Color Draping Challenge

April 18, 2009

If you’re a Winter, you can no more wear Spring’s makeup or hair than you can wear her clothes. You look drained to a not very gorgeous greeny-beige-grey shade. You would instinctively not wear the yellow-green – what am I saying? I wore Autumn’s Chartreuse which is close enough.

Since we did my colors, back in Demo : Online Color Analysis, Lora has kept a suspicion that I wasn’t Warm Autumn. She kept coming back to it and always wondered if I could be deeper than she thought, at least a Deep Autumn, if not even darker. When we did me, I provided her with a bare minimum of photos. We’ve learned a lot since. The photos needed would BEGIN as follows:

- outdoors on an overcast day with 10AM-12 PM light; a sunny day will overexpose everything and wash colors out; end of day light has too many yellow wavelengths

- your best and worst colors

- no makeup in any picture

- 1 shot of your hair down, the rest with it covered

- wearing black

- as neutral a background as possible

- wearing the exclusive colors of the 2 seasons you think you might be – or be prepared for the analyst to have trouble deciding, and request certain colors be worn and more photos taken

I’m not certain if Lora has fine-tuned the system any more since then or what her photo requests are today. She may ask for completely different photographic criteria. I have no doubt that she’d agree that the more pictures you send, the more likely you’ll be analyzed correctly. We’re talking more than 10 pictures.

Controlling the lighting is certainly the hardest part. If you can’t afford to see an analyst, or there’s none nearby, you can definitely get excellent guidance online. You’ll still be better off and more educated about what looks good on you.

One other pitfall is to take direction from hair color. If the hair and clothes match in any way (complementary, analogous, monochromatic), there’s a tendency for the eye to match the clothes to the hair and conclude that the color works.

With my Color Analysis trainer, once I was placed in a neutral gray room, wearing a gray cap and gown, and color draped for 3 hours, we still couldn’t decide. Lora’s very intuitive about color and her suspicions were right on. I’m very much on the border of Deep Autumn and Deep Winter. We tried again on the second day, fresh set of eyes, and Deep Winter won out. My skin is quite yellow and seems to support some warmth. But it was in the Winter colors that sharpened the edges of my face and cleared the yellow overtone away.

I felt no opposition to any of this. It was just so obvious.

Get rid of the orange in the hair? No problem. I could see that it clashed. I was adjusting well, even though I really thought I knew my colors before. My trainer said she had her season wrong for years and took 2 years to accept that she was another season. I felt so pleased that I got in sync so quickly.

And then she put the makeup on me. Cool red-pink blush. Neutral-cool lips of a similar color. Gray eyes. Cool ivory foundation. I got all weird. A wall went up. I thought I looked like a clown, felt completely insecure. I lost all objectivity whatsoever. My family telling me I looked completely different, younger. HA! My trainer’s husband, telling me he thought I looked better without makeup than with the makeup I had arrived in on the first day. How could it be so? All the respect I have for my trainer. Out the window. I could NOT accept it. The more I stared, the worse I thought I looked. Me who thought she was so objective and open-minded.

I’ve gotten over it. It took me several hours and a lot of reassurance. It was illuminating to have gone far enough with the analysis to experience that level of resistance. It’s good to have felt the inner struggle that must be overcome. It can be a big adjustment.

When you come to see me and can’t agree to what the drapes tell us, I won’t worry that I’ve made a mistake. I’ll stand there calmly, smiling as my wonderful trainer did, and watch you coming to grips with the door you just allowed yourself to open on Your Deeper Self, your hand pulling on the doorknob and your feet braced against the frame like I was.

You’ll be like Jodie Foster in the very funny scene from Nim’s Island where she’s fighting with herself, trying to leave her safe home and face the unknown. (The trailer only shows a tiny part of that scene. It gets better.)

There is nothing better than a new way of looking at something you thought you knew. Like you, for instance.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Color Analysis, Happiness

Comments

6 Responses to “Color Draping Challenge”

gina on April 19th, 2009 10:43 am

You are a Deep Winter? Well blow me down.
Photos please!
Is it possible that our season changes with time? I completey see the gray eyes and neutral mouth …..the red pink blush? hmmmm But we need to see photos. Like before and after.
See now I am really really curious about me. I want the power that I know it will give me.

This is very cool …no pun intended. Thanks for sharing

And still loving my MAC Studio Sculpt by the way. She gave me NW 20 and a pot of NW25. Think the 25 is closer to me at the moment. Coverage is excellent. Great stuff!
Wonder how my 17-year-old-soccer-playing son will feel about running into the MAC store in Montreal next weekend when he is there for training, to pick me up a tube of it ?
.That would be deserving of a youtube clip.
Christine Scaman on April 19th, 2009 6:55 pm

Yeah, weird, ay? I’ll work on the photos, even though my hair is still way warm. It might make the statement even better when you see how obviously the hair clashes.

It would be truly awesome to analyze you. On personality alone, you’d have a lot of Winter (they live for power and drama, not that you do, but, well, you know ). I’m presently about US$3500 away from being able to analyze anyone.

But working on it. Hoping. Expecting, Manifesting. I’m beginning to think none of that really works, but it was true before I ascribed to those beliefs, and it is probably at the crux of what those paradigms are saying that you only get things when you don’t need them. That’s the basis of the whole thing, far as I can tell.

I haven’t hit the nail on the head with the Studio Sculpt color, but it’s so darn good even in the wrong color that I will not give up. I’m actually moving into Ivory shades.
Maureen on April 20th, 2009 10:23 am

Christine, I’m currently obsessed with color analysis, and am really enjoying your posts. I am in Canada, thinking of taking a training course. Where did you take your training?
Christine Scaman on April 20th, 2009 5:01 pm

Hello, Maureen,

I empathize with your obsession. I looked at all the various systems and decided on Sci\Art. You’ll find some info and an e-mail address here http://www.sci-art-global.com/
I inquired in an e-mail. Kathryn, the owner of the company, responded with the name of a trainer who lives near me. We were able to set up a customized course.
The training was more than I had hoped for. IMHO, this company is doing the color analysis thing right. With each of the other systems, there were things that didn’t make sense to me, but that’s not the case here. Now, that may be partly because I was trained in this system rather than one of the others and because I don’t have a lot of draping experience yet.
I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that whichever of the color companies we discuss, although the way of arriving at the person’s season may differ, the season palettes themselves are pretty similar. That’s why my Makeup Model posts use the Color Me Beautiful season names… because it really doesn’t matter too much. The basis of each season is much the same.
Hope you find what you want. I encourage you not to wait another day. You will be so happy you did this.
Taji on April 25th, 2009 7:03 pm

I too want to see photos of the dramatic color season difference. I also am med. brown hair, some reddish highlights, light colored skin that i think is more yellow, but I do have alot of red blotches that i need to cover up w/ foundation. How about if I know my fabulous colors to wear are: green-turquoise( either pale or darker), pink coral, bright peach, bright periwinkle, kelly and forest green and i can wear lime green. I don’t hardly wear white, and i can wear black with only lots of makeup. Blue reds and most grays make me look ill. so i can’t wait to see your pictures.
Christine Scaman on April 27th, 2009 5:00 pm

Hi, Taji,
You sound a lot like me. I would have named those same colors as my best. I wasn’t far off but I wasn’t at my BEST. Sometimes you need someone to look at you objectively. Sometimes you need someone who knows what to look for when deciding the colors that REALLY suit you. We get too used to looking at ourselves. We get used to matching our hair (one of the biggest contributors to color impression) to our clothes, but don’t see the real effect on our skin.
I’m getting around to those pictures. I’m very camera-phobic. Like everyone, I see all the flaws. And my photographers are 13 years old and need to be bribed.
Thanks for your comment on the Antioxidant Serum post – I’m glad they’ve improved the formula to contain Vitamin C. When I think of what women pay for skin care, I have to admit to a certain admiration for the cosmetics industry at their ability to snare so many consumers. They’ve done an astounding job of that.