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Archive of ‘Personal’ category

Color, My Color Journey, Personal | 5 Comments

Dark Autumn Blonde

Today I did the experiment I mentioned in this post. To review, I purchased Truth Is Beauty home draping cards for six season (Light Summer, Soft Summer, Soft Autumn, True Autumn, Dark Autumn, and True Spring) and took a picture of each season’s fan underneath my chin. But before I posted the pictures, I cropped the colors out, so all you saw was my face. Online color analysis has limitations no matter what, but I felt like this got rid of one of the major problems: people see what they want to see. If they like a color, that’ll influence their opinion. If they feel in their heart of hearts that you’re a Soft Summer, that’ll influence their opinion. This way, all they were looking at was the effect of the color on my skin, not the color itself.

When I posted the photos, the results came in quickly. The worst was Light Summer. The best was… Dark Autumn. And when I posted the individual colors of Dark Autumn (again not showing the color itself), the best color was this one:
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(Source)

The attractively named “Newt Green.” Definitely not a color you could imagine a Spring or Summer wearing.

I think this experiment was a successful one. People looked at what I wanted them to look at–skin effects–and not my hair and eye color. I’m not taking this to be the same as being draped Dark Autumn, but it’s enough to make me seriously consider it and want to experiment with it.

Color, My Color Journey, Personal | 3 Comments

An Online Color Analysis Experiment

Recently, Christine Scaman wrote a post dealing with the comments she receives that she must be a summer. She handles this all much more graciously than I would, and even still, you can see people in the comments insisting she is a Light Summer. (!) If Christine can’t get it right in the eyes of the Internet, really, what hope do the rest of us have?

This brings up a major issue with asking people online for help in determining your season when they are not an analyst standing in front of you during your draping who is trained in the system you’re exploring. Analysts trained in Sci/Art or 12 Blueprints look at your skin during a draping. Your hair is covered. No one looks to see whether your eyes have spokes or an Aztec sun.

And yet people are used to the body-color way of doing things. They want to see what they perceive as “harmony” between your hair color and your most flattering clothes. We all do it, whether we’re aware of it or not. We have our own preferences that affect our judgment. Now, I have nothing against this way of doing things. I am open to the idea of a Caygill or Caygill-derived analysis after a 12 Blueprints analysis, because I think it may help me understand where my sweet spot within my 12 Blueprints season lies. I am fully aware of and in agreement with the fact that I’d probably end up a Spring in Caygill. But this does not mean I am a Sci/Art Spring, or that I should look at Light or Bright Spring again. In Light Spring, I’m pink. Bright Spring totally overpowers me. I simply need more depth than Light Spring and can’t balance Bright Spring. Yes, I’m blonde with very pale skin that is slightly warm. That does not mean that these are my only options.

Soon, I will be receiving color cards from Truth Is Beauty in the mail. I ordered True Spring, Light Summer, Soft Summer, and the three Autumns. When I use these cards to drape, I plan to post them without the card showing, with the focus just on my face. This way, I hope, I will get a response that looks just at my skin, not at my apparent lightness in relation to what I am draping with.

Flamboyant Gamine, Kibbe's Metamorphosis, My Kibbe Journey, Personal, Soft Natural | 8 Comments

Why I’m Not a Soft Natural

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I don’t like body-type recommendations very much. I much prefer Kibbe’s emphasis on creating harmony within yourself, and not trying to conform to classical rules of beauty and symmetry. That being said, there is obviously a body-type component to Kibbe. You wouldn’t have an apple-shaped Theatrical Romantic, for instance. But recommendations for my type (hourglass–my shoulders and hips are even, and I have a small waist) conflict with FG, and FG works, so that was enough for me to dismiss body-type recommendations as nonsense meant to achieve something that isn’t possible.

While I’m still not their biggest fan, I am now realizing that there is a way they could work for me. Yesterday, one of the members of our Facebook style community began a project mapping Kibbe Image Identities to Imogen Lamport’s body types. Now, of course I went in with my usual suspicion of body-type dressing, especially since I know that my body doesn’t fit the Flamboyant Gamine recommendations very well. I consider myself to have X with a secondary H. The more weight I gain, the squarer my shape gets, my hips especially. This person sees X-H as a Soft Natural shape. I do, too. I see similar shapes to my own when I see Soft Naturals, and I’ve never understood why Soft Natural is just so awful on me. If you read the description of a Soft Natural body, it sounds like me, weight gain patterns and all.

But I think there are words in Kibbe that are loaded. These words are loaded because he seems to use them in a different way than people who aren’t Kibbe. One of these is “curvy.” I think that in Kibbe, “curvy” means a curved line, not just 36-24-36. He describes Soft Naturals as, “slightly curvy, tends to an hourglass shape, but not extremely so.” We tend to think of how curvy someone is in measurements. But I think Kibbe is talking about the line we see. An SN can be mathematically curvier than a TR, especially when you consider that Naturals are often curvier from the side than the front. But the TR will have a curvier line to their bust, waists, and hips.

And this is exactly why Soft Natural doesn’t work for me. I don’t have a slight curve. I have what I described in this post: a very tapered ribcage on top of squarish hips the same width as my shoulders. My torso shape is composed entirely of angles and straight lines, no curve in sight.

Who else had this non-curvy hourglass body shape?

alittleblackdress3
(Source)

Audrey. Hepburn.

This shows that even a wasp waist is possible in FG, provided that everything is composed out of angles and straight lines, no curves. While an I or a plain V might be more common in FG, I think that if you combine I or H with V, you get the FG version of “curves.” We can only highlight our waists in something that follows our shape exactly, whether it’s from structure or bodycon. We cannot softly emphasize, the way SNs do. A softly flowing curve makes no sense over dramatic angles. I also don’t like to cinch, but your mileage may vary. So this is why both Soft Natural and recommendations for X shapes did absolutely nothing for me. I am an inverted triangle and a rectangle masquerading as an hourglass.

I think that if you are searching for your Kibbe type, read what Kibbe says about bodies very carefully, since he often means something a little bit different than other people. If you have no curvy lines, you can’t be a curvy Kibbe type. You want to match what you’ve got. So even if you have something that may seem to kick you out of a type, like a wasp waist for FG, really look at what is creating these particular details. You may end up with something totally different from the obvious answer.

Color, My Color Journey, Personal | 8 Comments

Looking at Autumn Again and Adjusting Makeup

Sometimes determining your colors can feel like going around in circles. I’m really no closer to figuring out my colors than I was when I started this blog. After playing some more with the fan, I think Bright Spring results in some graying. Bright lipsticks jump off my lips like translucent candy in photographs. I think that I need some clarity and brightness, but not as much as a Bright Spring, at least.

For fun, I took the Truth Is Beauty Seasonal Analysis Quiz today, and my results were surprising. Using the knowledge I’ve gained over the past couples of weeks, I end up with three possible results, depending on the things I’m not sure of:

1. If I consider black to be overwhelming (I think sometimes it overwhelms me in photographs because the white balance gets thrown off on my phone camera, but in real life I think it’s not the worst, but it makes my eyes gray): True Autumn.
2. If I think black is good, and that pumpkin is also a good color on me (I have just never tried this color): Dark Autumn.
3. If I do not think pumpkin is good, but black is: Dark Winter.

I actually wrote about looking Spring but potentially being Autumn, True Autumn in particular, way back in July. While I feel I’m in the same spot now (see what I mean about circling?), I do think I have some more knowledge at my disposal. I know some important things about myself. These things include being high contrast as far as natural blondes go and looking awesome in bronzer. Christine Scaman talks a lot about how key bronzing is to the autumn face in this blog post. I know for a fact that my most important step, even more so than foundation (okay, well, covering undereye circles too, but that’s part of my highlighting routine anyway) is highlighting and contouring/bronzing. It really defies all logic. I have the kind of skin that’s so pale I can’t even buy foundation at MAC. You know, the kind of person for whom beauty experts say bronzer will look just look like dirt on their skin. But me? Nope, I wear bronzer, and not even the peachy kind, and all I hear is how nice and healthy and glowing my skin looks.

One of the things that has turned me away from Autumns in the past is the brownish lipstick and blush looking like dirt on me. But a couple of months ago, Cate Linden, herself a very pale Dark Autumn, posted about her own DA makeup struggles. It has made me realize that makeup recommendations are definitely not one size fits all. As a non-typical DA (pink overtones, very pale skin), she has had some trouble figuring out the makeup angle. While we would have separate issues–I would say my overtone isn’t particularly pink, but it is very porcelain and clear as hers is–it seems that whatever season I do end up in, unless it’s one where I would basically fit the stereotype, which would be Light Summer, I am going to most likely have to deviate from the standard makeup to fit my own extreme coloring.

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Source

While we most often associate Dark Autumn with dark makeup looks with very dark, reddish-brown lip colors, there are other colors on the palette that seem like they would work as lipsticks that are not as dark, and clearer and not as brown. On a Dark Autumn who is as dark as the stereotype, these colors might be too light to work as lip colors. On someone whose starting point is much lighter, however, it may create the right contrast level with the rest of the face.

I am not saying I am Dark Autumn, of course. This is just how I would approach makeup if I did turn out to be one. (Look at how gorgeous the DA colors are! I would LOVE to be one.) Just like you address contrast level in your Kibbe according to your season (e.g., an SSu FG doing high contrast in the context of the low-contrast SSu palette), perhaps we also have to expect makeup to look normal on our face according to the coloring we have on our face already, while staying in harmony with our season’s palette overall.

Color, My Color Journey, Personal | 0 comment

Bright Spring Blonde

I finally received my Bright Spring fan, and while I haven’t really been able to go out and do a thorough try-on session in Bright Spring colors, what I have done so far seems promising. A t-shirt here, a few lipsticks there. So far, it seems to work pretty well. I know I said in a previous post that I felt like I couldn’t relate to other Bright Springs, but what I have discovered since is that there tends to be a lot of variation among Brights. Brights are tricky. They seem to usually look like something else. Tina covers this well in her post. I think I could very well be the second type she describes:

2) Those who really wear the darker colors quite well and have to use the lightest and darkest colors in combination to get the contrast they need (especially common in dark haired/dark skinned or dark haired/light complexioned Bright Springs.) Neon and almost neon colors on them are beautiful. They cannot go too bright.

Of course, I am blonde, but whatever. This is what seems to work on me. It could be a line influence, since FG is so high contrast.

I am still open to any type except Light Spring, since I saw how terrible it is. Getting every fan makes no sense, so I won’t have a definite answer until I get draped. But for now, I am going to play around in the Bright Spring color space and see what happens.

Color, My Color Journey, Personal | 10 Comments

Dark Winter Blonde, Part Two

Since I found blogging about it while going through the process to be incredibly helpful during my Kibbe journey, I thought I’d do the same thing with my season.

Unlike with my Image Identity, I don’t expect to be able to DIY my color analysis. While the tone of my last blog post may have seemed like I had settled on Dark Winter, what it was really about was realizing that Dark Winter is actually a door that is open to me, and not one that is automatically locked shut just because I happen to have blonde hair, pale skin, and (seemingly) light eyes. (Plus I just love that palette!)

Getting the Light Spring fan and seeing just how bad it was a real turning point for me because I had always just assumed that I would be a Light season, and probably Light Spring, since I wear foundation with neutral/warm undertones and it never looks weird or mismatched on me. But as Cate Linden wrote on her post on the subject, it’s extremely difficult to see these things yourself, and it’s rare that a person will be correct about themselves, no matter how good their color sense is.

So what do I expect to gain from examining my colors myself? I hope to identify certain things that can tide me over, shopping/makeup-wise, until I can get draped. So far, I have learned things like I can wear colors that are much deeper and/or saturated than you would expect from someone with my skin tone, and they look normal on me, but sheer lipstick tends to be better, especially with no other makeup. Black may not be my BEST color, but I can balance it just fine, and having both lights/brights and darks is a good thing. Heat level does not seem as important for me as intensity. Dark Winter is still in the running, but Bright Spring and Bright Winter are likely contenders. I will probably stay in this area, clothes-wise, but I will not make any investment purchases until I have had a PCA.

So that is where I’m at right now. And thank you to everyone who commented on my last post; you guys were very helpful and had some great insights and advice.

Color, My Color Journey, Personal | 12 Comments

Dark Winter Blonde

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(Source)

Several months ago, I wrote a couple of posts on “Banning Black from My Wardrobe” (part two is here. Over the next couple of months, I went back and forth on whether I was a Light Spring. Many told me that I just had to be some kind of Spring. I have blonde hair, blue-green eyes, and pale, almost-translucent skin with a warmth to it. Spring, right?

So I got my Light Spring fan in the mail. When I began color-matching things to the fan, I could immediately tell that it was not where I belonged. I could go darker. Many colors brought out gray shadows on my face that didn’t exist otherwise. I didn’t tick any of the boxes of how a Light Spring person reacts to colors; I just fit the stereotype.

So this inspired me to do more drapes. Everyone agreed that Light Spring was as terrible as I thought. Soft Summer was brought up, but most agreed that I was Bright Spring. Kelly green was good. Coral had something good about it, but the shade (fan-matched to Light Spring) was a little off. Some even thought black was my best.

I went to the Bright Spring group on Facebook, and like when I thought I was a Soft Natural, I felt like I really didn’t fit in. Like my experiences with clothes among the Soft Naturals, I felt like I was having a different experience with colors than the Bright Springs were having. I look great in bronzer and a smoky eye. Bright Spring lipsticks leap off my face as if the color was photoshopped on. Tina has a great post on signs you might be a Bright Spring, but none of her points applied to me.

A little voice in my head began making itself heard. It brought up the handful of non-stereotypical Dark Winters I’d seen, ones who didn’t look like Kim Kardashian and instead had similar skin tones to me. Some of them weren’t even brunettes. Cate Linden posted a beautiful picture of a little blonde girl that she had draped as Dark Winter.

Then I found this post by Rachel Nachmias, on Dark Winters who people think are Bright Springs. Every point she makes in the post could be taken from my Facebook thread where I posted my drapes. (I take draping shots with messy hair and no makeup, so I’m not posting them on the blog for posterity. I promise, though, that when I do finally get draped professionally, I will post those pictures.)

The only difference between me and the theoretical light Dark Winter in Rachel’s post is that I love dark colors. Nothing makes my heart sing more than a very dark purple, which, coincidentally, has been my most flattering drape to date. Dark circles that require two different kinds of concealer? Gone. Skin? Looks photoshopped. Face? Totally in focus.

Finding out about the possibility of me being Dark Winter makes me feel like I did when I came home to Flamboyant Gamine. All of the disparate parts about my natural appearance that weren’t making sense feel like they are suddenly coming together. I can wear very dark colors and turquoise and bright green and coral, and I am never going to try to get rid of black again. I am going to continue to experiment with Dark Winter, and let you know how it’s going.

Did your season surprise you? Do you fit the stereotype for a person of your season?

Color, Personal | 8 Comments

Light Spring and Flamboyant Gamine

I’m back to thinking of myself as a Light Spring after realizing that Light Spring makeup colors and neutrals suit me best. One of the issues with the spring seasons in general for me is that when season and personality are conflated, I don’t really fit into spring at all–especially Light Spring, which tends to be thought of as the most ethereal of probably all the seasons.

The other side to this is what a spring is supposed to look like. Not coloring-wise–with my light golden blonde hair and very fair-yet-warm skin, I have that part down. But as a Flamboyant Gamine, the typical image of a Light Spring is definitely in conflict with the stereotype of my season. You can read Christine Scaman’s post on spring makeup here. Light Spring’s makeup is supposed to be light in application and texture, not just color. This completely contradicts Kibbe’s makeup recommendations for Light Spring:

Makeup is your finishing touch. It provides the elegance and sophistication your Image Identity requires to be completely coordinated, head-to-toe. A “smoky face,” which combines deep, sultry colors with a touch of vibrancy around your eyes, strong cheeks, and a deep lipcolor, is your best look. Don’t choose shades that are overly bright; just a hint of color is necessary to bring out your flamboyant spirit. Stick to matte colors for the day, with a simple addition of sheer sparkle most effective at night.

Avoid: Pastel colors (too matronly on you). Watercolor blended edges (too aging on you). Only neutrals (too stark on you). Overly ornate or glittery face (too unsophisticated on you).

This is just one example of what can happen when your season and your Kibbe type don’t really seem to work together. (Let’s not even get into how most Light Spring Polyvore sets and Pinterest boards are completely irrelevant to my life and style. Most Light Spring inspiration looks something like this.) The real question here is how much your season does or doesn’t affect the way you interpret your Kibbe.

My way of interpreting Flamboyant Gamine is to simply try to buy clothes in Light Spring colors, and then putting them together the exact same way a, say, Bright Winter FG would. The end result is something like this post on Light Spring Punk: take Light Spring “black” and Light Spring “white,” and do the same thing a winter season would. But some would argue that my delicate Light Spring coloring requires some more delicacy that corresponds to my coloring.

For me, though, I think it works best to keep the intensity of FG, and just do it in my own colors as much as possible. If I want to a dark lip, I will find the color that is as deep as my palette goes. I know that a deeper coral will look as bold on me as a stark blood red on someone with stronger coloring.

I’m still trying to figure this out. I know that my FG recs WORK, and I know that I feel that this allows me to cheat somewhat with colors, that I can do bolder looks than, say, a Light Spring Romantic. But I am cheating the beauty of my coloring by doing so?

Flamboyant Gamine, Kibbe's Metamorphosis, My Kibbe Journey, Personal, Soft Dramatic | 5 Comments

My Kibbe Journey: Part 3.5

This is a follow up to my most recent post, because I feel like some interesting things were going on in the comments that I felt deserved post of their own.

I feel like I’m having a new Kibbe realization once every 48 hours. This is, I suppose, working with my own interpretation of Kibbe, because he is very right-brained/intuitive about it, and I want to plot everything on a graph. But that’s okay, because this is my blog and this is helping me to work stuff out. You don’t have to look at Kibbe the way I do if it’s not helpful for you.

Yesterday, I was reading about Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn, and how Twiggy is an FG with D influence and Audrey was an FG with Classic influence. Now, this does not mean that you don’t still fit into FG. You are still just the one category. But it can be helpful for those of us who are not Liza Minelli or Vivien Leigh or anyone else who is the prototypical celebrity for any given type.

Now, it’s pretty obvious I have some extra yin–I have yin flesh and I’m not boyishly straight, like you’d think of an FG as being. The only type in Kibbe where you have yin flesh and a yang face is actually SD.

Put me next to an SD, and it’s obvious that it’s not me. But if you look at a picture of Sophia Loren, I have what is basically a compact version of her body: very tapered ribcage and square hips matched by relatively broad shoulders:

Sophia Loren
(Source)

If you look at the chart of the logical progression of Kibbe types from yang to yin, contrast to blend, FG and SD are actually right next to each other. So instead of my extra yin coming from Soft Gamine, perhaps my extra yin is coming from a Soft Dramatic influence. Soft Dramatic is way too big on me, but perhaps I can add touches here and there. I would place myself where the red dot is:

map

I’ve long loved this Polyvore set by papillonnoir1:
2 winter kibbe gamines

The FG outfit is very much my style, and the skirt is drapey and asymmetrical in a way that seems to border on SD to me. Of course, I think SG peplums are also an option for me, but they seem to have disappeared from stores. So I think that keeping to FG’s rule of the first layer being narrow and cut close to the body, I am going to experiment with a little touches of SD draping as a way to highlight curves as an alternative to SG ways of highlighting curves.

Flamboyant Gamine, My Kibbe Journey, Personal, Soft Natural, Theatrical Romantic | 13 Comments

My Kibbe Journey: Part 3

***5/1/2015: I now see Kibbe in a totally different way than I write about here. Please see this post for my current views.***

Sometimes I feel like it may seem like I have no idea what I’m talking about, because pretty much every time I come to write a blog entry, I feel like I have decided on a new Kibbe type for myself, or a different season. But I think that most of us who set off to determine our Kibbe type find that it’s a pretty convoluted and confusing process, and many live in what turns out to be the wrong type for years–and the only way to actually confirm is to spend around $2000, plus hotel, airfare, etc., to see David Kibbe in person.

So. With that in mind, I’ve come to yet another major conclusion about the whole process. I recently joined a Kibbe group on Facebook, and there is a wealth of information there, including how Kibbe feels about the book, and how he wanted people to use it (look at the types presented, try stuff on it and see if it works, no quizzes necessary). It turns out that my approach to Kibbe–look at lines only, and then use your personality/essence to make it your own–is totally wrong. You should start with your essence, and then make adjustments to fit your body as needed.

This all became clear to me a couple of days ago, when it was pointed out to be that Charlize Theron is an official Kibbe Theatrical Romantic. One of the key features of a TR, according to the book, is a wasp waist (which I have, which will become important later). Charlize Theron has a straight figure, one that’d probably be called an inverted V. Looking just at her body, I’d probably be inclined to put her in Flamboyant Natural. But her face is so beautiful and full of S-curves. She looks the most herself when she is glammed up and dripping with jewels. If you compare her Dior ad to her sweatshirt look from Young Adult, which is truer to the person? I think it is jarring to see her look so dishevelled. You can tell she doesn’t have any natural in her at all.

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(Sources: 1, 2, 3)

Charlize’s glamorous face supersedes the fact that her body lacks these key physical feature of a TR. The TR clothes follow the lines of her face. The more reading I do, the more I realize that it’s about figuring out what is key about you, how you look the most yourself, what people notice first. Like Zyla, Kibbe was inspired to do what he does from the acting world, where he saw some people get cast and some who did not.

So maybe what we should do is typecast ourselves. I wrote about this idea in my first post in this series, and then I said I was wrong. But now I realize that I may have been right. I’m not a Soft Natural, a “Fresh and Sensual Lady.” I am much more aggressive and dynamic and funny. The energy I put into the world is that of a Flamboyant Gamine. My TR-style wasp waist that was tripping me up before? That’s not the first thing people notice about me. My task now is to find the FG clothes that work with my body, instead of hiding it. But I feel like it will be a relief to go to stores and be able to try on the clothes that appeal to me naturally, and not have to feel like I have to fit myself into styles that should work for me, taken as a sum of body parts.

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