Best Things This Week June 15 2010

June 22, 2010

Gosh Soft’n Shine Lip Balm

Like Clinique’s Butter Shines or MAC Slimshines, I like the soft feel of this type of product. Gosh Soft’n Shines are a stick gloss, but with a longer duration, less goopy application, and obnoxious overkill shine of many glosses.

If you don’t like greasy, balmy, or sheer lipcolor, these may not be for you, but I like them. They’re soft and natural on their own, and can lessen the heavy lip look of a matte lipstick. I use Paula’s Choice Clear Lipliner to seal the edges of the lips first, and it works just great.

If you find the $15CDN pricetag steep, I’d agree with you. If I’ll use the product to the very end because I love the color and feel, I can get over it on days when I need to buy myself a present.

I very much like the color selection. With Passion Pink (Bright Winter), Perfect Plum (Dark True Summer or True Winter), Barbie (Bright Spring), Sweetheart (the Light Seasons), Soft Touch (the Darks), Mocha (True Autumn), Irony (True Spring), and a few others, well…there’s a good color range. I like color that isn’t trying to cover more than 2 skin tone possibilities, because then it ends up right for nobody. Certain skin shares certain qualities, but it’s pretty narrow.

These are a great way for women who look younger and better in brighter lip colors to get used to their right makeup colors, if they’ve been wearing flesh tones.

They’re also a great way to wear brighter lip color in the daytime without looking like lips-lips-lips.

Jessica Biel’s Haircolor

In the new Revlon Mascara ad, this is beautiful Summer hair. It’s a natural ash brown of medium darkness, pretty well what you see here. The highlights are restrained. It is all too easy to start with a few highlights and end up with one big highlight. At the beginning, the highlights look too yellow. I especially like the hair when she speaks the last line of the script. The hair is one basic color that works, with a few cool highlights.

Light Summer’s best highlight is a beige, just this side of silver. No yellow unless Nature put it there. Their best base color at maturity is the same as Biel’s here in most cases, perhaps a touch lighter.

The haircolor that most perfects Soft Summer’s skin tone is this same ash brown base, but with a taupe highlight. That is hellish hard to do, the colorists tell me, because it fades. Unless you’re prepared to put a toner on monthly or more, you’ll look like you have bleached out highlights.

However, it’s amazing how much more forgiving just a few strands are. For a woman looking for a Soft Summer browned-ash cool highlight, this has potential. Too much hair has been lightened, but there are shades in here that can be worked with. What if the colorist foiled the medium browns to protect them, and colored the rest of the head closer to the woman’s own color? So, a medium darkness ash-brown, perhaps 1-2 shades lighter than the natural color.

There would be much less of a root issue and a more natural could-have-happened-by-itself (IMO, the best kind of beauty, the ONLY kind of beauty) appearance.

A huge part of color analysis is knowing what is NOT for you. In this photo, the woman knows to avoid yellow, orange, red, copper, darkness, trendiness, or very contrasting highlights. She’s already way ahead of most. Once the majority of the processed hair is returned to a more natural color, whether the remaining highlight is precisely taupe or not won’t matter.

Exercise Fun Discovery

You cannot tighten your butt unless your tailbone is tucked under. This brings new understanding to Pilates, stability ball, and ballet type workouts. If you keep your glutes tight every single minute, your tailbone is always positioned to protect your back and work your rear and abs better.

Why else does it matter? Because your glutes are always your brakes. When you slip on ice, your glutes can hold your body together and prevent a strain. When you jump sideways, it’s the glutes that stop the movement and absorb the shock, not the knees. As soon as you learn to control your lower body range of movement in everyday life (and in exercise) with the glutes, you’ll notice how much better your knees feel.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Color Analysis, Great Hair, Makeup, Paula's Choice

Comments

2 Responses to “Best Things This Week June 15 2010”

casey on June 23rd, 2010 10:15 am

You are such a brainy fun girl! i found your site looking for info on whether one can turn from deep autumn to soft autumn as she ages, and found so much more, inlcuding lots of references to things i think about all the time like body alignment/physiology and weirdly Paula’s Choice products, which i have been crazy about (and of course her no-nonsense, fact-based FREE advice and knowledge) for years and years. So nice to have a gal out there who speaks my language!
Christine Scaman on June 24th, 2010 3:46 pm

Hi, Casey,

Agree that we have a lot in common! Did you find what you were looking for? The real color analysis site is at 12blueprints.com. Any articles posted here, at least before May 1/ 09 were from before I became a color analyst, so many of my recommendations have changed.
I use a different PCA system. The Deep Autumn is called Dark Autumn in the Sci\ART system. To get from there to Soft Autumn with age would be a very big jump. As a visual, though I have no idea what Season these people are till they’re draped, the skin characteristics and reactions to color of Orlando Bloom would have to become those of John Denver (the late singer).