Posts Tagged ‘Color Me Beautiful’

Dark Autumn Blonde, Part Two

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Since I wrote my last post, I have been experimenting with the Dark Autumn color space. I have amassed a collection of Dark Autumn lipsticks, some I already owned, some that were made possible by a killer sale on Lipstick Queen at my salon, and some I just splurged on. I also stumbled upon a sweater in the color I talked about in my last post, the draping card that looked really, really good with my skin.

Unfortunately, the beginning of spring is really the wrong time to begin exploring Dark Autumn. There is next to nothing in the stores, apart from what’s on the sale rack (where that sweater was). Now that I’ve received my fan, I’ll be able to go and seek out tops from the lighter side of the palette without fearing that I’ll mistakenly dip into another season. But of course, what I really want to find are pieces in Dark Autumn’s darks, the beautiful, better-than-black, yes-it’s-a-color-but-it’s-a-fashion-neutral colors.

If you are not familiar with the way True Colour swatch books are laid out, each swatch is labeled with either “A,” for “accent,” or “FN,” for “fashion neutral.” One of the interesting things about the DA swatch book is that so many of the colors are labeled “FN.” Coming from Bright Spring, where I felt like there weren’t very many, those extra darks that count as neutrals are very intriguing to me.

On the other hand, I feel like there is less variety in my makeup possibilities. The swatches in the photo above feel like a complete lipstick wardrobe to me. Any other lipsticks that I both like and fall into DA would feel like a repeat to me. Bright Spring, you have your pinks, your reds, your corals, maybe your oranges… But I may make discoveries yet. I eagerly await Cate Linden’s updated DA makeup post.

(And if you’re a DA and see a major gap, by all means, let me know!)

Also, DA is way brighter than people think it is. Just a little PSA. 🙂

Lastly, I’m not the biggest fan of Color Me Beautiful, but I was reading the men’s book today, and read some things that I had missed when I read the version for women:
1. CMB Autumns are more likely to sunburn than CMB Summers.
2. Ivory skin and ash blonde/dark golden blonde hair are all options for CMB autumns.
3. CMB Autumns can have turquoise eyes with a teal gray ring around the iris–which is exactly what I have.

So that’s interesting. Anyway, if you are a DA and have tips, please share.

Seasonal Color Analysis and the Minimalist Movement

So, nerd confession time: I like to play stupid games on my iPhone, and one of them is Archie: Riverdale Rescue, in which you play along with storylines featuring Archie and his friends. I was playing last night, and I had a new mission. Ginger, a character who moved to Riverdale after I stopped reading the comics, had recently gone to New York and gotten analyzed, and was now giving Betty her clothes in colors that weren’t in her season. They even used the correct terminology, like “draped.”

Of course, as someone who has been obsessed with color analysis as of late, this was very nerdily exciting to me. I even took some screenshots–although I didn’t get one about draping, sadly:
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Seasonal color analysis was most popular in the 80s, when Color Me Beautiful was popular. I don’t recall ever hearing much about it in the 90s or 2000s. But it seems to me the seasonal color analysis is ripe for a renaissance. There are already plenty of sites and communities dedicated to it, and there are tons of websites focused on things like capsules and wardrobe minimalism. Minimalism is a big trend in general, and who doesn’t love a tiny house?

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If you’re working with minimal posessions, capsule wardrobes, and less storage space, it makes total sense that you’d want to make sure that every piece of clothing you owned was ideal, and that it was the perfect color and cut for you. So things like color analysis and Kibbe, which go a long way to making sure you don’t end up buying things that don’t work for you and just sit in your closet, are a perfect fit for this whole movement.

Now, Archie has always seemed to me to be taking place in both the present and the past; they may be using the Internet and the storylines tend to reflect the mores of the time, but Archie still drives a jalopy that would look perfectly at home in 1939, the year the comics came out, and the comics in general look like they can be taking place at any time over the past 75 years. So this reference to color analysis, with a book title very similar to Color Me Beautiful, could just be a callback to the past. But I think in the context of 2014, color analysis is ripe for a revival, and it could very well be that the person who wrote this little mission is lurking on the same color forums we are, and is currently deciding between Bright Spring and Bright Winter.

Now, if seasonal color analysis shows up in a mission in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, then we’ll know that it’s returned to the zeitgeist.

Have you seen any mentions of color analysis in pop culture lately?

Color Me Beautiful: 1980s Fashion Nightmare

For now, I am not going to really discuss systems that are defined by color and season. After reading the materials related to Dressing Your Truth and Zyla, I have some major issues with the way that kind of system works. I don’t see how having, say, a certain kind of nose will mean that you’re more likely to lose your keys (DYT) or that a certain kind of coloring will mean you have a certain kind of personality (Zyla). I like Kibbe because it is about working with your entire essence and your balance of yin and yang to find a type, and has nothing to do with what color your hair is. While obviously knowing your most flattering colors is helpful, whether you do it by a seasonal color analysis or by using the colors you find in your eyes, skin, and hair, like in Zyla, I don’t like using it as a starting point for finding your personal style. I’d rather have the style first, and the colors second.

That being said, before I get into Kibbe, I’d like to continue with the history kick and talk a little bit about Carole Jackson’s Color Me Beautiful. There are others, like Caygill and Kentner, but I haven’t been able to get ahold of their books–Caygill’s goes for hundreds of dollars–and Carole Jackson’s book is still in print. It was the first book I read that had at least part of it based on Belle Northrup’s and Harriet Tilden McJimsey’s work, and indirectly led me to Kibbe, DYT, et al. So I thought I’d talk about it a little bit.

Color Me Beautiful‘s main premise is splitting women into the four different seasons based on their coloring. (I have been fascinated with this concept ever since coming across it in a Baby-Sitters Club book.) Using these colors as a guide, Carole Jackson further split women into what she calls “style personalities,” using the categories determined by Harriet Tilden McJimsey. Jackson, however, totally rids the system of the yin/yang concept. She tells you just to use your season as a guide and then study yourself in the mirror and see which personality fits you best. She also says that some people can wear several personalities, depending on the occasion.

Thanks to the Internet, you don’t even have to buy the book to see what she’s talking about. Someone uploaded a 1980s Color Me Beautiful promotional video to YouTube. The very 80s fashions are alternately hilarious and frightening, and I can say that after watching this, I was more certain than ever that none of these fit me. The Style Personality segment starts at around 38:19:

(The rest of the video may be helpful for determining your season if you’re struggling with it, although nowadays using 12 Seasons seems to be more popular. But it’s a good starting place if you’re unsure if you should look at, say, Autumns or Winters.)

I think it’s interesting to look at this and then compare it to Kibbe, who came out at around the same time, and see what he did with the structure provided with McJimsey. His allows for a lot more variation, and gets rid of coloring=style personality, which I definitely approve of. I will finally begin discussing Kibbe in my next post, which will be on how I see the Kibbe system.