I haven’t posted since March of last year. The reason for this is that I decided that I wanted to follow the current of where online content has gone since I started my blog 10 years ago. I decided to pivot to YouTube.
I recorded some videos, but they sit on my hard drive, not on my channel. I finally realized a couple of days ago that video content just isn’t what I want to do right now. My goals with this blog have always been to share where I am and what I’m learning in order to both catalog it for myself and to help others where they are with their own journeys. It’s not to become a full-time influencer in the color and style space. Video takes a long time, and time isn’t something I have a lot of right now. I’ve also always been much more comfortable writing than speaking. So I finally decided that, despite the trend for video, I would simply go back to blogging and share that way.
A lot has happened since I last blogged—and I mean a LOT. I finally went to see David Kibbe (and Susan Slavin) in NYC! I went at the beginning of June last year, so I’ve been living in my Kibbe Image Identity ever since. I have so much to share with all of you about this experience, what it’s been like to live as my ID, how I feel about it, what I’ve learned… I also will get into some of my Tawny Spring and seasonal experiences as well, plus some hot takes. Please leave a comment below if there’s anything in particular you want me to cover, and I can’t wait to share all of this with you! (I also will get back into Personality Squared and create content for that.)
A couple of weeks ago, I did something I’ve been waiting to do for nine years: I went to see David Zyla. Why Zyla? It’s the one system where I felt like I had a hard time DIYing. And I knew that even if I didn’t end up using the palette or recommendations I received, it would still be an interesting experience and a chance to see myself through the eyes of someone whose expertise I respected.
One of the reasons I’d put it off for so long is that my personal rule with analyses is that I need to be able to go and not have it be such a huge investment–financial or emotional–that I can’t leave the room and leave the analysis there if I feel like it’s something that wouldn’t work for me. And with the unconventional path my life has taken, it took a while for the financial part of that to be true.
So mostly, I went out of curiosity. I had so many friends in the color and style community who had gone, and I wanted to have the experience. I was happily surprised that not only did I love my palette and my recommendations, and I felt like everything David was saying resonated with me, but I feel revitalized in my love for fashion and style in a way that hasn’t been the case for a long time, maybe since high school nearly 20 years ago.
Seeing David is a lovely experience. The initial consult consists of about an hour of him putting your palette together, and another hour of going over it and style recommendations and, of course, the reveal of your Archetype. While you’re talking to him, your palette starts to take shape in front of your eyes. I was a little nervous when he started because some of the colors he settled on early, like my Tranquil and First Base, are a little cooler than I’m used to. But as the whole palette came together, my fears settled and I saw that it was going in the direction that I thought it would in terms of Archetype. And once my Metals went down, I knew it for sure.
So I’m a Tawny Spring. In hindsight, it seems obvious, and I did come to this conclusion myself at one point, but I think I got distracted by the path of Type Four and went in another direction for a while.
But sitting across from him, even though I had felt for most of these nine years that there wasn’t an easy fit for me in Zyla so whatever I got would have to be very customized for me, veering away from the archetype’s usual recommendations, Tawny Spring just seemed so obvious and such a natural fit. Everything he said confirmed what I had figured out for myself in my explorations.
I am also very happy with my palette. It contains things that I really wanted, like a golden brown. But it also contains things I haven’t really worn since I started with color analysis, like my lilac Tranquil, blue without green for my Dramatic, and the dark blue-gray of my First Base, bringing me out of my comfort zone. I think he’s said that usually, about half would be what you thought, and the other half will be a surprise. My Essence, Romantic, Energy, and all my Bases were about what I expected. My Dramatic and Tranquil were big surprises for me. I expected something more in the turquoise/teal range for both, which are common in Tawny palettes (I’ll see if I get any at my eventual Extension!).
What I’m most excited about with my palette is the wide range it gives me. I have versions of peach, red, green, purple, blue, navy, brown, and tan–basically the entire rainbow. Having such a wide range of colors to choose from makes my palette more usable for me. I’ve seen some palettes where there is more similarity between colors, and while I think this can work beautifully for other people and their Archetypes, having a lot of different colors is something that is important to me. I want variety. I wasn’t sure if I was going to use my palette is lieu of other palettes, like Autumn or T3, but currently, I feel like I want to explore what a wardrobe consisting entirely of this palette would look like.
I’ll get into my recommendations in my next post, as I feel like this post is already very long, but mostly, I want to convey how happy I am that I went. It has truly revitalized my love for style, and I also feel like what I got works really well with Soft Gamine and gives me direction there as well. I’m also oddly glad that I waited so long because I feel like I got so much more out of it with all of the work I’ve done on my own. Please let me know if you have any questions about my experience or seeing Zyla in general in the comments.
In my last post, I mentioned that David had reached out to me and offered his guidance. Of course, I took him up on this generous offer! After some back and forth, he let me know that he could really only see two potential IDs for me based on my physicality: Soft Classic or Soft Gamine. And based on everything he knew about me, he thought that Soft Gamine would be the more likely of the two. Also, I definitely had Double Curve!
(Caveat: David doesn’t type people online. I would still have to see him in person for a 100% confirmation. And the best way to find your ID if you can’t make it to NYC is still to do the exercises in Strictly Kibbe. I’m not saying they didn’t work for me–they did get me to a place where I saw I was much more yin than I had wanted to admit to myself. David just saw that he could help me more directly.)
Once I started rereading the SG section, it made a lot of sense, both why I was a Soft Gamine and why I had yin resistance and wanted to be more yang. Soft Gamine has very yang energy, which is why I was so drawn to yang angularity, despite having a more rounded body and apple cheeks. This quote in the Soft Gamine makeover writeup in the book resonated with me:
Heidi was afflicted with what I’ve come to call the “Soft Gamine syndrome.” How does one integrate an outer physicality that clearly spells adorable, doll-like and bubbly, with an inner spirit that is filled with drive, spunk, energy and ambition?
I can see how I embody these contradictions. Even at 36, I feel like I still appear cute and youthful–but I am also known for having a strong personality and being very driven. I love this scene from The Golden Girls where Betty White flips from sweet and innocent to “don’t mess with me” in no time at all:
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how when I first came across Kibbe, I believe that Soft Gamine was my first instinct. I do think that if someone just sits and reads the whole book, without looking at anything on Pinterest or asking people on various forums for their opinions or watching YouTube videos, most people will land in the right place. I had lived as myself for long enough to know, in my heart of hearts, that I didn’t really have the straight, more yang body of a Flamboyant Gamine. But the way Soft Gamine was portrayed on the Internet was so girly, so ingenue. It didn’t really feel like it was something I could inhabit and still honor my yang energy.
But I have a better understanding of what Soft Gamine actually can look like now that David is invovled in the community. I am still working on developing my personal Soft Gamine look, and it is a challenge in our current fashion times. It is hard to find clothes with a precise fit that have a lot of design details. I have started putting together a Pinterest board with looks from Soft Gamine celebrities. Right now, this look from Eartha Kitt feels like akin to what I could see my everyday style as being:
I hope that the fact that I decided to revisit my assumed Kibbe Image Identity after eight years will help others give themselves permission to question and explore if where they have placed themselves doesn’t feel right. Here I was, eight years in, the co-founder of what is regarded as the official Kibbe community, helping other people on their journey–and I couldn’t type myself correctly?! I could have seen it as something that would undermine my credibility. But instead, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. It has helped others gain clarity on their own place in the system too.
What do I hope people take away from my experience?
It’s okay to be wrong.
I think every time I have mistyped myself in a system, it’s been what I needed at the time. I experienced it with typing myself as Type 4, and I think it’s the case here as well. I may have just needed that time leaning into my yang side in FG in order to be ready to accept my more yin side. And it doesn’t mean you were clueless about the system you’re working with–it can be easier to see others than to see yourself. True, there were things that David clarified that helped things fall into place for me, and I now am able to use this information to do a better job helping others, but having additional information now doesn’t mean that I wasn’t doing the best I could with the information I had.
Don’t let the sunk-cost fallacy keep you where you know you don’t belong.
Yes, you may have spent time, money, and energy on adapting your wardrobe and your mindset to a certain type. But if you know it’s not the right fit, don’t let those things keep you there and spend more time, money, and energy on the wrong things. You can start fresh. And as I said above, the past wasn’t a waste; it got you where you are today.
What is right may not be comfortable.
I think for a lot of us, there is a kind of contradiction inherent to our relationship to our Kibbe Image ID–it resonates, but it also dredges things up. I don’t really have much of the yin resistance that he outlines in the book, but for me it was more of a lack of attraction towards a more yin aesthetic in general. Yin was uncomfortable because I wasn’t sure how I could incorporate more yin and achieve a style that felt true to my inner self. I am still trying to work this out, and I’m even revisiting my stack in Personality Squared. Does Sporty, Edgy, and Playful still fit? I am finding myself being less attracted to yang than I was, knowing now that I need more yin in my style. It is definitely a work in progress.
And in the end, I could go see David and I could be a Soft Classic after all. But that would be okay too. It would just get me that much closer to where I want to be with the image I create for myself.
I’ve been writing about my own Kibbe journey on this website for a long time–I started it fairly shortly after I found David’s work. And throughout, I’ve never experienced that feeling of 100% certainty that I have it right.
I am very good at convincing myself that I see what I want to see. I did this with Type Four as well. And when I found Kibbe, there was really no good information about there. There was just the book, the way people interpreted the book, and people who had gone to see him. In the end, I went with where my inner self was telling me to go.
But I have never truly been able to claim FG with 100% confidence. It was just what I wanted to be. I was never one to share my outfits or anything like that. Maybe I didn’t want to give the chance to be proven wrong about myself. Maybe I knew deep down that I didn’t really fit the description.
But a couple of months ago, I finally felt like it was time to explore these doubts. A member of Strictly Kibbe shared her experience seeing David, and hearing the way she described her line made me realize that it was basically impossible for me to not have Curve in some way. My line would have to accommodate the curve from my bust pushing out fabric. I decided to redo the exercises, which I haven’t done since they were being written and posted in real time by David.
What came up for me during the exercises was that I had some serious yin resistance. I don’t think I have some yin-related issues or anything–I don’t relate to the kinds of things in the book about being seen as too sexy, or anything like that. Yin, and the aesthetics of yin, just had no appeal or resonance for me. It wasn’t something I was ever drawn to.
So when I got the sketch portion of the exercises, I first ended up with Width and Curve and decided to move to Soft Natural. This was still a yang space. It felt safe. It accommodated Curve, and yet it was still primarily yang. There was a relaxed simplicity of line that appealed to me. It wasn’t yin enough so as to trigger my yin resistance.
I got very excited about the prospect, in a way that I wasn’t excited about Soft Natural in the past. I watched a Jane Fonda movie or two.
But then David reached out to me and asked if I wanted some feedback, which is where I’ll end this. Stay tuned for part two!
Yes, it’s finally happening: David Kibbe has a contract for a new book. There’s been a lot of momentum in Kibbeland as of late, with the Vox article and a feature in The New York Times. And it’s all been leading to this, the news that Kibbe aficionados have been hoping for for years.
I don’t have many details yet on what it will entail, but I’m so happy for David and Susan. And I’m proud of the fact that Strictly Kibbe has reached nearly 10,000 people, and it was surreal to see the entrance quiz, which I wrote because I was exhausted by people coming from YouTube and getting upset that their fave YouTuber’s approach was not seen as equal to David’s, get quoted in the NYT! I’m so grateful for the role I’ve been able to play as admin of Strictly Kibbe. So many things have been happening lately!
But most importantly, I’m so excited that David will get to share his updated system with the world in such a big way! And it definitely motivates me to return to this space and finish my YouTube series on the original book before it comes out.
What are you hoping to see in a new book from David?
Since I figured out that I was a 3/1, my focus has actually been more on inner work, and less on the style aspects of it all. Learning that I was a double extrovert was shocking to me, since I had always seen myself as an introvert. I also figured out that I was an ENTJ, and not like an INTJ like I thought. I do think that the inner self cannot be separated from your personal style, so please let me know if this is something you’d be interested in having me write more about.
I also haven’t been writing new posts because in this same process, I realized that my Aspiration was Playful, and not Sophisticated. But I didn’t want to share more about that until the Playful Cheat Sheet was ready, so I’ve been holding back to a degree. But now that I’ve finally finished it, in between working full-time from home (which really wears me out, perhaps another sign of my double-extrovertedness!) and also freelancing, and just generally being tired like pretty much everyone else in the world right now.
Playful might appeal to you if you have a more lighthearted, fun, colorful, and animated approach to your personal style. The Playful Cheat Sheet can be found here. Please also see the Pinterest board to find out more, and check out the workbook if you’re interested in the Personality Squared system as a whole.
So I recognized that I was actually a T3, and figured, again, that I had gotten my primary and secondary reversed, and I was a 3/4, like I had originally thought back in 2014. But again, I was faced with it not feeling quite right. I wasn’t as formal as 3/4s seemed to be. My facial features seemed to be less strong. I have a degree of cuteness and youthfulness. I realized, as I dressed T3, that there was a kind of disconnect between how I think I dress, and how I actually dress. While I may not wear the outfits that Anna K (the 3/1 expert) wears, the reason behind why she wears what she wears started to resonate with me. I like graphic tees, stuff swiped from the kids’ section, and a more young, casual look. I look best in a degree of animation. I can wear a lot of things other people can’t–I am a Flamboyant Gamine, after all!
But again, I was stymied by the fact that 3/1 is a double extrovert energy. I wouldn’t say I was obviously high movement as a child. I spent a lot of time doing quiet, solitary activities, and while I may move loudly, I wasn’t talkative or especially active compared to others; in fact, it was the opposite. And as an adult, I love reading and writing and getting deep into topics. These are things that had put me on the path to T4.
Then Carol did a Coaching Call with the 1/3 expert, Jeny, and Anna K. I don’t want to get too into what they said, since it’s only for Lifestyle members, but it made me realize that if you’re one of these types, you might not realize how high your energy is when you aren’t aware of how high it is, and you might have stifled yourself. I decided to try 3/1, and posted in Lifestyle asking if anyone else was a 3/1 or 1/3 who didn’t recognize their high energy, and I added some photos of myself. I got some great responses from other people of these energy types who felt the same way.
Eventually, it was closed and I got in touch with Support, who offered me a Truthbomb. A Truthbomb is where, instead of Carol randomly leaving a comment, it’s a structured experience where you are asked to post on a specific date and people are asked to guess your type based on facial profiling. I accepted the offer to join the queue for this, but then Carol reopened my thread and commented on my type.
Carol confirmed that I am a 3/1.
My reaction to this was to cry for about 15 seconds, and then I made a joke on Facebook about the Eagles’ new head coach. I saw my secondary 1 come into play there with connect/disconnect. In fact, that’s a way I see it a lot. You can even see on this blog, where I start a bunch of projects and then get bored and pick them up again two years later.
I can see that while I may not be the most social or visibly active person, I like to keep busy. I am involved in a ton of different things, from work to volunteering to admining the SK groups to creating an entire side business with Personality Squared. If I’m watching TV, I have a game open on my phone. I need some degree of movement around me or it’s hard for me to concentrate (aka I’m messy). It shows up in ways that aren’t as obvious as what you might think of when you think of a 3/1 person, but I can see that it’s there now.
Just a note about figuring out your secondary: the recommended way is through your style preferences. Carol can generally see it in your face as well, but it’s not recommended to use facial profiling to figure it out, because people get confused enough looking for their primaries! I can see that there are facial similarities among people of the same secondary, i.e., I can see that the fact that I have a more cute and youthful look compared to other T3s points toward S1. But again, it’s not recommended to do it this way!
In my next post, I’m going to talk about how this has affected how I see my style going forward. If you have any questions about my experience, please leave a comment. 🙂 There is probably a lot of stuff I’m leaving out!
If you’re not familiar with Dressing Your Truth and aren’t a member of the Lifestyle Facebook group, getting “cluebombed” means Carol Tuttle comments on your post and confirms your type for you. You can’t request this; it’s something she does when she feels like it would help the person and they’re ready.
I’ve a long journey with Dressing Your Truth. It’s a system I discovered around the same time as Kibbe, so 2014. I initially typed myself as a Type 3 from watching the beginner’s videos and reading It’s Just My Nature. Facial typing is the determining factor when typing yourself, and I related to the T3 face description somewhat, like the lump of clay nose, but not really the parts like having textured skin or a lot of lines on my face. In fact, I look much younger than I am. But T3 seemed closest, so I went with it.
T4 was the type I related to in terms of personality. I knew I had to had some degree of introversion there, and I loved T4 colors and clothing. Your style preferences clue you in to your secondary, so I figured I was a 3/4. But I never truly settled into it. I didn’t want to dress T3. I was way more drawn to T4 patterns, for instance, and I’d buy items from the Dressing Your Truth store, and they’d just sit in the cellophane wrappers they came in. Even the earrings seemed too big for me!
I briefly considered whether I was a 3/1, because I did look youthful, but I couldn’t imagine myself in a type that was the highest movement on the planet, a double extrovert, and I didn’t feel particularly drawn to lightness in my clothing. I felt like a lot of what people wore in the T3 group just wouldn’t look good on me, and my face just didn’t seem to have the same strength and substance. Eventually, I decided that I must be a 4/1 who mistook herself for a T3, and then eventually I settled on 4/3, and it made sense that I had just flipped my primary and secondary. I thought maybe my inability to see a type strongly in my face maybe meant that I had rectangles and parallel lines, even though I had never thought of myself as having a symmetrical face. I thought maybe I took the idea of facial symmetry too literally, as a T4 would.
I was very happy to be a T4, and I enjoyed the discussion with other T4 women, although I felt that they got upset about a lot of things I don’t care about. I figured that boldness showed itself more strongly in me than being reflective and still. I was very happy living in T4 for about two years, as I completed a masters degree, and I did very well and I felt like people were seeing me for who I was–a bold, analytical person who was more introverted, but could also lead. I actually had a classmate give me feedback that they saw me as someone who saw the big picture and could perfect things.
But I didn’t really feel like I looked stunning in T4. Black didn’t do much for me. I gained something like 40 lbs. very quickly. Once I finished school, and I needed to start finding a job and entering the real world, I had a hard time finding motivation and energy.
I also started to want to dress in the Autumn palette again. While I had loved the T4 hues, they suddenly stopped being as appealing to me. And I noticed that I never decorated my house in them. I had seemed to want to surround myself with more of an Autumn palette as well. At first I thought I would stay with T4, but just have some Autumn outfits, but the difference was stark. I came alive in Autumn; I looked dull in the T4 colors.
I also looked at my movement, which is loud, substantial, and swift. I don’t talk a lot or very loudly, but you hear me move, and I am rough on things. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. I watched videos with an open mind, like on the T3 women’s purse and how T3s express themselves, and I saw how obviously T3 I am.
I’m going to stop this story here, and talk about my cluebombing experience in the next post. Carol actually gave me both my primary and secondary types, so I’d love to hear your guesses!
If you’re new to Personality Squared, I suggest starting with the workbook to learn more about the system. It’s based solely on how you like to dress, not what you look like, so I hope people can use it to make sure that their style shows their personality and what they like, the way I use it in my own life.
Speaking of my personal style, I actually do have some updates on that front regarding my type in a particular system, but that will be a much longer, dedicated post. 🙂
This music video is a little strange, but the song fits where I am with my style right now.
Sometimes, we treat our style and season as if it’s going to last our whole lives. Often, though, it’s more of a stop along the way, rather than a lifelong thing.
I have noticed that I tend to change my style in some way when something major in my life changes. I started looking at Kibbe and Dressing Your Truth after I felt a shift in my life toward coming into my adult self, having my first real job, etc. I stayed in a kind of autumnal space until it just didn’t feel right anymore, and I went with 4/3 for the entirety of my time in grad school.
Now that I am done with grad school, and am working in my profession, I am again faced with my color palette feeling off. Flamboyant Gamine has been pretty constant, but wearing the T4 color palette no longer feels right to me. I know that these colors do not exist in my body, and it feels like at this point in my life, I would feel more self-assured wearing the colors that exist in me.
Wearing my season or body colors has always been something I’ve had resistance to, because I don’t get black, or neon, or many other colors that 4/3 “allowed” me to wear. For a long time, it felt like a compromise. But perhaps I’ve gotten it out of my system, because wearing the colors I loved now feels somewhat artificial.
Zyla is a system that I have been looking into for as long as I have been looking into Kibbe, Dressing Your Truth, and Sci\ART (which I no longer have faith in). But it was one where I felt like I didn’t have an archetype that felt “right” out of the box, meaning the description in the book. Zyla customizes the archetypes to the person, so some people end up with recommendations that vary greatly from what is in the book, and I’ve long felt that I would be one of those people. I couldn’t even narrow down my season apart from ruling out Summer.
But as I was thinking about it this weekend, something clicked for me. High Autumn is an archetype where other people have said that I come to mind when they read the description in the book. High Autumn is a direct, take-charge type, and that describes me pretty well.
When I was in Dark Autumn, it worked for me because it is the brightest Autumn available in Sci\ART. I do not really have the depth of Dark Autumn, though, so that was where I ran into trouble. I felt like I was a brighter Autumn. High Autumn, on the other hand, is based around the colors of Ancient Egypt. If you google this, this is one of the results that comes up:
Indeed, I recognize many of these colors from Zyla’s High Autumn Pinterest board. In particular, the realgar color seems to be the classic High Autumn color, and one that actually many who know me in real life have referred to as my “signature” color. I also find all the colors in the top row in my eyes. I went hiking yesterday, and as I looked at the water, I wondered why I have been so resistant to my body colors:
Point Lobos, Carmel, CA. October 2020.
As odd as it may seem to use someone’s Ancient Egypt college project as my color palette, I think it seems like a suitable base for a wardrobe (apart from the black and white) until things open up again and I can make an appointment with Zyla. I will perhaps add an olive green and a honey brown as additional neutrals.
The bigger challenge, I think, will be making sure I retain my style personality with the new color palette. Black is an easy way to give an Edgy sensibility to your look, and without it, it can be easy to lose it at the Core of my palette. Sporty and Sophisticated should be much easier, but they’re also not my Core. I can see that this is where I had issues with the Autumn palette before–it could be difficult for me to retain my focus on expressing what I wanted with my style, and not just buying things in the right colors.
Another issue with this High Autumn approach is that there is so little information on High Autumn. David has his Pinterest board and his book, and I have seen some information from the handful of High Autumns in the community. But it’s not like, say, Tawny Spring, where there are a ton of people in the archetype within the online community, so there is a variety of versions of that archetype you can read about, and see where you resonate in terms of style.
I have created my own Pinterest board, using some of Zyla’s High Autumn pins, some other High Autumn pins on Pinterest, and some of my own.
How my style will work with this new palette, and how to bring out the special qualities of High Autumn, are something I’m going to be working out as I plan new outfits over these next few months. It is definitely a new stage in my style evolution, and I’m excited to share it with you!
Note: I know it has been a while since I have worked on some of my other projects, like putting a new video on my YouTube channel, finishing my next Cheat Sheet, or continuing my series on The Looks Men Love. The changes that led to the change in my style have also made it harder for me to work on these projects that take a lot of time and energy, but I hope that as things settle and I adjust that I will be able to pick them back up. So don’t worry; I haven’t abandoned anything. 🙂
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