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Archive of ‘Personal’ category

Color, Personal | 8 Comments

Color Resistance

I didn’t really have any Image ID resistance to being a Flamboyant Gamine. Many people come to the system with a “grass is greener” attitude, and that’s what made it hard to see themselves. I came to it with, “It can’t really be that easy or what I want; it has to harder than that.” Perhaps it’s my Enneagram 4 coming out, but I enjoy being a type that is less common and that can be disruptive to traditional beauty standards.

I have to come realize that the resistance I do have, in terms of my yin/yang balance, is that I can tend to go too yang, which is something that David identifies in the book as a problem common to gamines–that we tend to accept our yang side more easily than our yin side. It is important for me to remember that I am not yang-dominant; I am yang and yin, in a juxtaposed and almost-equal combination.

Similarly, I have a tendency to go heavier in my colors than I actually am. And this is where I really have resistance. In my heart of hearts, I love the Winter palette. I appreciate DYT, because it gives me permission to explore this desire, but I know that I am actually have more warmth, less contrast, and more delicate coloring. I can dress up and carry the movement and energy, but it is not going to be the perfect harmonious match for me. (Carol herself mentioned in a video I watched that she was draped as a Winter in the 80s. I don’t think it’s uncommon for your DYT type to not be a good fit for where you would be based on coloring alone.)

While I still think my skin generally looks OK in Dark Autumn, I think the heaviness can overwhelm me–my natural coloring can’t really hold it up. I suppose it was a bit of compromise for me–some brightness and warmth, but still with Winter. I also looked for that in Bright Spring, but it wasn’t the right combination for me, either–I think some of the colors go too cool in a way I can’t handle.

After consulting some of my most trusted Color and Style friends, I purchased a True Spring fan. I think it is a good starting point, and I like just having a fan to look at–sounds weird, but it’s true. When I read Christine Scaman’s True Spring chapter, a lot of it resonated with me, from my coloring as a child to the finishes I prefer in my makeup, which is more translucent acrylic than the oil painting of Autumn.

I don’t think, however, that my feelings on Sci\ART have really changed: I still feel like the color spaces are too limiting. Maybe they’re your top colors in a four-season space, but this exact color setting of hue/temperature/chroma isn’t representative of your entire color space.

What I have come to is simply Four Season Spring. It feels right to me because:

  • These are the colors I have surrounded myself with when I look at my interior decorating choices (See Johannes Itten and students choosing the colors that suit them without being aware of it)
  • These are the colors that I get complimented on. I did not get compliments in Autumn colors for the most part, except for my style choices. I worked retail for a while, and I heard a lot of opinions on my own choices!

When looking at four seasons, it is understood that not every color in a palette will be good and some will be better than others. When pondering Spring and Autumn, I took the Color Me Beautiful palettes and crossed out all the colors that don’t work for me in Spring (the ones that bring out redness in my face) and the colors in Autumn that feel too heavy for me.

Spring

Rather than using a palette, however, I am just going to trust me own eye and go with colors that appear to be warm enough and clear enough. I have been doing this dressing T4 (since I feel that I still need red-orange and not fuchsia, for instance). My approach is to do both, sometimes separately, sometimes in combination, if there are colors that are warm enough for Spring but also pure enough for T4. This is made easier by David Kibbe’s philosophy of head-to-toe dressing, although he would not approve of anyone who is not a Winter wearing black! If I want to wear black and my silver jewelry, I can, in an outfit that is totally in line with the T4 pure hues; if I want to wear brown and my gold jewelry, I can, in an outfit that is all Kibbe/CMB Spring.

While this may seem like two wardrobes, I just think of Audrey Hepburn’s first wedding set, which was a stack of bands in gold, rose gold, and silver, because she was so into fashion and couldn’t be restricted to one metal. Rather than just choosing between two options, I want to have both options. Maybe one option will win out. Maybe I’ll just be happy to have options and wear whatever strikes my fancy on a particular day.

Are you dealing with two (or more!) color palettes/style philosophies? How do you handle it?

Dressing Your Truth, Kibbe's Metamorphosis, Personal | 16 Comments

Why Did I Return to DYT?

Of course, the last post on this blog before my unintentional hiatus was Why I Stopped Dressing My Truth, Part 2. And of course I stopped, because what I thought was my Truth was not my truth–the post before that was perfectly 4/1 and I was talking about disobeying my recommendations.

So I left DYT because I was tired of trying to fit myself into Type 3, where the jewelry was too big and the clothes were too textured and heavy. I think some people do find that DYT just does not work for them, but in my case, it wasn’t working because I had placed myself incorrectly within the system. Once I realized that, though, it was like getting everything back that I loved after years of thinking that I just wasn’t bright enough to handle black and white and pure colors.

This began to change a little when I realized that all of David Kibbe’s palettes go pretty bright. He doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of things in the Soft range. Accepting David’s view of color, I gave myself permission to go brighter, especially as even DYT T3 seemed to be moving in a more vivid direction.

I pretty much rejected T3 style but kept the T3 colors, thinking of it as a four-season Autumn. But once I realized I was 4/1, it was basically just giving a name to what I was doing already, and giving myself permission to add black and white to my wardrobe, as well as some colors like non-peacock blue.

I don’t think that I would get black from David–only Winters get black in his world, and his Winters are very cool and high contrast. But I’m still enjoying allowing myself to express myself using the T4 palette, and I find that keeping 4/1 helps me get my FG yin/yang balance correct. Like many Gamines, I have a tendency to go entirely to the yang side, and T1 reminds me to add back in more yin.

Besides Kibbe, the only stylist I’d want to go see is David Zyla, but that is forever a puzzle to me. For now, using 4/1 to inform my FG expression feels right to me.

How have you found working with DYT, if you use it? Does it work with your other style system discoveries?

Dressing Your Truth, Personal | 7 Comments

Finally Revealing My Truth: Why Did It Take Me So Long to See It?

It’s shocking to me that it took me so long to see that I was T4. I have heard from others who know me that it was fairly obvious. So why couldn’t I see it? I fell into some common traps.

1) Thinking I wasn’t perfect enough for T4.
Many T4s fall into this trap: our perfecting nature makes it so that we have a hard time seeing ourselves in T4’s symmetry and perfect posture, and/or feel like we don’t hit all the checkboxes. I don’t have perfect posture. Like anyone else, I can see where I have asymmetry in my face. My nose has long been a sore point for me in terms of my appearance, and when I read “lump of clay” for T3, I felt like I couldn’t be anything else in the system, especially not the “perfect” type.

2) Confusing “still + upward” with “push forward.”
T4s and T3s can both have what is considered to be a “strong” personality. I am definitely a bold person, and the S1 makes me a little more high energy than, say, a 4/2. Things that I had thought were an indicator of T3 actually were an indicator of being T4 and being my own authority and not being afraid to express my opinion.

There were a lot of things that should have clued me in:

1) My childhood behavior.
No one would have ever called me an “active” child. I was very still–you could place me in a chair and I would stay there, observing the world. I didn’t talk much. I enjoyed spending time alone, working on my own things. I didn’t have much use for other children. I never related to the ways that T3s are shamed as children because, well, I wasn’t that kid.

2) Never dressing T3.
Many people who have placed themselves in the wrong type will dress with all the other elements of their actual type, just in the colors of the type they think they are. My “T3” wardrobe was basically 4/1, just in the T3 colors. The T3 elements never felt right on me and never suited my taste–even when I would buy T3 jewelry from the DYT store, it would literally be too large for my ears or wrists, and I never took any of the clothes I bought from there out of the package.

So why didn’t I see these obvious things? I think it all goes back to #1: I just didn’t think I was “enough” for T4. I didn’t think my facial features would qualify. I had to see them from a different perspective (my license, with proper T4 hair because it worked better than T3 hair… another sign) in order to see myself as T4. And once I allowed myself to see myself as T4, I have been able to go back to what I love and what I feel expresses me. The Autumn colors never suited my personality, really. I am a bold person, and the clear, strong hues have always been what I have wanted to be in all of these systems.

Again, I don’t feel like I would drape into these colors in any of the color-based systems, but when everything is put together, it is what feels the most true to me. And in the end, I think that is what we all want: to feel like ourselves.

Dressing Your Truth, Personal | 19 Comments

Finally Revealing My Truth

I teased this on the Facebook page months ago, and I have been silent ever since. There are several reasons for this. Some are logistical, since I moved across the country and started grad school. But I think also there is just a lot to reveal, and how much this shift has changed my perspective on what I do here and how I am present in life.

One thing that has not changed: my perspective on my Kibbe Image ID. I still believe that my yin/yang balance is Flamboyant Gamine, and it is the best description of my physicality and my “star quality.”

But there is another piece of how I identify that has been nearly as stable over the years that I have now decided was wrong. For many years, I have seen myself as a 3/4 in Dressing Your Truth. But I have never even really come close to dressing that way. It was always too heavy, too much. And when I joined the Facebook group, I could never shake the feeling that I just didn’t look like the people in the group. But I simply didn’t know where else I could fit.

I got my license at the end of June, and as I was looking at my photo, it was as if I were seeing my face for the first time. Suddenly I could see symmetry and parallel lines. And I realized that I was a Type Four with a Secondary One.

This is a common mistyping–it’s stillness with a push behind it. And it is not uncommon for Type 4s to not see themselves as “perfect enough” to be T4. I thought I wasn’t graceful enough; I thought that my nose was all wrong. But once I saw it, there it was.

This does, of course, render Dark Autumn, and Autumn in general, no longer relevant, if I really want to stick with DYT. I have enjoyed bringing black back into my wardrobe, and going for bold, saturated colors. Would I drape into these colors? Probably not. Do I feel like they express me better than something I may drape into? Yes.

I do feel like it is a relief to not have to think about how I would fit what I loved into T3. I can see that the way I have been dressing is 4/1 lines, just in T3 colors. And I can see that living my truth has been good for me, especially since I discovered it right before I started a brand new chapter in my life.

I could go on and on about this, but really, just look at this site! It is so T4 🙂

I am not looking for opinions, but if you have questions about my process, I will answer them here and on Facebook.

Dressing Your Truth, Kibbe's Metamorphosis, Personal | 5 Comments

Why I Stopped Dressing My Truth, Part 2

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…Or did I start doing it, at least my definition of it?

In recent months, I’ve been moving away from stricter views of style. You can see that my first post on this subject, as well as in my posts about disobeying your recommendations and abandoning Sci\ART.

Some people may like having a very narrow outline of what they should wear, and having everything in their wardrobe coordinate. I see the appeal of this, and for a long time, I believed that this was the best way. But I feel like it’s started to feeling too constricting for me. It was taking the fun out of clothes. When I started my style journey, I pretty much only wore black and gray. I had no idea what colors looked good on me. Exploring all of these color and style systems has given me clarity, which in turn I now feel allows me to know how I can break the rules.

One of the problems with the stricter systems is that they can almost make you feel guilty for not following them. For instance, if I don’t dress as a Type Three, am I letting myself down because I’m not showing my “true” self? If I don’t want to wear shades and substance, is it giving the wrong impression about who I am?

As it so often happens, the answer came to me while reading Metamorphosis:

Since you don’t have Louis B. Mayer guiding you in developing your star quality, you’ve got to do it for yourself. Discovering your Image Identity is the first step, for it allows you to utilize everything you are–both physically and innately–so that you can integrate your essential uniqueness into your own total look.

Not only will you end perfectly coordinated, with all elements of your appearance working harmoniously and holistically, but you will also get to experience the fun, the excitement, and even the glamour of discovering how thrilling and fulfilling it is when your star quality is out in the open for everyone to see and appreciate. The most exciting part of your metamorphosis becomes the new way you experience yourself as you begin to glory and revel in your totally radiant being!

By putting your uniqueness on display, you allow the world to see that there is no one else exactly like you. You are also able to remember that fact yourself, which is not always easy to do. That’s what Metamorphosis is all about. We’re not transforming you into something that’s going to disappear when you slip out of your clothes or wash the makeup off your face and watch it slowly drain down the sink.

Your true special essence already exists. Your star quality is inside you this very instant as surely as the ability to take your next breath. All you need to do is discover it, acknowledge it, enhance it, allow it to be seen, and then simply sit back and experience the wonder that is you!

I’m putting so long an excerpt here because I think it really captures what I love so much about the way David Kibbe works, and what I think sometimes other people struggle with when they try to work out Kibbe’s system for themselves. You simply are who you are. I can’t make myself into a Marilyn Monroe type anymore than Marilyn could have turned herself into Audrey. It’s about embracing what you are, and letting go of what you’re not.

To some, letting go of who you are not means rejecting things based on color, or by following DYT’s principles. But being Dark Autumn didn’t feel like an essential part of who I was–it was simply a set of rules to follow. DYT didn’t feel like an expression of me. It seemed to just get in the way of who I was, with rules to follow that may reflect my heavy footplant, but that were not as good a representation of me as Flamboyant Gamine is.

For me, using my intuition to follow my yin/yang balance and enjoy being FG is the fullest expression of who I am and my truth.

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Personal | 24 Comments

How Are You Doing?

As we look forward to summer in the Northern Hemisphere, I’d like to hear from you. How are you doing with your style? What systems are you using? I have been busy with work and now I’m trying to figure out how to make my site GDPR-compliant, so I’d like to turn it over to you.

For me, I am currently using Kibbe Flamboyant Gamine, as always, and Kibbe Vivid Autumn. I am as ever interested in Zyla and Fantastical Beauty, and currently think I’d be Tawny Spring in Zyla and a Garden Fairy Fae in these systems. If you’d like for me to talk about these more in depth, I would be glad to.

So just let me know how you’re doing and what you’re interested in seeing here as I try to get my life in order before some massive changes occur. 🙂

Color, Personal, Style Systems | 1 Comment

How To: Disobey Your Style and Color Recommendations

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In a perfect world, we’d all have closets full of only A+ for both style and color. Some of us will have that. For others, it can be a struggle to find things that tick both boxes. Or we just fall in love with something that doesn’t really fit.

Some of you will recoil at the thought at buying something outside of your perfect colors or perfect lines. (I think most of you in this category will be Winters, because being able to wear black and white makes life a lot easier ;)). But if sometimes you want to be a little naughty and rebel, read on.

I recently bought a shirt that is striped black and white. This is something I have been avoiding for a long time. But I saw this top, and I immediately saw how perfect it was for my Modern Jean Seberg aesthetic.

J.Crew Striped Silk Top, was $88, now $59.99

Striped Silk Top, J.Crew, was $88, now $59.99




So once it went on sale (I won’t pay $88 for something that isn’t A+!), I bought it. Here are my tips for disobeying:

1) It should still be A+ for one part of your recommendations.

Don’t get something that doesn’t fit you well in both line and color. Go off palette or go off style, but not both at the same time.

2) Buy it as part of a complete outfit.

Don’t buy it as something you have to mix into your wardrobe. It may cause you to buy a lot of other things that aren’t A+. Buy it as an outfit so that it is isolated. Don’t try to mix and match your “off-brand” stuff. Buy it as a complete look so you maintain the integrity of your wardrobe otherwise. I bought the striped top with some shorts:

And then my sandals have black soles, so I figure they will go well enough:

(This is also a good tip for when you get a new set of recommendations and you want to transition your wardrobe. Don’t try to buy things that will work with what you already have. Buy complete outfits and put them in a separate section of your closet.)

3) For color, don’t wear your worsts.

Black isn’t my worst. It just isn’t my best. It is a little blah on me. But no cut or details are worth optic white or spring coral or melon. If you have identified your worst colors, avoid them at all costs.

4) For a piece that is off style-wise, try to make up the difference.

David Kibbe says garments don’t have yin/yang balances on their own. So something may work for you, regardless of how distant it seems from your idea of your best lines. And make sure that the rest of your outfit is on point. Jewelry, shoes, other articles of clothing. See if you can’t style your way from B- to A+.

4) For color, consider your makeup.

With a black-and-white outfit, I’m not going to wear my brownest lipstick. I’m going to go in the coolest and brightest direction I can, while remaining within the boundaries of what’s flattering on me.

5) Wear what you love.

Buying something outside of your recommendations isn’t a sign of moral failure. Style is fun. Allow yourself to have some freedom.

Have you purchased anything recently that falls out of the range of what you’re “allowed” to do? How have you managed to make it work for you?

Dressing Your Truth, Personal | 9 Comments

Why I Stopped Dressing My Truth

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Before I begin, I think some people who are really into DYT would say that I never did in the first place. And they may be right–I never went full-on on what would be a recognizable T3 look.

And there’s a couple of reasons for that. The first is that some of it just isn’t my style. I knew from past experience that some things wouldn’t flatter me, and some of it, I just don’t care for the aesthetic. The other is that some things, like the jewelry, are literally too big and heavy for me. I have tiny earlobes, small wrists. I have ordered a couple of pairs of studs from the DYT store, and they are always larger than I expected when I receive them. They show the earrings on a ear on the website, but my ears are just that much smaller.

I don’t think I’ve typed myself incorrectly. My movement is very Type 3. But T3 fashion doesn’t necessarily express what I want to express. While theoretically, it should be a looser framework into which you can inject your personal style, T3 generally looks earthier than I go.

Whenever I look at other systems, I have to say that I just always come back to Kibbe. Whatever else I’m thinking about with style at the time (and I’m writing about this right now for the new workbook), Flamboyant Gamine is always the sun that any other style system floats around. If a system isn’t compatible with FG, it isn’t going to work for me.

I tried to combine them for a while… judging both the yin/yang balance of an item on me and whether or not it fit the T3 keywords. But in the end, this just felt too stifling. In addition, my style has started to shift to where “edgy” has taken a less prominent role. So while I previously liked the edgy aspects of T3, it no longer feels like who I am. I could definitely not wear T3 jewelry, and I don’t want to cut my hair short in a T3 way; I like my current haircut, which is probably a 1/4 or a 4/1 cut.

I still really appreciate the self-exploration aspects of Energy Profiling. I just no longer feel like the aesthetic aspects of it fit who I am. I feel like Flamboyant Gamine expresses my essence really well, and I am happier dressing that way than I am when I try to add T3 into the mix.

For instance, this dress is on my list… there’s no way it would fit T3. But it would be a dress I would feel comfortable and confident in.

Martha Dress, Boden, $150

Martha Dress, Boden, $150

Have you tried Dressing Your Truth? Do you find that your energy type’s clothing suits you, or have you found that other style systems work better for you?

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Color, Personal | 13 Comments

Vibrant Autumn

In recent months, I’ve felt myself become disillusioned with the Sci\ART system, at least as it is practiced today. There are a couple of reasons for this.

1. My issues with the two main schools of thought.

The two branches of Sci\ART that are the most widespread, with the most analysts, are True Colour International and 12 Blueprints. I have issues with both, although these issues are different. I wrote about it before, but I simply don’t like the results True Colour gets. They drape a lot of Softs, and I think that the look they go for is flattening and graying. They make a lot of fuss about redraping former 12 Blueprints analysts and clients, and I don’t see an improvement. I don’t look at a TCI client and go, “Wow, this woman looks fabulous.” I see someone who now blends into the background.

I tend to prefer the way 12 Blueprints/Your Natural Design clients look, but the intertwining of this branch of analysts and the Best Dressed Kibbe knockoff system means that I can’t support them, either. My feelings on this subject are well known, but suffice to say, there are so many 12BP analysts that are now offering typing in this system that I feel I can no longer endorse it. I take Kibbe’s legacy very seriously; his system totally upends conventional wisdom and is so honoring of individual beauty, and he is such a wonderful and generous person to boot. The Best Dressed system undoes what it great about Kibbe.

2. The palettes feel limiting.

Despite the fact that Zyla gives you a limited color palette, many people who come from Sci\ART still feel liberated when they get their color palette. He gives people colors that are great for them, but may fall into various Sci\ART seasons. Sci\ART palettes can begin to feel a little confining, in my opinion. You need to hit all three markers of hue, chroma, and value, and then soemtimes it feels like your season is a compromise, which I will explain in a bit.

The wrong way to solve the latter problem, in my opinion, is to further limit your palette and make it more specific, like the systems do that have 16 or more seasons. I find that they are often redundant, further limiting your Sci\ART palette over adding new options. In recent months, I have actually begun to favor a four-season approach, which would have shocked me of a couple of a years ago. I’ve been using my T3 palette from DYT, actually.

After reading Tina’s blog post on her House of Colour experience, I feel like I’ve found my solution. House of Colour drapes you into one of four seasons, and then further refines it into a subseason, but you can use all of the colors of the main season–the subseason just has your bests.

On the Kettlewell (which I think is close to House of Colour), I found a blog post that has a Vibrant Autumn, which I think best describes me. I put myself into Dark Autumn from Sci\ART because it’s the brightest Autumn, and less because it’s the darkest. The coolest colors in DA are not my best, for sure. I stock my wardrobe with colors that are bright, but still have that muted/dirty autumnal quality.

kettlewell_vibrantautumn
(source)

These are the kind of colors you’ll mainly find in my wardrobe, and the ones I get compliments on. From the descriptions on the site, it sounds like I could be their Soft Autumn (which is far less Soft than a Sci\ART Soft Autumn), since people frequently think I’m a Summer until they see how much cool colors drain me, but I think these colors are truly the best from the Autumn family for me. The Dark/Blue Autumn in Kettlewell and House of Colour is very cool, to my eye–I know we have had some people in the Dark Autumn group on Facebook who come from this methodology, and the colors they can wear are far cooler.

As I write this, I realize that the approach is very similar to what Kibbe does. He has one palette for each of the four seasons, but then the way you use the palette varies. So like with style in general, maybe once again it is Kibbe who holds the key to what works for me.

Have you looked at House of Colour at all? What do you think about what is basically a four-season approach versus Sci\ART?

David Zyla, Personal | 0 comment

February 2018 Style Update: Tawny Spring?!

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So a little over a year ago, I started moving away from the edgy looks of my 20s and began transitioning into style that was influenced by the late 50s/early 60s and French New Wave cinema. Since this has also coincided with a major move and weight loss, my wardrobe is almost entirely different than it was at the time I wrote that post. Anyway, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, Zyla is a system that I cycle in and out of every few months. I’m interested in his work and would love to see him, but unlike Kibbe, there isn’t an archetype that resonates with me right out of the box. And because the recommendations vary so much from individual to individual within an archetype, unless there is one where the narrow view presented in the book fits you very well, there are a number of places where you could potentially land.

I’ve generally gone back and forth between a handful of Autumn archetype and a handful of Spring archetypes. I’m back to thinking that I would likely be Spring, specifically Tawny, as recently there was a consult writeup that I read where the image he was giving is something that would suit me well. I played around and created another palette for myself:

Essence, Romantic, Dramatic, Energy, Tranquil/First Base, Second Base, Third Base

Essence, Romantic, Dramatic, Energy, Tranquil/First Base, Second Base, Third Base

I’ve also picked up some items recently that I think suit this Tawny vibe well.

The first is this Botkier bag. It’s a small crossbody, which is something that I was liking, and I was glad to find a brand that suited my style as well as Rebecca Minkoff does, but without that Scientology connection.

I love the yellow, and I also appreciate how they have matched silver hardware to the cool colorways and gold hardware to the warm. You may also have noticed that I included the large version in my Vivacious post.

I’ve never been one for button up shirts. David Kibbe is the one that pointed out that they are just somehow incompatible with my personality, and he’s right. That’s why I’ve had my eye on this shirt from J.Crew for a while, but it used to only come in blue and black pinstripes. When I saw that they had an olive for spring, I bought it immediately.

And lastly, I have been in love with the idea of a camel-colored wool coat for a while, but it had to be just the right one. The right shade of camel, a warmer and richer golden brown. And it had to have a straight cut. I finally found one, although sadly few colors and sizes remain. I’m very happy to have picked mine up and at the price I did, which was around $120.

Cocoon Coat in Italian Stadium-Cloth Wool, J.Crew, was $350, now $226.99

Cocoon Coat in Italian Stadium-Cloth Wool, J.Crew, was $350, now $226.99

So these are the key pieces I’ve added to my wardrobe lately. What have you gotten for yourself lately?

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