’m going. Wear red. Wear velvet. Have a hairstyle that’s luscious. Where does supernatural meet sumptuous, as it does in Jennifer? Rhinestone. Black, but not industrial. Black, but not diesel black or office chair black, those are all Dark Winter.  How do we make black yummy? Beading. Shine. Swirl effects. Lace. Big hair. A darkly luscious Marilyn Monroe.

You understand that I get carried away with words, right? And the image gets bigger than life because it’s fun to see where things will go. Don’t picture a red velvet leotard and a push up bra. Just saying, there are way more kinds of great women in the world than Sweet&Sunny.

Step into your own power. You saw that happen in our mirror when we analyzed your colouring. In Sweet&Sunny or Soft&Dreamy colours, you were literally not there. We couldn’t see you. You were not in the room. Be who you came here to be.

You can convey these pictures with one tiny item. It takes barely anything for the viewer to make a connection. Mary Kay Crystalline eyeshadow highlight, pure as the driven snow, and a mouth-watering accessory, a shiny pomegranate juice wallet. Voila. Not a high wire act.

2. When you wish you were anything else

The tough love section. And please believe me when I tell you that I do love you. For every one of you who is feeling exposed, who is trying something new, who can’t find that hiding place when it was right there yesterday, I have nothing but love and respect for what you’re trying to do.

When your colouring was analyzed, your conscious and subconscious minds got a wake up call they didn’t see coming. I get it.  I was it.

I could have stayed there. Nothing bad would have happened. There is no pretty or ugly. There is no wrong or right. My face is not the same colour as my arms. You can see my Dad but my features are less focused. I know, you can see that for yourself.

Once we see a new way of thinking, we can choose to absorb it or reject it. Our call.  Walk away from it if your heart and intuition say N.O.W.A.Y.

I looked at the Winter makeup and saw a clown. I could see nothing else. And being a Winter, I’m always right. Just ask me. Others might be right but I’m more right. I got compliments the first day, but No, Sir, That Is Not Me.

On the other hand, winters are hard on themselves and they are smart. Winters are good at living at the rules they set for others. They can separate emotion from the problem or the job. So do the job. It’s a sweater. Buy it cheap. If you were the analyst back then and I had been your client, what would you have said to me? Try it for a month. I did. Took me 5 days and then it couldn’t come fast enough. 4 years later, it’s still coming and it will for you too.

You do not have to be perfect. I know, words lost on Winters.

While you’re separating things, separate colours from styles. Every body type, fashion preference, weight issue or non-issue, age, and comfort zone exists in every type of colouring.

A reader:

I was convinced I was a summer, maybe a soft summer.  I had been analyzed as a summer in the past, and advised never to wear gold jewelry.  I like foggy, misty colors.  Pretty much my entire wardrobe is muted blues, violets, & greens, plus black & gray, which I thought complemented my gray (once ash blonde) hair & blue eyes. I’m not arguing with [the] evaluation — I agreed with her that my complexion evened out and livened up with the BW drapes —  but I don’t like bright colors!  Especially red. Reds and pinks make me queasy.   Just looking at my BW color fan makes my head hurt. What to do?  How to embrace an identity of Bright Winter and supposedly present my best self, when the only thing from your BW wisdom that resonates with me is a fondness for tailored, glamorous, nearly formal clothing?

Me:

Part of this is my fault. In describing these colours as highly pure and energized so you could distinguish them on a scale of every possible colour including the other Winters, people heard NEON and felt like STROBE.

Textile colour exceeds human saturation. You’re picturing an extreme and you’ve painted it head to toe.

In What It Takes To Look Normal, we talked about how strawberry red doesn’t look bling on you, it just looks like medium red. I’m not sure how many more tips I can come up with.

The best advice really is to try it for a little while.

Reader:

“Well, you have to start. Do it for a month” is that in my case I’d have to throw out and replace just about everything I own —  and everyone seems to agree that BW is hard to shop for!

Me:

That’s a Winter’s world. Be perfect or do nothing. Why is perfect necessary? Can we put it on hold for a year?

Everyone who learned their colouring replaced everything they own over about 2 years. It’s important to NOT throw anything out. Those items will be how you evaluate progress and make comparisons.

And “everyone” will only be as accurate as “everyone” ever is, which is to say barely. If you listened to “everyone” about other things in your life, you’d know what you did when you were 16 and heard the “everyone” voice for the first time. Live your own experience. Make one move. Wear one sparkling bracelet with one charm on it that has meaning to you and gives you energy. Your little intention that you will open your heart.

There is definitely a bright winter stereotype of vaudeville costumes. I’ve had a role in perpetuating that, probably a big role. The irony is that this is the only coloring that doesn’t look like a silver bullet in these colors.

We’re saying to choose pure pigmentation, nothing more.  Dressing as The Flash isn’t the plan.

The colours looked brighter under the PCA lights. Those are seriously honest lights. They need to be. Same with O.R. lighting. The surgeon has to see the earliest signs of changes in colour of tissues. Some professions have brutal lighting but you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Regular lighting is indirect and bounces off all sorts of objects, which is why close enough is often good enough in foundation. Our brain adjusts a lot, like all the white we think we see that a painter would not paint white. We don’t need accuracy to survive so we didn’t evolve to see it on our own. To survive and reproduce, all evolution really cares about, we need to draw accurate information from our surroundings, which we do by being less absolute. We make correct approximations. Not good enough for a colour analyst.

If you love heathery colours, wear them. My teenagers get along splendidly well wearing what they like. If this is a good plan for you, PCA can save you money even here by suggesting you not buy anything too costly. The clearness of Bright Winter colouring will drain other colours, reducing them into a tired old item that’s been washed a lot. There is no way I know to make those colours interesting on you, if they get noticed at all. Put your cash someplace else.

Biggest part of helping someone is teaching them to help themselves.

Biggest part of helping yourself is answering this: What are you willing to do?

Let’s break it into steps. You decide if you’re willing.

Action Plans

1. Do nothing for a month. Not one thing. Let the whole PCA sit on the highest shelf in the pantry. Leave it there. If your Season grows legs and moves in the night or starts making chirping sounds and bugs you enough, doing something will become the path of least resistance. For now, your best decision is to stay where you are.

Action step: Give this (and your analyst) a chance. Change will be unsettling. The iChing said

“Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.”

Deepak said something similar in the 7 Spiritual Laws of Success. I read one daily. Today, try #2 in the Law of Detachment.

2. Choices. You can choose to look for every reason why it won’t work. Dog trainers experience this day in, day out. My dog is different and not one of your 40 ideas will work. At the end of the day, the trainer’s hands are tied. Keep the dog you have. You made it be the way it is so part of you is already OK with that. Dogs and owners train each other, the dogs doing the massive majority of it.

Action step: Start small. Buy a wallet or nail polish. We still see it as part of you. Wear a sparkly something. I favour these at Macy’s. Simple, symmetrical, repeating, balanced, all good Winter words.

3. Don’t wear the makeup. Or any makeup. Half of women don’t and wouldn’t and don’t care.

Many women wouldn’t have a PCA at all simply because makeup is uncomfortable. Many wouldn’t be trained as analysts only because they’re uncertain about applying makeup on themselves, let alone others.  Sell who you are. Women will think, “Someone like me. I’ll be comfortable with her.”

Many who would bring so much to this career hold back. They worry that they don’t wear makeup and won’t fit into an image industry. Think there’s no market sector that doesn’t wear makeup and still wants to look great? Lord.

Action step: Do it as a group. If I’m writing an article, I’ve gathered from the many emails that the audience must be wide. Here’s another market sector to open up. The New Bright Winter Support Group. Many reading this have figured out this colouring. They could offer the most valuable kind of help. What did you do? How did you think about it? How long did it take to get comfortable? What’s still hard and how are you managing it? Of the advice out there, what do you just ignore? Do you have a vision you’re moving towards in your choices?

4. Two sessions. If you live near the analyst and you know makeup is a problem, ask ahead if you can split the visit in two parts. PCA first, makeup in 2 months. Every analyst should be offering some kind of progress visit after a few months. If you’re hitting the brakes as we get to the end of the analysis, the makeup will go in one ear and out the other. You’ll be processing a thousand things and wanting to get out of there. If you want to sit in your car and weep, you should be free to go do that.

But don’t turn yourself into a victim, ay? In your life, you’ve gotten lots of advice you didn’t take. This can be the same. Here’s a Bright Winter thing: emotional vulnerability on a giant scale. Spring’s emotion and sweet optimism mixed with Winter where everything happens on a grand scale, and drama soon becomes melodrama. The emotional vulnerability is laid out over and over only to have it shot down.  Hopelessness sets in. Rein all that back in. Get out of your life. Look down at yourself from a balcony.

Action step: Winter excels at big perspectives. Go there. “Instead of finding everything about my appearance that I don’t like, I guess I better find the things about me that I do like and notice those for a while. Have I being systematically brainwashing myself over the years? OK, so I can’t unlearn everything as fast as my PCA experience did, but I can take it slow and re-examine a lot of things.”

Energy flows along behind attention. Get conscious about where you’re putting yours because you are literally telling yourself the story of your life. From the balcony, what is the story of your life? “She is going to…”

5. Let’s try out some voices. See if you can recognize yours. There is no wrong or right.

 Christine was right when she said that it’s easy to see the changes. I understand her writing better now but I like my clothes and I’m going to keep them. Interesting experience but I probably won’t do much with it.

 I might try those colors but the people in my life won’t like me wearing them. When I told Christine that, she looked at me funny and said, “Who gives a shit?” but that’s just Christine and she’s kind of hard. She must have felt really strongly about this topic because it was the only time she swore.  She said, “Stop abdicating your power and decide for yourself how you wear your hair and what clothes you choose. Let someone else control the little things, and while you were distracted, poof!, they’re controlling your big things.” Whatever. Might work for her but I care what my husband thinks and I want to look good for him. Good thing her husband is a True Winter, they probably deserve each other, imagine living in that house.

Okie dokie, something is going to have to change. I could see that in Summer colors, I looked like I was being prepped for surgery. In Autumn colors, my skin and eyes reflected light like a farm pickup truck that hasn’t seen rain in a month. I had pea soup skin. The lighter Springs weren’t so bad, but I looked like a horse that has its winter coat. Puffed. No sleek planes and angles. Wider and duller. Am I really going to spend the next 40 years of my life in clothes that tell other people that I’m not really here because I’m nervous about the color of a sweater? My 90 year-old self would kick my butt around the block.

I know that to get anywhere in life, you have to know where you start. PCA gave me that. I got handed my Owner’s Manual, or a chapter of it. I get to decide where and how to drive the car.

Now I need to picture where I’m going. A start place and a going towards place. Two points define a line. I now understand the space from here to there. It know it will get clearer once I start because that’s how life always works.

Action step: Celebrate that you can wear black quite well. Do you know what others would give? I mightn’t advise that you wear a turtleneck of it. Black is a little rough on Bright Winter, even though you’re a Winter. A colour that’s too cold and dark will need adjusting and it’s hard to make sunlit black.

A colour that’s too cold, even if the saturation and darkness levels are Bright Winter, will cause blue shadows and need adjusting, even though you’re a Winter. Some of my drapes might do that if you’re a little warmer than they are, though both you and they reside under the Bright Winter umbrella. That’s a common happening in Bright Winter colouring, male and female. Every human can’t hope to be equally represented in every way when there are only 12 categories.

Let’s be real. Every Winter will have black pants while they’re trying to figure stuff out (if they didn’t before) and so they should. Their colours go well with black.

6. Start with colours you already like. Periwinkle and turquoise are usually easy.

Move towards purer pigmentation. That’s all it is. Go top to bottom.

7. You like soft colours. You already like gray. Wear more. Rely heavily on neutral colours.

Action step: Little adjustments the next time you buy pants or decide which pants to keep.

The Winter lineup on the bottom.

Winter gray is made of black and white. Might look a touch blue or red.

Pink and purple gray are not so good. A red gray like the cords on the right side is better.

Blue gray is ok too if it’s close to white. Rainclouds and pigeon medium-blue-gray won’t be the best choice you can  make.

Winter white pants are good.

Trade soft blue for more blue, 3rd from left.

The top center pants are not bad at all. They’re just very dark. I like dark clean gray better than black but it’s very dependent on the person. Some Bright Winters have beige hair and wear black exceptionally well, no problems of any sort even in a turtleneck.

8. Forget about contrast. Revisit it in a few months.

Action step: I’m going to build me an outfit on the internet.

Learn Polyvore. Learning your Season is much like learning software. You Google and YouTube about it. In the end, you figure it out by messing with it, getting some stuff wrong, remembering what worked, setting up new maps in your head till they are easy and automatic.

On the internet, it’s free. As many times as I need.

My pants are going to be gray. Already own those. I’m going to wear a light peach colored sweater. Peach is hardly ballistic. The wool will soften the look and the colours. I might go for mint too. Today, I give myself permission to buy anything I want. The only deal is, I can’t pick anything I would normally buy.

I’m going to wear a white blouse under it. Easy and pretty. I’m not even going to think about shiny fabric for a year.

Maybe it’s Christmas. I’m going to pin one sweet little Jingle Bell to my cardigan as a brooch. Maybe a sparkly angel. No other jewelry. Actually that doesn’t sound very hard.

Christine asked me to do her one favour. I can hear her voice. “Please, don’t buy a brown or black purse. Please. Anything else. Pick crystal gray. Doesn’t have to be fuchsia sequins. Just not functional.”

I hid the big colour inside a purse.  That allover purple purse, we’ll just put it up there in the corner, top shelf of the pantry.

Saw some jewelry I had to have.

If I saw this on another woman, I can admit that I wouldn’t brace myself.

At first, I got many Soft Summer clients. I know what the lesson was. Learn from them to be a nicer version of yourself.

Lately, it’s Bright Winter. I still cannot figure out the lesson so we’ll be here for awhile.

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The post 2 Extremes of Bright Winter appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Not entitling this Dramatic Classic because I don’t want to imply that I have any expertise in body line assessment and the fashion choices therefrom. But I have opinions, oh boy. Since I’m a Dramatic Classic myself, I would like your help in adjusting what I could do better before I spend money.

Recently, we showed some softer wardrobe choices for True Winter, for those who don’t feel that making coats out of Dalmatians quite describes them. In the same post, we saw choices for Dark Autumns who identify better with mink than shearling.

We talked about synonyms. For example, in the Light Seasons, light could mean not dark, and also not heavy, not complicated, not aggressive, and good-humoured.  Softness as it applies to True Winter and Dark Autumn would not imply more graying of colour, since that contradicts the colour attributes of those groups to some degree. We looked for synonyms for softness that found the intersection between the word soft and its other possible meanings – perhaps velvety, creamy, rounded, flowing, smooth, supple, decorated, satiny. Soft has many other renditions, in soft tastes, scents, touch, sounds and music, and shape, form, and texture. Today, we’re going to look at all those to find expressions of sharpness.

Dressing for Sex Appeal and Wealth

This is not the same as Dressing for Sex and Money.

What Is and Is Not Sex Appeal

What does sex appeal look like? Or what looks like sex appeal? I don’t have to have sex or even want sex. The point is about telling the world that you’re fully engaged in life. Sexuality is part of life as a grown-up. The thought of broadcasting sexuality never enters my mind and doesn’t have to. Sex appeal comes across just by looking like me and for every woman when she looks like her real self. When I wear who I am, I am saying, “I trust my gifts.” That’s the seduction.

Everyone woman is extremely beautiful. She doesn’t have any choice. The switch flips to ON when the X’s line up. Female energy was drafted that way in tandem with female anatomy. I’m the guy in the room who never laughs at stand-up comedy, talk show humour, Elf, or any other funny person, Robin Williams only sometimes. If you can get past all the fu** during the movie, The Heat, I had tears running down my face. There’s a point to this story, which I’ll get to here, many digressions I can feel coming on. Sandra Bullock has an athletic Natural body shape, to which has been added lots of drama of a swashbuckling type, rather than a Nature walk type.

With neither she nor we being conscious of it, we see what happens to our perception of her (played out hilariously but accurately by the characters and script) in different clothes. When the story needed her to be boring, the wardrobe folks knew just what to do. Put that body in a suit. It never manages to look right. She looks awkward, just how the story needs her to be.

As when wearing someone else’s colours, there is no wrong or bad or ugly. Every woman overflows with beauty, sex appeal, and femininity. But there are better choices for those to come across. Sandra, gorgeous woman and a gorgeous suit, combine to create no excitement whatsoever. Something gut-busting happens to the suit and whaddaya know, she starts looking great. Eventually, she appears in battle gear. Now we get why the movie is called The Heat. We feel relieved, relaxed, and suddenly very interested in her. She’s available to us in every way. In the suit, her presence, drawing power, and magnetism came in around negative 20. The army gear was closest to her brand of sensuality. Wearing it, she looked most feminine.

However your colours and body type were intended to seduce is irrelevant. It goes on autopilot when you stay true to them. Bubble gum and cherries perfume can be fantastic on some women, and be confusing at best on another who could have been so much more elevated, expressed, and attractive simply by changing to a casbah patchouli event. A forest makes no sense smelling like apple pie, right? Projecting authenticity comes across as sex appeal, as “I’m in the game. I know what looks good on me.”, “If you throw me the ball, I’ll know what to do with it.” Which extends to, “I am  capable. You can trust me with responsibility, decisions, and money.”

Confusing sex appeal with media-sexy has women of all ages giving it away, forcing it away. That’s not sex appeal, it’s despair, but many women compare themselves to it. Trust me, the pushiness has nothing to do with attraction. It’s capitalizing on assets. Men are built to know the difference.

All I’m saying is you’re lovely as you are. You are enough as you are. I’m a little disappointed if you still wear orange when you’re a Soft Summer. It’s not peaceful. I’m very OK with you wearing it if you know it doesn’t look good but you love wearing it anyhow. That’s peaceful in a different way.

Many women, especially the 18 to 30 group, cannot tune out ridiculous sexualizing of women.  I’m not saying to ignore it, that’s hardly realistic. We all know it’s there. We all know that 90% of advertising involving women’s bodies is drastically altered. A mediator might say it can be there, it can matter, and you’re still enough, and what we can do about it to help you find a better peace.

How I find peace:

1. Meditate. My favourite is from Deepak Chopra. Listen to it with earpods if you can, now that is a trip. In meditation, you’ll find optimism. Joined with the forces that create worlds, how can you ever be alone?

We’re programmed for action. It’s intoxicating to to have 20 new Likes and 30 new emails to answer and a new diet and a new resolution and to be doing all the time. Sitting still is not intoxicating by exhilaration, it’s intoxication by nurturing. Like eating spinach. Except, we are programmed for instant gratification. Not the week after you ate the spicach,  let alone 20 days or 20 years later.

Our brain is always in fight or flight. It always sees things it thinks it has to protect us from. As Dr. Changizi explains so fantastically well in The Vision Revolution, our brain has evolved brilliant ways of keeping us safe. The larger problem is that in fight or flight, the brain is incapable of learning. It can be a stressor with a toxicity of its own. Neuroscience tells us that the sustained stress actually shrinks the hippocampus (cognitive function, adaptation, learning). Like an over-protective parent, we need to find some freedom to spread our wings. The brain thing is rooted so far in that we’ll not dig clear of it. The only way is by quieting it. With stillness, maturity, and accountabiltiy, we can see clarity.

2. Move. Bloodflow is an important pat of neuroplasticity. Brain, body, spirit, what happens to one happens to all. And it puts a better frame around your life.

3. Laugh at it. Fear-based illusions, such as comparing to media-women, can’t stand up to being laughed at. They can’t find the toe hold they need to anchor in. I meet women and we’re divided in two camps. Those where media got into their head and those where it doesn’t. Doesn’t matter where we live, what we do, our age. Is the difference how much we need/want/care about the company of men? I don’t know but if I can help one woman be free of the you-are-not-good-enough chatter in her head, I want to be there. Read Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman.

4. Make a space  for what’s wrong about sexualizing women’s bodies in the pursuit of money. An important friend shared this link  (Pinterest, Don’t Compare Yourself) with me. I sent it to my daughters, son, nieces, nephews, sister women instantly.  Girls, boys, and young women and men need to talk openly about it. There is nothing wrong with us. Not one single thing. We. Are. Perfect. I. Am. Perfect. You. Are. Perfect. They just convinced us there were  things that needed fixing to sell us stuff, and damn but we bought into it like crazy. If everyone woman I see is perfect in herself, how can that not apply to me as well?

Why It’s Good to Look Like Wealth

Not …Look Like Money. Different thing.

What looks like wealth? Similar discussion. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Certain bodies automatically make certain lines look richer. Sandra’s body will make a banker’s suit look cheaper than it is. Looking like wealth is not related our bank account, money per se, or equating success with money. They’re only loosely related in my book. Not about where we shop or comparison to others. Those backfire by setting up too many more-than and less-than relationships that block the multiple and powerful ways in which outside influences can help us.

It’s about wealth as synonymous with maximal happiness, because isn’t that what wealth is? That, in turn, is synonymous with success. Maximum happiness (success) is maximum peace. A particular style on a certain body conveys abundance, which speaks to creation, fulfillment, sharing, and enough. The connection and belonging says, “These two things are extensions of each other. They share something real.” To us the viewers, it feels peaceful to look at.

Wearing the same jacket everyone else is wearing says, “I follow. I obey. I am willing to negotiate myself, instead of celebrating myself, to accommodate a magazine, a friend, a man, a job.” Or  maybe it says, “I am imposing this effort on myself to get something.” That sets up struggle, and in turn resistance, and winds up pushing what we want even further away. Not peaceful to be or to look at.

Telling the world (and yourself) that you live an enriched, independent, expanding, self-directed life will happen by choosing a different jacket. In the black T and cargo pants, we felt Sandra tell us about being unconstrained, unbridled, and without inhibitions. That’s the truth of her particular energy. It isn’t the truth of mine. When we find our own, we all express autonomy, individuality, liberty. A free human. Now that’s a beautiful thing.

When body and line, or body and colour, are the same, they connect. There were meant to be together like silver and moonlight, like forest sounds and forest smells. We like it. We want to engage. Tension flows away. We want to stay longer and keep the good feelings coming. Colour Analysis, like Line Analysis, is the Theory of Relativity. When it feels good, time goes by faster. You’ve discovered your brand of wealth. You are closer to your peace.

The Season – Your Natural Colours

In 12 Season personal colour analysis, Soft Autumn is the Neutral Season (meaning a group of natural colouring that is a blend of a warm and a cool source Season) that is mostly Autumn with some influence from Summer’s colour properties.

Autumn overall implies golden heat, muted colour, and darkness. Summer’s colours suggest blued coolness, muted colour again, and a lighter colour selection.  Since both are muted, their combined Season is very soft, softer than either Autumn or Summer’s already soft starting place. As opposed to the type of softness we were seeking in the Softer True Winter article linked above (where soft did not mean muting of colour), here, soft really does mean muting or graying of colour. With soft colour (muted) and Summer’s presence (soft as in traditional ideas of femininity) in Soft Autumn, how do we create a wardrobe for a person with sharper lines?

We can’t do sharpness of colour, since muted colour is a prerequisite of Soft Autumn. We can’t do sharp as darkness either. Soft Autumn colours are very soft, quite warm, and medium light to medium dark. It’s the lightest Autumn. You can easily read without turning on a lamp. Because it’s on the sunny side of Autumn, the colours feel bathed in late afternoon light. Not candlelight, that’s Dark Autumn magic.

We need some other expression of sharpness, the same one that the body itself expresses. That’s when our clothes make sense, when their lines and colours are the same as the body they go on.

The Line

Dramatic Classic is familiar to us recently as one of the 13 Image Identities in David Kibbes’ 1987 book,  Metamorphosis. The terms have been used in other style contexts and seem to have a similar meaning.

There are bodyline experts with the skill to join any of the 12 Season palettes with each of the 10 to 12 body types. Watching them work is quite fascinating. Their results are transforming, startlingly so. My worldview is jolted forward every time I see it happen. I am not one of those body type experts. I’ll defer to their greater knowledge every time.

My Polyvores are not textbook perfect.  Someone you hire as a line expert is expected to adhere to the highest potential of knowledge and practice, as I do in a personal colour consultation. Here, I’m doing an adaptation. Fashion that doesn’t work in my life doesn’t work period. It’s here to do me the favour, not the other way around. Sure, the shoes below should be more pointed in the toe, but my feet will hurt the day his do.

Classic always seems to me very medium. Nothing is extreme or irregular, in body size or facial features. The lines and angles are on the sharp side of medium, like Jacqueline Onassis, as opposed to a person whose lines and angles are on the rounder side of medium, like Grace Kelly.

As with the 12 Seasons of natural colouring, there are very few averages in the real world. To know for sure, you should ask someone who understands the entire scope of the subject. I’m a Classic but I’m told my eyes are big in my face, though C types usually have features that are pretty even. I guess my big teeth even out my big eyes, though my lips don’t. I’m shorter than usual for a DC but my body parts are evenly distributed.

My taste is conventional. When I wear unique or creative items, I get “?????” looks. When I think I’m stretching the limits, my kids tell me I look plain – because they can compare me to the full range of how people look. I can only compare me to me, which is one more reason why self-colour-analysis and self-line-analysis tends not to work.

An interesting question: Are women good at picking out clothing for their body lines? I don’t know. If it’s like colour, they run 50% in terms of how many people have a sense of their colouring and how many of their best colours they could choose. I had absolutely no sense of body line, like zero. I’d wear whatever I saw around me. Life and shopping are so much better now. How I’m treated and how I treat myself are so much better. Like colour, you don’t have to be perfect. Being halfway better improves appearance by three quarters. If you would like to learn from someone who really dose understand how to make the very best of body line, follow the wild papillon at Polyvore. You’ll find clothing choices explained and many collections of Seasons and styles, including a few different Soft Autumns.

Interesting that no Polyvore collection comes together any faster than any other, even the Soft Classic Summers. We may feel that all this knowledge will make shopping truly impossible, but that’s not what happens. With a little practice, we get better at seeing ourselves and knowing our stores.

The Meeting Place

Where’s the meeting place of Soft Autumn’s colour language and a sharp classic line?

Autumn does Business Chic incredibly well. The drama part escalates the picture to High Stakes Executive. Makes me think of the projection of Ivanka Trump. She is not medium enough to be a classic, has some fullness in her features, and who knows what Season she is, but her professional clothing style is close to DC at times. Maybe Julianne Moore could be DC. The whole Bulova type brands, you know? Lord&Taylor has all sorts of nice Ivanka wear for classics, sharp and soft.

What might be an issue?

Autumn texture. Texture is too broken up. Ivanka is sleek, tight, clean, and organized, not earthy and natural. I also doubt she’s an Autumn. Julianne has much more texture (freckles, hair) and she may have some Autumn, though I doubt it’s as much as is often suggested. I believe in wearing what you are, so Julianne would add a little texture (snakeskin or metallic, not fluffy or chunky wool).

Animal prints could go either way depending on the item.

A suede belt? Probably too natural for a Classic. A suede skirt? Not sure so I tried it, picking the least adorned one I could find.

Leather jacket (leather pants should be worn by nobody, but then I’m a Classic)? I think so.

Plastic, because it’s really smooth? I don’t see it as natural enough for any Autumn.

Be careful with hair highlights. They can look random, which translates to a little messy and uncontrolled on a very organized and controlled woman and her wardrobe. This is a nice colour, though many Soft Autumns are significantly darker of hair colour.  The hair style and the person seem a bit natural, but it’s a good colour without looking obviously processed or busy.

We can associate Summer with flowy fabric. Not all of them. Don’t apply the Season stereotype to anyone, about any aspect of colour, line, or shape. Soft drape won’t stand up on this body, it risks looking limp. Limp doesn’t express sex appeal and wealth.

How else can we interpret flow? From thesaurus.com,

• continuity: as in gradual colour transitions, great on Soft Seasons
• series: so maybe a monochromatic outfit, which can look expensive because it’s not irregular
• connections: as repetitions, very good on sharpened classics.

Summer circles? The person is way way more classic than they are dramatic. If the shape is sleek and a little sharp, could be fine. Clean and organized work for sure.

10 Rules of Dramatic Classic According to Me

I’m a DC Dark Winter. What I think applies to most sharp-side classics is:

1. Smooth, especially around the face. If it’s not, we’ll push each other further in opposite directions as opposite things do.I’ll look flat and 2D while the item looks like a bathmat.

2. No mess, all organizers welcome. Even ruching is an issue but a little low down on the side is ok. Scarves are complicated but a simple one that lies flat and is arranged a little dramatically could be good on a Summer blend. I doubt traditional lace will work, she’ll drain energy like a dripping tap, but there is a version of everything for every body. I just haven’t seen lace for all the body types yet. You can build natural looks wtih lower budgets. This look is harder because there’s nowhere to hide. Goodness knows, I still try every day.

3. Little or no explicit decoration. No ruffles, peplums, bows, lace, fuss. Even prettiness can start looking frumpish on this body when you’re not paying attention. No open toe shoes but sandals ok, slingbacks excellent.

4. Not cute or young. Cap sleeves, borders, a hint of bunny ears, kitten heels, they just look silly, not cute or young.

5. Nothing weird. It’s a medium and symmetrical body. How wide could the tolerance for weird be? Where would weird find a home? No pink briefcases, patchwork raincoats. Your Natural teenage daughter might say your clothes are plain, old, and boring when she sees pictures of them, just like she’ll say the colours are dull if she’s a Winter (she won’t recognize them as plain or dull when they’re on your body, under your face).

6. I never know why I feel so negative for crew necks since they’re so classic. Boat necks are worse on me, I think. The neck has to slice up or slice down, and slice narrow, to keep the voltage high, which is what I really want in this life. A crewneck might be OK if there were a collar necklace and the rest of the top were great  or had a superb dramatic print. Cowlneck could work well on this colouring but I’d need to be shown how . Asymmetry or sharp pleats on one shoulder could make a crewneck better.

7. A certain amount of busy-ness in a print is fine but there’s limits. Damn straight I’m a good DC with helmet hair to prove it. Same with a purse, which should have plenty of organizers inside. If they’re on the outside, all those zippers and snaps look busy and messy and feel annoying and complicated.

8. About stripes: diagonal and vertical good, horizontal trickier, ok if thin and regular.

9. For purses: nothing squishy, fairly square, and not real big or real small. Picture the purse version of a banker suit. Now, we’re in low gear, giving it gas, and we’re towing.

10. No visible logos even if it says Armani, which is a super good DC brand and seldom (ever?) has visible logos. Hugo Boss is right up there too (Bloomingdales has some great items).

What I Don’t Know About Sharp Classic Autumn

1. Length of jackets. I think it’s tight as a cropped style at the waist or long just after the break of the hip but not further. This may depend on height. I’m not tall (5’4″).

2. Plaid is usually good on Autumn but I can’t quite imagine what it looks like for Summer + Classic + sharp.

3. Pearls on a Summer blend could be fine. This whole topic interests me a lot, how much the different Seasons actually could express the style stereotypes inside the style types, like their own dialects.

For instance, those equestrian boots in 6 – equestrian anything is automatic wealth of a classic sort. Ski anything is wealth of a dramatic and natural sort.

The link bracelets in 3 and 5. Links are good on Autumn. They can run a little biker on me. I know a DC Bright Winter, they’d be even more biker on her.

Natural elements are good on Autumn – the leaf necklace in 4. I don’t see it on Winters. This is almost astonishing to me. Like seeing it all in a new way. Paraphrasing from The Polar Express, “It doesn’t matter where the train is going. What matters is whether you decide to get on.” I’m on all the way to wherever the Destination is. I hope to see you there.

Is a sharp classic from the Summer colouring groups less sharp than a Winter? Kate Middleton seems to me a sharpish classic. Wearing those styles is when she looks great. I don’t see Diana’s big outward natural energy. Diana always looks big in photos, even thumbnails. Kate looks smaller despite her height, and more contained. I did wonder about a Natural energy but she has so much symmetry.

Symmetry feels formal, I would guess, which is where the Winter stereotype of “formal, ceremonial” must have come from since so  many Winters have symmetric features. Most certainly, not all Winters have them. Asymmetry feels informal, which feels livelier (warmer?) and works so well on many Springs. Many Springs have that cheerleader/BFF feeling of Natural body types, but there are plenty of Classic, Romantic, and Gamine Springs. Anyhow, everyone will have a worthy opinion about Kate. Kate is softer than Mrs. Onassis, the image of DC. She wears that hairstyle well. Is it just because she’s young? Michelle Pfeiffer is quite sharp and she’d be a Summer. I really wonder how much Season would influence line within a given body type.

I would also like to know if women have different degrees or tolerances within a group, as they have with colour. Inside our 12 Seasons, we find our best individual expression. Body type must be the same, since we can’t divide all humanity in 10-13 groups within which the advice will apply to each person equally. Every woman expresses her Season her own way, even with the same body type. Like the 12 Seasons, it’s not so much a rigid gospel as a way of bringing some kind of measurable, teachable, reproducible objectivity to our native lines.

Body type analysis is a guide for my Light Summer Soft Natural sister to not default back to her True Autumn Gamine styles, for which we are all grateful. My Dark Autumn Gamine friend finds affirmation and confidence to wear her knit red dress with yellow footprints (I’m not making this up) in her small farm town. Suddenly people see, expect, and love her snapping wit, instead of expecting a TV Mom when she wears more conventional outfits and taking offence at a style of humour that was so big, it took them by surprise.

Back to the clothes, some of these outfits would work for Kate and some may be too masculine. She needs more decoration. Again, is it because she’s young? Softer in the range of DCs? Not Classic at all? Because we’re used to seeing her items that cost 10 times the amounts that I controlled above?

4. How much asymmetry? Not a lot but some is fine. To me, the softer Classic is much more symmetric than this one. I really like the neck and flat pleats of the pinkish dress in 4.

5. How much flare? Bootcut is ok if you can’t find straight leg. The coat up there in 6 is good in the top and in that it flares but doesn’t flounce in the skirt. Worn by a classic body, would it look like two styles fused into one garment? Not sure. Maybe better for a softer classic.

6. If you find black soles on boots – you gotta know when to fold ’em. Soft Autumn has pretty good darkness and the contrast from boot to sole may increase the overall sharpness.

7. Gray is great on Summers and Autumns, and good at becoming what’s around it. I put in that jacket in the lower L of 6 because the style is good. The gray is too sharp though, better for Dark Autumn or Dark Winter. The color necklace is too soft, too colourful, and too irregular is my guess. It doesn’t belong. I was trying to use colours to take attention away from an imperfect gray. I don’t think this outfit would really work on a Soft  Autumn but I wanted to try it. So many good things about Polyvore, the ultimate in comparison shopping and no-limit outfit trial runs.

8. Set 6 is where I experimented. The top R group is probably Soft Summer but I’d try it in a store. A cool Soft Autumn might wear the colours. Is the dress too irregular? IDK but I’d try it for that too; it’s smooth around the face.

How much saturation could Soft Autumn wear? That aqua dress just to the R of the numeral 6, I’d certainly lay the palette on it and see what happens.

The crystal pleat coppery skirt? Again, IDK if it would be wrong on DC, but I like it a lot. A line expert could probably tell you how to wear  it.

What watches? There’s a lot of watches? The batteries ran out long ago. Don’t replace them, save money and buy perfume.

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The post A Sharper Classic Soft Autumn appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Signature/STYLE is a newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. The information you want is over at the top of the right column of this page. Right there >>>

This is a pre-release announcement for the upcoming issue which should be released this coming week.

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A new way of seeing something that I thought I understood is one of the most generous gifts I could receive. This Earrings issue ranks at that level.

Earrings. Among my top favourite items. Who really notices one more basically-the same-colour lipstick? Earrings can cost the same or not much more and explore big new territory for you and everyone who sees you.

Here is a timeline of how the newsletter comes together.

Day 1: First, I go through the 20 or 30 pages of links that Rachel (the colour and image expert who oversees the image archetype section of the newsletter) sends and place them into their Seasons.

Still Day 1: That job is not even half completed when the second job needs doing. The second job is, buy one or two amazing pieces from the Winter/YangClassic section that are part of me before I even own them. This time, three were bought.

Days 2-3: Sorting links, not even stopping when eating, so amazed am I by what each link opens to.

Day 4: Now, the links are all sorted. And I am (and you will be) thinking, “OH!!!!!OH!!!!! I get it!!”

Or in the words of the eloquent Kaarin Huffman, our analyst in NC, “You mean, it’s ok!!?? I just do this and everything’s good!??”, spoken through tears of joy and hopeful laughter, “I can stop trying to look like everybody else?!”

Maybe that’s the part of PCA (personal colour analysis) and PIA (personal image analysis) that I’ll never get over.

Early Day 5: Race to the mall, know what risks to take and what to ignore. Being completely and confidently in control of a shopping experience is grounds for euphoria. Three pairs later that I’m still congratulating myself for.

Because I’m as guilty as anyone of slouching back to my safety zone, freely admitting it’s a type of laziness. I don’t need safe&shielded, but I will choose it over accident&nonsense or forced&tried too hard, the three ineffective visual extremes. The fourth extreme is the one I want. To get it, I am willing to practice. That one is intelligent&modern. In 2015, authenticity reads as a form of intelligence.

Later Day 5: Back to the Earrings Issue. I made the N and the C newsletters. While in the Cs, I thought, “Now, how in creation did I miss those??”

You’d think I’d have gotten over the elegance of Rachel’s eye and taste, but I really haven’t. Each issue is a new adventure. Nobody gets contemporary shopping and how stuff looks next to bodies like this woman does.

Big sales right now that will only get better. I buy 2 more pairs. Averaged price for the lot, $23. You will never leverage a purchase better than when you know what to buy in advance. Then, it’s just a click of the Place Order button when the sale notifications come in.

Days 6-9: Building your newsletters, putting thought into offering you the most Right Now.Today. education in effective appearance.

Day 10: Where we are now, attending to final details, almost ready to send. Women, welcome to the Earrings Issue.  Absolutely stunningly beautiful choices.

The first Feature section contains big catalogs of silver and gold explained by Season, for each image archetype.

The second Feature section illustrates repeating the face shape, eye colour, and other aspects of the Season and IA essences.

Every discipline has boundaries. Since I cannot know Season from photographs, the colour section gives you explanations with word imagery, no face pictures. With Rachel’s work, size and scale are crucial. Therefore, we only linked to websites with a size reference in the product images.

As always with the Signature/STYLE newsletter, products sell out very fast, within days in many cases. Search the product by the same name at Nordstrom, Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Lord and Taylor, Shopbop, Amazon, Google, and any other large retailer you can think of. You will probably be successful. We were.

Days 11-12: Watch your mailboxes. Signature/STYLE: The Earrings Issue will be in yours in the next few days.

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The post Signature/STYLE: The Earrings Issue appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

True Spring Greens

I was divided between the featured picture above the title and this one. Such nice, clear, natural greens. True Spring is really a gentle Season, gentle with sunshine and warmth.  The picture was taken in late May. It’s hard to find these greens in Canada in September.

One day recently, I was thinking about how much I’d like to go back to basics with topics for this website. Out of the blue comes this email from a reader with a perfect idea.

As a true spring (probably, that is) I like wearing green. But I wonder if there are greens that I should stay away from. What about sea green, other blueish greens, emerald green and olive green?  What about periwinkle, purple, and lilac?

Today, less words, more pictures.

The usual disclaimer: These images may help you adjust your eyes to what to look for (and ignore) in stores. I am not able to colour analyze people from pictures. It’s awful hard to colour harmonize clothing or makeup too. In stores, it looks about like this.

If you have any Back to Basics requests, I’d be happy to hear them.

 Yellow Green

Not requested but an important colour for True Spring.

No darker than the purse or the couch.

These have a definite upper darkness limit.

The mirror frame seems muted but the plastic shiny material has some things that could work with the palette.

Olive

Is not really olive but they are olive-like and would act that way as wardrobe neutrals.

True Spring colouring is not flattered by khaki in the sense of camo, canvas, or cargo. Even for Natural archetypes, the garment should not read utility, heavy, or burlap.

On the other hand, sport, party, costume, and even practical are just fine. Lightweight fabric (nylon), sheen or shine, fabric with a little crinkle (taffeta) all help.

Not one of these might be True Spring if we had the real garment in front of us, but they could interact happily in a True spring wardrobe. My top pick is the vest under the word Olive, aqua zipper and all.

Emerald

Depends on what you call emerald. You knew I was going to say that. Clear medium green with a blue tinge comes to my mind. Some see it as yellower so I added a couple of those.

Light Green

Some might tip into neighbor Seasons. The important thing is that they can still work with True Spring.

Medium Green

Darker Green

Plenty dark enough.

Blue Green

Sea green might be in here.

Vest dark enough, maybe even too dark.

Prints

Almost True Spring

In the close enough might be good enough group, depending on the woman doing the wearing and how much it matters to her.

And would it matter a lot to most viewers? No. These colours share a lot with True Spring.

Too far from True Spring

Intersting how bright the green wrap T-shirt looks here compared to how muted in the Almost True Spring panel above.

Some might work for some. Close enough that I had to really look and decide a position. If you’re thinking, “That one looks great to me.”, then it probably is. How big is your ballpark?

Periwinkle

Is not lilac.

The sandal and wallet a bit dark. I wouldn’t put the colour under the chin but as accessories, there is room to move and keep the wardrobe, the woman, and the viewer happy.

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The post True Spring Greens and Periwinkle appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Continuing with our series showing Pantone’s Color of the Year 2017 for the 12 Seasons.

Previous posts are here for the 3 Autumns, and here for the 3 Summers.

The three panels below show Greenery in the swatch card in the lower right corner, in the third row-far right sample, along with other colours for 2017. The colour appears to be bright and warm, with some Spring influence. How will a person coloured with Winter pigments use it?

Every item shown might not fit into the Season exactly. I hope it doesn’t, actually, because that might feed a beastie that thinks everything has to be perfect to work. It totally doesn’t. Colour is for everybody and everybody can do this. What I want for you is to learn how to use fashion retail to your advantage with Every. Single. Purchase. Your colour analyst can show you tips and techniques to help make that much easier.

A personal colour analysis (PCA) palette is like a source of renewable energy. Whatever the fashion climate or era, you pull it out of your purse or pocket and it goes to work for your wardrobe. Although every swatch is the same size in a palette, it doesn’t have to be that way in your closet. In your colour territory, wear as much or as little of any colour as you like.

True Winter

In some ways, True Winter is a very yellow Season, but just because it’s yellow doesn’t mean it’s warm. All human colouring contains yellow. The important question is, which yellow?

True Winter’s is very cool and very saturated, so you can see it in many colours and neutrals. Summer yellow is softer and doesn’t register as much. As all non-native yellows can, True Winter yellow can make people with other colouring look yellow in an unhealthy way. Only True Winter looks entirely normal and present, neither over- nor under-defined, not overheated or jaundiced or sallow, just sitting there wondering what everyone is staring at and how they could possibly make use of this colour.

In the panels, you may see a strong yellow in some items and I’ve included various darkness levels to give you a better idea of how it might look. On your screen, it could look different and hopefully the comparisons give you a general idea.

Greenery out of the box contains someone else’s yellow. True Winter will be more magnificent in emerald, if they migrate over to the image of the bamboo stalks for their colours.

Blue-green has overlaps with True Summer. The handbag under and to the left of the word True could be great for them, in part because the yellow is less obvious (on my screen) than in the earrings below it.

Dark Winter

This Season has a jungle green that we looked at in this post, about Green and Purple for Dark Winter.

The bracelet at the lower left is more jade and could be part of an Autumn wardrobe; the one at the middle right is glassier and appears in the Bright Winter panel. For a Dark Winter woman wearing either one, I’d think, “Great!”

They share more than they differ, are small in area, and  are not right next to her face (colour proximity raises the effect of colour interactions (aka, simultaneous contrast)). Both pieces could participate in ensembles, and better if she removed or replaced the light gold medallion on the jade bracelet with something deeper and shinier.

I’m a big believer in everyone in a Season wearing the entire palette, though how much they wear of each colour and where they use it can have as many interpretations as there are people in the Season. Some have cool-looking skin and warm-looking eyes. Some (like me, depending on who you ask) are the opposite. Whether that is due to undertone or it just is, I don’t know. They all react to colour in the same way.

Cosmetics are applied right on the face, in immediate contact and the closest proximity with natural pigments, so they have to be individualized a bit more. They also interact with skin chemistry. Once you know your Season, this part is easy. You know what not to bother with. You try a few colours with your colour analyst and narrow down to a good place.

The drop earrings and one-shoulder top above it will appear in the post for Springs, which will complete this series. If we asked ourselves about the earrings, “Are they based in yellow or gold?”, they may look more yellow, though somehow they don’t seem candy enough for Spring and have enough of a deep opacity to do interesting things next to yellow green in eyes, which Dark Winters often have.

The top might be also be based in yellow. You might see gold. It’s a little candy and a little jungle. I might see the top better with Dark Winter lipstick, you might love it with Bright Spring neutrals. There are many ways of being right, and when it comes to personal taste, they all count. The other colours in the outfit will find all that they have in common and make sense of them.

Bright Winter

With the Bright Seasons, Greenery is becoming recognizable in its native state. The warm and cool greens in the curled leaf image look about right.

As ever with Winter yellow, it has a sharp quality that makes it hard to call it warm. There is nothing cozy or buttery about it, though in Bright Winter, it is getting slightly sweeter. In the items below, the type of yellow looks more clear and daffodil (Spring, for Bright Winter whose colouring is blend of Winter and Spring) than velvety and gold (an Autumn ingredient, for Dark Winter above, who is coloured with a lot of Winter and a little Autumn).

Neon is neon on everybody. Humans are not made of these kinds of pigments, but the Brights can balance them so that the person and their clothing still appear united. The colour might be used more for accents and accessories than coats and pants. Bright Winter emerald is beautiful on this colouring so I included a few items down the left side. The  multi strand bracelet near the centre has both yellow-green and emerald. I love warm and cool colours together on colouring that has influence from both. The person looks intuitive or tuned-in to themselves in a very cool way.

The green, blue, and white tunic is interesting. It might be Dark Winter but I didn’t care for it with the lipsticks. It might be Bright Spring but those colours faded a bit, though they could certainly use it since the white areas are small. I’ll add it to the Bright Spring panel and we can see what happens.

And it might be Bright Winter; I like it with the white pants.  I always wonder how many of these they sell and to whom. More items might have moved more out the door if the white and periwinkle had been the largest areas, but high five for getting out the box and looking great. PCA is all about that and looking like the original work of art that you are.

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The post Pantone Greenery for the 3 Winters appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Here at last.

With our appearance,

We tell the world, “This is who I am.”

Actually, “This is who I think I am.”

And they respond, “If you say so.”

On our own, we’re usually incorrect or incomplete.

As in life, we must manage our expectations of others.

With this book and the colour palette from your colour analyst, you will learn to manage what they see for your greatest result.

But, guaranteed, your Season cannot be known by reading this book. You need to visit a colour analyst first.

Our best appearance means moving towards ourselves, the image of us painted in our own colours.

You will find your real beauty. Your colours will sing.  The shapes of your facial bones will become slender and focussed. Your ancestry may emerge.

An alternative reality might float up, the one where you were meant to live.  As you see yourself differently, holding back change may take more effort than letting it in.

> The video is also here at YouTube.

Paperback

CDN$38.10

To buy more than one copy, please e-mail me (christine@12blueprints.com) with the quantity, your mailing address, and the email for your PayPal account.

Tax

Canada only.

5% Canada-wide.

Included in prices below, as appropriate.

Shipping

Canada Post.

Air Mail. Delivery:  2 weeks – 2 months depending on distance and passage through local Customs.

NO tracking.

Choose your destination:

1. Canada Ontario/Quebec (shipping CN14.09) = CN54.09.

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2. Canada East/West and USA (shipping CN18.41) = CN58.66.

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3. EU (shipping CN40.99) = CN79.09.

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4. All other global destinations (shipping CN48.37) = CN86.47.

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E-books

The entire book and each of the 12 Season chapters will become available in this format.

E-books may exclude the colour layouts. Purchasers of single chapters will have the more accurate palette from their colour analyst.

When? In the near future.

Where? Probably this website.

At what price? CN$8.99 or similar.

Locations? Early research suggests North America only. The reason: with digital products, the EU requires that VAT be registered/recorded/remitted by the seller. This is an ambitious request for businesses such as mine. A financial threshold is expected in 2019 and the situation may change.

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The post Return to Your Natural Colours Edition 2 appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

The wonderful benefit of colour analysis is that by wearing the colours already in you, same value, warmth, and saturation, you attain the youngest, healthiest, skin tone and the most natural looking makeup.

When Spring eyes are light in colour, they are usually quite light. If surrounded by dark eyeliner, hoping to create attention with a strong light/dark contrast, the problem is that the dark colour does not appear anywhere in the natural colouring, so it looks false or apart. The other effect is to do what a dark line around a light shape always does, to close it in and make it appear smaller.

For all 3 Springs,

1. Makeup is not earthy or pastel.

Earthy means orange and muted. These colours are desert tan colours, like bronzer. Springs have warmth in the colouring and brown eye makeup can work, but it’s often lighter and more yellow, from Rice Krispies to beer colours.

Pastel means softened with gray and not too pale. Spring colouring is  vivacious, with colours that are creamy or juicy. Pastel effects are beautiful for Summer colouring, and not the best choice for any other.

When makeup is too cool, the effect is ghostly in the skin, rather than healthy and glowing with vitality. Warmth is a cornerstone of Spring.

2. Eyebrows matter.

PCA brings attention to your eyes like never before. They are the focal point of your entire being. The brows are the upper frame for the eye. Keep them neat and shaped. The cheekbone is the lower frame for the eye.

3. The waterline of the eye is the inner rim of the lower lid.

In colours in harmony with your own, it will be calm and clear,  the same colour as the rest of the skin. That looks healthy, cleans up the white of the eye, and sharpens the iris. You could put a line of cream eyeliner there.

4. Never underestimate the power of jewelry.

It is always viewed with the eyes. Violet eyeliner may not look entirely grownup in makeup, but violet in jewelry can be remarkable. Spring infuses everything it touches with happiness and movement, so can it wear a lot of bright, clear colour. 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 are young and want to wear violet eyeliner, be sure it comes from your Personal Colour Palette. Stay away from 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. Smear a few out on paper to compare them.

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

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

Light Spring

These people may be translucently fair or more medium in appearance, in keeping with the narrow light to dark range of Summer and Spring. Some have ash hair and look like Summers. Some have yellow-green or brown in the eye and believe they are Autumns.

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 the Summer cooling effect, Light Spring still has more grays 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. Wear your gray clothes, for the same reason.

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

If green is 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 one 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. In the real world, the True Spring may have medium brown hair, since there are few real blondes after 30, and glowy golden green eyes.

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 colours and look fantastic in them.

Brown eyeshadow is fine. Light and clear, such as linen, blonde, and honey eyeshadow.

Wear bronzer that is 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 colours from your palette somehow every day. A scarf, a pin, an earring, a purse, a hairband.

Bright Spring

If the eyes are light, you may wonder why Summer pastels are so detracting to the appearance. If the eyes are darker, you wonder 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 and natural light to dark range will create balance. The grey must be clean and crisp, and less dark than Winter. Merle Norman Galaxy and Annabelle Mercury are good.

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The post How Springs Intensify Eye Colour appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

Anna (name changed) has just learned that she is a Soft Summer. She expected Soft Autumn. She is 30 years old.

Anna heads home, reads the document that explains the color analyzed clothes/cosmetic/hair/jewelry that harmonize most beautifully with her natural coloring, looks at her clothes, and sees that nothing is as flattering as it could be. Just like everyone else after a PCA. She looks at the pictures of what her hair color should be and starts buying the new makeup.

None of it feels right. She does not see the gray brown taupe in her palette. Her mother always said she was a redhead. Her husband calls her his Coppertone girl and yet, I suggested that Soft Summer skin is not flattered by traditional bronzers. Suddenly it all feels wrong. In her own words, she feels like a bird that fallen out of its nest. She knows she is making it be hard when it is supposed to make her life easier, but how to relax into it?

Confirm the result

I can be wrong. Anyone can be wrong anytime, doing anything. I usually, but not always, go with my first impression. A new set of eyes, a new day, and I might see something else.

We went ahead and did the drapes again.

For a second draping, I always have someone sit in who is not a colour expert but is sensitive to the optical effects. Everyone can tell when you look better, but not everyone is visually perceptive enough to watch a face blur and focus, or the eyes and teeth yellow and whiten. I try not to talk much because I usually see what I saw the first time. Soft Summer was confirmed.

The tangle is mostly between the 2 best Seasons. Nobody can see their own face that objectively, including me and mine, which is why a makeup purchase decision is so often wrong if you test it on your face. The confusion Anna felt was valid, in that she felt the shadows around the eyes were less visible in the Soft Autumn drapes. You have to be careful here.  The yellow is canceling some of the purple in the shadows, just as we choose yellow concealer. To cancel those shadows though, we had to jaundice the entire complexion.

The crispest, freshest, healthiest skin was in Soft Summer. That perfect, delicate, aristocratic bone structure definition that Soft Summer does ultimately well was clear.

Expect to need time

It was as though I told her she had been switched at birth. Her identity, her safety net of what it meant to be Anna, was pulled out from under her.

Begin with knowing what to never look at in stores again. That alone will exclude so many distractions that the right items will become more obvious. Look at the item and think about why you should not buy it. Try to talk yourself out of it.

Next, match your palette the best that you can. You are already looking a zillion percent better than you used to. Your eye is learning.

Accept (and expect) that you will make better and better decisions. The effect will get stronger. Don’t worry. You now understand where you came from and you know where you’re going. This is empowerment beyond describing. The branches can’t help but grow when the roots are this strong.

You will make a few mistakes. In your first windsurfing class, the guy in the water most is the one trying the hardest, progressing the fastest, working on moving to the edge of the technique. Mistakes are good. Allow them to be good. This is how we learn.

Leave the hair to last

Hair is the hardest to get right, hardest to adjust to quickly, and often the most sensitive (and least objective) self-acceptance feature. Get used to the clothes and makeup first and your brain will be much more compliant when you correct the hair color. Do it in small steps and your mind will say,” OK, fine, she’s done this before and I survived.”

If you did a big hair adjustment on day 1, the change-averse parts of us might say, “Wrong, off, can’t be right, looks weird, change it back, need to go find someone and pester them till they confirm that I looked better before, get me to a phone, I’ll see a different colorist, can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.”

As a child, the hair was a warm toffee blonde. Nevermind. Anna has different skin now and her childhood hair might not work at all. Today, she is the pine cone highlight (should she choose to have them), rather than the wheat field. Her natural base, just visible at the temple below, is not very dark, a medium ash brown. Her eyebrow is light-medium ash brown. Letting the red fade till she can go back to her natural base color, with those watery grey-green eyes, would be like looking into a misty forest.

Breaking emotional ties

Letting go of the past is shaky for all of us. “I always saw myself as…”  is dug in deep. Doing something different is always destabilizing, even if it is driving a new way to work. You cannot hold your balance and your position.

Never look back over your shoulder again. You are not her anymore. You can choose what she has that you want to keep. Allow the calm, strong feeling of finding, and speaking, in your own true voice.

Learning to deflect the marketing all around us is part of the journey. A much more difficult question, that may take a lifetime to answer, is whether we intentionally, but subconsciously, sabotage ourselves. As women, we seem awfully good at undermining our full potential in beauty, as well as in personal strength, more than we could just blame on our marketing culture. Everyone who saw Anna commented on the beauty in her face, and in her person. We women are better at cataloguing our faults. Inadequacies that nobody else sees becomes our security blanket.

If it were given to you at this moment to become everything you could be, how many would take it?

Anna will be treated differently as she separates from her past and realizes that she may have to step up to how beautiful the world sees her to be. It will take about a year.

This is what I saw. Go back and look at her eye.

Anna said,

…the whole experience has given me peace. Not initially, obviously, but upon reflection, I feel at peace. It was like meeting myself for the first time. Or finding out something major about myself, that caused me to have to reintroduce myself to myself if that makes any sense. And now that the fog has settled, the muted and dulled fog : ), I am relaxed at meeting the new me. And I enjoy to know myself that much better. This was another, fairly large piece of the puzzle I found in me. There are less questions. Less self doubt and I feel like I can forge ahead now, equipped with a better sense of self. I have been enjoying the last few weeks, walking into stores and looking for the real me in there somewhere. And when it is not there, I don’t compromise anymore. It’ll be fun. It’ll continue to give me direction, as now I know the destination. There are lots of ways to get there, but I will always arrive at the same place. Within my palette. Whereas before, I had no direction, no sense of self, little confidence, and depended on second opinions a lot. I am getting there. It will take time. But I feel much better already.

 

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The post When Your Season Doesn’t Feel Right appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

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.

The viewer feels more relaxed and accepting of our appearance when no element stands apart or needs processing. Hair colour looks believable when it could have happened by itself.

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 for some members of the Season than others.

Season describes a group of people who react to colour in similar ways, without implying that they look alike or use their palette in identical ways. Within our group, in our relationships with colour, we share more than we differ. Within our group, we also retain our individuality.

Soft Autumn is a typical Neutral Season in that they have a range of warmer and cooler colours, with none fully warm or cool. The value (meaning, Light>>Dark) range has some movement too, and does not reach the extremes. The setting that is not medium is the softness, which is high relative to other palettes (saying the saturation is low means the same).

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.

With her PCA, she understands that though she appears warm, her warmth is more neutral, so she keeps the highlights warm-neutral with a lot of visible natural colour.

She understands that she is lighter than True Autumn and takes care not to go too dark with the hair colour.

She also knows that softness is key to her colour success, and her colourist has suggested ways of adding a soft toning to reduce the brightness of the colours.

She wears soft orange-brown beautifully in makeup, in a darkness range that unites her natural light appearance with the darkness that all Autumns need to define the face and features.

Because the members of a Season react to colour in the same way, successful makeup colours are often shared or fluctuate within narrow ranges. Once you know your Season, finding your makeup is easy.

Recreate the light you already cast. Make the wavelengths that you synchronous with the ones you are. To the viewer, it feels persuasive.

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The post Soft Autumn Darkness Adjustments appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

The word Season describes your natural colouring. In the colour world, there are 12. A personal colour analysis tells you which is yours.

Is Season dated?

Why use the word Season if it sounds old-fashioned?

Because we are children of a planet on which light and season change as it describes an ellipse around the sun.

Our pigments harmonize with those of our world. They send wavelengths and have frequencies that communicate in concert with our surroundings.

Those energies react with our retina to put colour in our brain. Colour doesn’t actually exist, only energy does. If that is not amazing, IDK what is.

Though our pigments have different organic chemistry (hemoglobin, melanin, carotene), they evolved with the world in which they live. In the course of these thousands of years, we learned to feel colour.

People remember the colour associations. Thanksgiving table suggests Autumn.

Because Season evokes associations of scent, texture, moisture, movement. So do colours.

Because all of the above is as true now as in the 80s.

Bright Spring

The pigments that make up a Bright Spring person look a lot like the True Spring colours, meaning they’re clear and pure, warmed by yellow, and fairly light. When those colours get mixed with a bit of Winter, they become even more clear, and less warm and less light.

With input from 2 True Seasons, Bright Spring is called a Neutral Season. They have warmer and cooler versions of each colour in their skin, hair, and eyes, and so in their colour palette.

These individuals may appear darker and contrasting than they are once draped. Keep in mind that Season is not determined by how we look, but how our own colours react to adjacent colours. At times, the person looks Spring-like, with a blonde hair and blue eyes appearance. And very often, they look like Summers, especially when eyes are blue or blue-green.

Landscapes

The colours speak to me as lush and natural, like a jungle. The life force of Spring and the impact of Winter co-exist. Winter places a cool veneer on the surface but the invisible sense is of life gathering energy to see it through the freedom and bloom coming in True Spring. Tension is building, and when the spring uncoils, True Spring will truly have sprung.

The Persona

This person sparkles. They have wit, conversation, joy, and humour. Winter gives them formality, organization, and some seriousness with the darkness in their appearance, but it’s not heavy-handed. Spring’s sunshine relaxes them, still with enough cool to give them quickness of movement.

Playful and clean, it’s all fun and games but there are reasons for not wanting to get in this water. Winter means risk. Winter element brings an edge, something that isn’t too comfortable.

These persons look more delicate than they are, like the finest icicles and waterfalls. This is not daintiness, frills, or fragility. Rather, think of the morning after a freezing rainstorm. The branches are coated with a thin layer of ice, looking like frozen feathers. The world looks more tough than soft, but we feel no threat. The sun is getting warmer, we can hear the music of melting ice, and we know the tough part is temporary, almost pretend.

This is a charming and very social person. Spring’s easy smile greets you, more friendly than you really expected. Spring’s love of dialogue appears, less reserved and more joking than you really expected. You’re carried along by an optimistic and open personality, but one who never fully lets themselves go. Winter still has a hand on the wheel and decorum will matter. It crosses your mind to wonder why this dark landscape is so sunny. How can it feel so right to have the sun out at night?

The Clothes

What would it feel like to be standing by those crocuses above or in the jungle at sunrise with your eyes closed?

The air is clean and brisk, sweet and sharp at once. You smell wet ground and new life. You’d prefer to keep one eye open, having no sense of being snug or sheltered, but it’s still ok.

Life is so vital right now that it feels a bit unsteady. When you open your eyes, you expect that it will look different than moments ago. How might you do that with apparel?

Wear a deep and pure blue-purple shirt with silver writing, whirls, or sparks.

Bright Spring Accessories

Do not have a brown or black purse. Connected to a person so sparkly, it looks like luggage. Ditto the generic brown or black shoe, suitcases on feet. Black is fine if it’s not chunky and usual.

Choose patent leather over suede.

Wear fun and colourful exercise type shoes (and clothes).

Wear coloured coats and shoes, ballet flats in fun patterns, sparkly accents, gold or silver threads woven into scarves.

Wear lots of colour. It looks good. You sparkle and so does it. Not matched? No problem. From Harry Winston to costume jewelry. Fancy, cheap, pretty, silly, all fine if it reminds you of the thinnest layer of crackling glass.

Learning and becoming your Season is like hearing a language you grew up with.  Look inward for truth and you may feel that it plucked a string. You’ll find a place waiting for you that will enfold you, while another person would always stay the square peg. You can choose to stand still, but life is much more fun if you keep moving towards the heat.

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The post The Consistent Bright Spring Landscape appeared first on 12 Blueprints.

In 12 Season personal colour analysis, there are 4 True Seasons, named after the 4 natural seasons. True Autumn describes the person whose natural pigmentation is made of colours that are:

– warm; even the colours we think of as cool have been warmed to be in harmony with a warm palette

– muted; the high warmth may give the colours a brighter appearance; True Autumn’s salsa and curry are muted compared to True Spring’s fruit punch and citrus, but we don’t think of them as muted or soft

– medium to dark; all Seasons have their light, medium, and dark colours, and here, the overall look benefits from darkness to give a feeling of richness and depth

Susan Sarandon could be a True Autumn. You can see that their overall colour effect feels toasty, medium on a darkness scale, and glowy. The natural coppery warmth looks better surrounded by warm, muted, medium dark colour. Red hair is by no means a necessity but these women are very seldom beautiful as blondes or in ash hair tones.

Melinda feels the colours and landscape this way, from the photo:

I love the traditional pictures of fall leaves and sun shining softly through a canopy of colors, but for some reason these pictures just stir up something else in me that I feel so connected to.The first set of pictures, the rocks and bronze river, reach into some deep emotions for me. Warmth, intensity, passion, strength, and solidarity all come to mind. Such a range of emotions that are rooted deep in my soul.

The pictures below speak to my surface, if that makes sense. The bright vibrant trees and the gentle softness of the sun echoes an almost tangible warmth, comfort, coziness, and welcome that you just want to walk into. The leaves add a crispness that just makes you feel like dancing. Joy lives there and you can feel it.

As daylight hours are shorter, the world is becoming darker. As the air is cooler, it holds less water and is drier. Sunlight reflects softly from surfaces. Highlights and shadows are softly grayed without extremes. These combine to create a sense of depth, which may be recreated with layers, variations of darkness levels, and patterns.

Autumn is the wine and the nectar. Reds are indirect, as light comes from lower in the sky, such as rust, muted red-orange, and browned reds. Texture helps to create indirect lighting by creating softer glow or reflections.

True Autumn Colours

Coloured, texture, and opaque tights look great.

The overall darkness effect leaves just enough light to read by. If you found a perfect faux leopard short jacket and it happened to have black buttons that were not enormous and the overall effect was of rich caramel, gold, and chocolate brown, and if your hair were medium dark or more, that coat might be absolutely lovely.

Pink is replaced by copper penny, coral rose, and light, powdery nude pink.

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In any given person, like you reading this for example, every colour sings in perfect harmony with every other. These eyes go with that skin. This skin would grow this hair colour, not that one.

Harmony means getting along, implying at least two participants. Friction, or not getting along, takes two to tango as well.  What leaves us speechless about colour harmony in a landscape, a painting, or you reading this, is that 2000 or 2 million colours have formed a magical web of agreement to create the final picture. You already possess our world’s most beautiful colour symphony.

And then we get dressed. An outfit is like gears between moving parts. They can turn silky smooth when the colours we wear and combine glide along in harmony with our own colours. Or, the cogs can be the wrong size or spacing and when they start to turn, we will sense grinding, like a painting with colours borrowed randomly from different landscapes.

Our colour palette is more than a colour expert in our back pocket. It’s an artist with a higher level of understanding of colour harmony than most of us can imagine, me included.

First, colour

The #1 deciding factor for our most flattering gold, and everything else that participates in appearance, is natural colouring, or Season. Stay in tune with your symphony. 

Colour precedes style to my eyes. Even the most impeccably cut suit looks average if its colour is average relative to our colours. Styling that is 50-50 for our body type is improved a lot if the colour is glorious relative to our colours.

Jewelry and clothing have in common that the item is worn above or adjacent to skin. Technically, makeup is too, but at its best, it appears to be part of the skin and a little extra experimenting goes a long way.

Looking around, we may have seen appearances in which apparel, makeup, and hair colour look so fluent with the skin and one another that they naturally belong together. Every colour makes every other colour look even better.

Looking around, we have also seen gold jewelry next to skin where the skin looks flushed and pink while the jewelry appears darker or duller than it is. Compare a few hands wearing wedding bands and you’ll see examples of  more and less attractive combinations. We have seen gold that is too yellow for the skin and seems thin or tin, like a toy, when one person wears it and the height of luxury on another person.

An exercise: with folks you see or meet, try looking at their hair colour and their skin at the same time. Or their jacket with the skin of the neck and face. Observe two areas at once, not more. How do they feel? Is it comfortable to look at both or is it an effort, and easier to take in one at a time? 

Personal colour analysis (PCA) offers the solution to an entire appearance in which every colour pair is superb. The math has been done and it works. 

12 Seasons of yellow

Yellow appears in each of the 12 Seasons of natural colouring, since we all have carotene among our skin pigments.

For the very cool groups, True Summer and True Winter, yellow gold is generally too warm to harmonize beautifully with the skin. It may look overheated or hard to see, as if it changed the skin to be the same colour as itself. The combination with cosmetics is outright difficult. For these Seasons, silver, which includes white gold, platinum, and so on, is more attractive for the person and the item.

The Neutral Seasons of Summer and Winter have enough warmth to wear the right gold beautifully. More on choosing it below.

In Autumn-influenced Seasons, colours are generally softer and darker, harmonizing better with deeper, richer, darker gold.

Spring-coloured people wear light, clear golds, which are seamless with skin and clothing.

The technique for selecting gold that looks elegant next to the skin is to choose a colour of metal that:

• could slide comfortably into the yellow strip of the palette,
• could make nice outfits with the other colours,
• enhances without taking over, so the energy feels belonging and even, mutually enhancing, with no colour visible at the expense of any other,
• and maintains the shine in the metals and stones.

Test the first one by laying the jewelry on the yellow strip, first with the yellow strip alone, and then with the whole palette fanned out. For the background, choose a solid-coloured, neutral-coloured surface.

Gray makes the best background, in the neighbourhood of steam, feather, or shadow. In this context, neutral gray means gray with barely any discernible colour or cast, rather than a wardrobe neutral, such as taupe or beige. Think back to the gray oasis in which your colour analysis took place.

Test the second by hiding the yellow strip. The parts of outfits are seen together. A blue sweater is seen with all our colours, not just our own blues. Jewelry is viewed next to all our colours, not just the yellow of the item with the yellows in our skin. If the green of a blouse is similar to a green in our palette but awkward with all the other colours, another version of green may be a better choice. 

Colours need not be identical to our palette colours; we simply want them to look well together. Medium-cool, or cool-neutral, Seasons may find great accord between their palette and various golds that are not overly yellow, though not identical with any palette yellow.

Test the third by practicing with many different golds. Seeing un-harmony a few times is how we learn to recognize harmony. In everything we know or are learning, wrong is a simple tollbooth on the road to right. We must become who we want to know we are. Try a lot; retrace your steps if needed.

The fourth, we discuss in the next section.

Pieces that are larger or worn near the face may benefit from more attention. Smaller pieces, those worn over clothing, or further from the face, are more flexible. You may feel better wearing gold as a long strand necklace than earrings.

Shine

When the gold of jewelry has continuity with the yellows in our colouring, the piece can look entirely belonging and beautiful in its own right, as if it grew from the same soil, like a flower.

If the gold is incompatible with our natural yellows, the piece may look inexpensive or in need of polishing.

If our jewelry is brighter than we are, we look duller by comparison, as if we’re the item in need of polishing. What humans see is relative.

We have seen jewelry so bling that it wears the woman, and not because it’s too big. The piece may be too shiny. It is expected for jewelry to draw more attention to itself than cosmetics, but not to the point where it interferes with another person’s ability to see us or know us. We are not our necklaces or our hair; if we were reduced to one piece of art, we are our eyes.

When the item is laid on the palette and the choice would not flatter the person, the metal appears dulled, almost tarnished, and the gleam in the stones drops back.

Some Seasons wear satin or shiny surfaces equally well, such as True Spring and True Autumn. Of course, this is a subjective opinion, not a fact. In matters of taste, there are no facts, only opinions. Yours matters most.

The smoother the shine, the sharper the highlight, a look that may settle best with Seasons having a wide white to black range, meaning the Winters.

Other types of colouring wear textured, hammered, or brushed surfaces and look like a gold mine.

Regarding both shine and colour, jewelry can most always be worn well by two to four Seasons, with the metal sparkly and the stones lustrous. Awareness is the first step in becoming sensitized to how colour and texture behave together.

See more, Learn more

Under the Shop tab in the menu at the top, you will find images of jewelry under Accessories, as well as organized by Season.

• hold up to the screen the yellow strip of the palette looking for belonging or mutual enhancement, often coming down to, “I could see that, they seem to share something.” or “Nothing about these two makes sense together.”,
• consider the neutral strips of the palette, which may represent large parts of outfits and to some degree, the background or skin the item will be viewed against,
• the other colours of the palette, thinking, “Do they want to be together or are they trying to run the other way?”,
• narrow it down to 2-3 Seasons,
• place the item among other Season colours and see if they could become a family, however immediate or distant the relatives might be. Every family has its wild card(s). There’s no right or wrong answer to whether they fit into your closet; you decide whose pictures you put in the family album, they’re still family.

Location

Colour analysis clients may be confused by general recommendations to wear gold, since medium gold may be different depending on where the colour analyst is located.

Thank you to the reader who recently taught me that norms in karat of gold differ in various countries. Western and European countries tend to refer to 18 karat or lower. Eastern countries may consider 22 to 24 karat as the yardstick. Pure gold is 24 karat.

Every choice comes back to the Season of the wearer. 22K may be a fine gold for an Autumn, as the higher karat gives a richer deeper colour. With the many alloys and platings of gold, ultimately, the decision comes down to the particular item. Autumn and Spring have good flexibility with gold because they are naturally warm in colouring and adapt yellow with ease.

Silver hair

A Q we hear often:

Should a person with silver hair wear gold jewelry to compliment skin or a cooler metal to go with hair?

I would choose the metal that goes with the skin.

Hair automatically goes with skin, in every person, at all lifestages. There are many variations on silver hair, each one tuned to the same frequency as the skin. 

Warmer Seasons have warmer silvers. I have never seen a True Spring with the silver hair of a Summer or Winter, and nor have I seen a Dark Autumn with the same silver as a Soft Autumn.

For many people, colouring may fade slightly with age, although Season remains the same. Silver hair with gold jewelry looks as striking as silver hair with warm skin tones. If your PCA placed you in a Neutral Season, there will be a gold that is beautiful for you.

Dark Autumn is a neutral to warm colouring and with their silver hair, they are the personification of the term ‘silver fox’, whether light silver, like the babies, or dark, as the adults. Light Spring, whose once-yellow hair is now creamy silver, may prefer gold that is one level lighter or cooler from the same colour palette she has always used.

The more significant change that occurs with age is that hair colour shifts from a colour to a neutral. If we think of our hair as just another element in overall appearance, when one colour block switches to neutral, adding colour elsewhere in the composition maintains the vitality. During these years, moving towards colour in apparel may be the single most beautiful decision of all.

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