Defining The Best Colors for your Season

The best colors for your season isn't about what you should wear this fall. It's the ideal color palatte that compliments your coloring and skin tone. Your natural skin tone, hair and eye color will make you an "Autumn", a "Winter, a "Spring" or a "Summer". Do you know which of these is your color palatte?

If you've read my sister articles, Beauty and Color; an Intimate Connection and Beauty and Color; are you a Warm or a Cool?, then you know that certain colors excel at making you look alive and healthy. They enhance your best features while minimizing your flaws.

If you haven't read those articles, look them over to get the scoop on why any color can look great on one person and be another's worst nightmare! You'll learn which colors really make you look fabulous -- the warm ones, or the cool ones.

Have you figured out if your best colors are warm or cool? Great! You're already off to a good start.

If you've already tried some Color Draping at Home , you may have find out which items in your wardrobe are the true gems, and which ones you might want to donate! But wouldn't it be nice if we could fine-tune things even more, and give come up with a color palatte that works for your personal "color type"? Then you'll know just what to look for as you build your wardrobe, and avoid those costly mistakes.

When color draping was in it's prime, (mostly during the eighties), one of the most popular systems was called "Color me Beautiful". This system named the color groups according to the seasons. So, if your best colors were cool, you were either a "Summer" or a quot;Winter". If you looked better in the warmer side of the spectrum, you were either a "Spring" or a "Fall".

If you're a Summer or Winter, you look best in colors with silvery and blue undertones. Clothes and jewelry with a golden hue or a yellow-orange base will not be your friend!

The difference between the Summer and Winter is color intensity. Picture a cold, crisp winter day. The winter sky may be an intense bright blue contrasted against a white, snow-covered landscape. Colors are clean and sharp, with lots of contrast. These are your Winter colors. Now picture a hot, humid day in the middle of summer. The humidity casts a haze over everything (think of a hazy summer day), making all of the colors look soft and muted, without the high contrast of Winter. These are your Summer colors.

Just as Winter colors are intense and high contrast, so is the Winter color palatte. It contains the primary colors and jewel tones such as ruby red, sapphire blue, and emerald green. Snow white and jet black look fabulous on a Winter, especially worn together for high contrast. With Summer, while colors still have cool undertones, contrast is reduced and colors are more muted. Think of a deep, dusty rose instead of fuschia (see below -- these colors shouldn't look warm or yellowy on your screen), a creamy white instead of snow white or an off-black in place of jet black.

winter vs. summer

Similarly, Spring colors are bright and intense, like spring flowers, but with warm, golden-yellow undertones. Autumn colors have the same warm undertones, but are a bit "muddied". I suppose this mirrors the muting of colors as summer foliage starts to die off and fall to the earth. You could get confused if you think about Fall's brightly colored leaves, so I remind myself of the fall palatte by thinking of earth tones, as in things returning to the earth. If you're a Spring you'll look great in chartreuse. An Autumn? You're dazzling in olive drab!! (These colors should look warm and yellowy).

spring vs. fall

To view the color swatches for your season, check out our Color Swatches page. Keep in mind that computers have limitations as far as viewing colors. Your monitor and your computer settings can affect how colors look on your screen. Regardless, you'll still get a pretty good idea of the differences between the groups.

Finally, remember this: All rules have exceptions. You could have the "typical" traits of a Winter, but color draping might reveal that you're an Autumn. I've seen a case where a natural red head (almost always a sign of a "warm") turned out to be a "cool". And if you have a great hair stylist, a good colorist, and are a true artist with makeup, you may be able to pull off a color palatte that isn't yours! Models and actresses do this all the time.

The only sure way to know your true colors is to have a color analysis done by someone whose been certified. Certified color analysts have taken classes and passed tests in which they demonstrated their ability to color type women of all combinations of skin tone, hair and eye color. Some of the so-called experts out there have no real training, and I'd hate to see you build a wardrobe around the wrong color palatte, so check credentials first, and then have fun!!