You have a powerful beauty secret you can tap into any time, and you may not even know it. Every time you get dressed, or open your jewelry box or makeup kit, the opportunity awaits. And it may not be what you think.
The beauty secret is color: how our skin responds to it, and whether it brings out the best in or worst in our appearance. Will you choose the "wrong" colors, or the "right" ones?
Color choices can be complicated, but there's one distinction that's clear for everyone. We're all either a "warm" or a "cool".
This has nothing to do with your personality! It has everything to do with your natural coloring. Some of us look best in warm colors, others in cool. As it happens, the vast majority of people worldwide are "cool". Why? Well, because most people with black hair and brown eyes are flattered by a cool color palate. And that accounts for most of the Eastern hemisphere!
I wish it were as easy as all that, but every rule has exceptions. One of my best friends has olive skin, brown eyes and black hair, but she looks best in colors like olive green, golden mustard, and burnt orange. She is most definitely a "warm". The only way to know which "variety" you are for certain is to test it out for yourself.
White gold has become hugely popular recently, and I'm happy to see this! With most people belonging to the "cool" group, the white metals flatter the majority of us. Test this with your own jewelry. One metal will tend to look brighter against you skin than the other. One will almost glow, while the other just sits there.
If you have any doubts that warm and cool colors affect your skin tone, take a look at the pictures I took of my hand (below). All photos were taken within seconds of each other, with the same camera, under the same lighting conditions. The only difference? The fabric swatch on the left is gold lame and the one on the right is silver lame. Gold is warm, and silver is cool. The shiny fabrics imitate jewelry remarkably well. I happen to be a "cool", so silver colored jewelry is most flattering
against my skin.
One point you'll need to keep in mind is that if you're a heavy smoker or have a deep tan, it'll be harder to see the effects of color on your skin. I took photos of my palms because they're not darkened by the sun. And if you were standing next to me, you would have noticed that with "palm up" against a gold background, my skin looked blotchy. Even looking at a computer screen, it's easy to see that there's a difference in skin tone. If you ask me, the one on the left looks a wee
bit like a corpse! If you had big enough swatches of each fabric, you could hold them under your face and see the same effect.
Just as the gold and silver metals typify warm and cool color palates, so do yellow-oranges and icy-blues. When you think of warm colors, think of those with honey-yellow and orange undertones. Cool colors have strictly blue undertones with zero yellowy orange in them.
Below are examples of a typical "warm" and a typical "cool". The woman on the left will look great in orange, and can wear brass, copper or yellow gold metals. The woman on the right will come alive in a rich blue-red and looks best in white gold, silver and pewter. And our "cool" woman happens to be wearing one of the few shades of red hair color that will flatter her. It's a cool eggplant red, not orangey or brassy.
images courtesy of www.bosshair.com
Of course, I have to remind you that there are lots of exceptions to any rule. The fact that you have fair skin and blonde hair, or olive skin and dark hair doesn't automatically put you into one category or the other, it just makes it "more likely".
Want to do the warm/cool test at home? The easiest way is to get a couple of sheets of holiday wrapping paper, one gold and one silver, and alternately drape a sheet of each under your face. Here are some tips to make the results more accurate: Color Draping at Home
Related Articles:
Beauty and Color; an Intimate Connection Explains in detail how your appearance changes with the colors you wear -- both positive and negative effects are outlined.
Color Therapy (Chromotherapy) Describes the effects that color has on our moods, health, and ways of thinking
Hair Color Impressions Does your hair color affect the way other's react to you? Find the answers here.
