RSSSites To Know : Pretty Your World
January 9, 2009
I’ve been waiting a year and a half to find Pretty Your World. I read the entire thing in 3 hours. There are other color sites out there but few hold a candle to this one because it is so much more a teaching site than a marketing site. In most cases, the marketing is only thinly veiled by an attempt to teach, but PYW is about teaching and it does so outstandingly well.
The most important image tool
You may know how much importance I place on getting your colors right to look good. The terribly overdone choice of black for evening. The ubiquitous blonde highlights. The supposedly safe charcoal gray or navy suit. They just don’t work on everyone. Ellen DeGeneres in black, Nicole Kidman in washed out blonde hair, even celebs get it wrong.
We all notice it, not just people who like color. The dress you complimented someone on but really thought didn’t look special at all. The friend who spent a fortune on a new coat and she really looks pale and washed out, but you felt you had to say something nice. The warm brown hair on women with no warmth in their skin, so the hair takes over the face.
I really like Color Me Beautiful‘s first book because it was my introduction the 4 color season way to analyze people’s colors. It made the whole thing simple enough to understand. It is unbeatable as a place to begin but there were still people I couldn’t fit into the scheme. I get most confused by celebs with hair dyed the color of corn or Springs with brown hair (like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music, who seems most often thought of as Spring). Or why some women that I’m certain are Autumns look so good in black. I’m hopeless with women of color. Ask and it shall be answered. Along came Pretty Your World.
Lora Alexander
Lora Alexander is an esthetician, a makeup artist, and a Certified Image Consultant. Color and Art are her primary interests, with close second loves of makeup, color analysis, and beauty psychology.
The 12 Season System
The system is based on a more complete 12 Season color analysis, which Lora believes to be the ONLY accurate system there is, and I absolutely agree. The 4 seasons we know are broken down to each have 3 sub-categories. You don’t begin by finding your season. Rather, you find yourself in the 6 descriptions of Deep, Clear, Light, Soft, Cool, and Warm. Secondly, you identify yourself among the 2 choices of Warm or Cool. Combining the first 6 and the last 2 gives you the 12 combinations. So you could be Deep Winter, Cool Winter, or Clear Winter. The breakdown is found on the Analyze Yourself page.
There are plenty of examples, using celebrities. There are excellent but not overly detailed explanations. The system is broken down in various ways, in a stepwise process, to help you find your place. There are links using Eye Color and Hair Color to help guide your choice. It is unbelievable to me that Lora began this site only 2 months ago. She’s already created THE best teaching site about personal color analysis on the internet.
A walk through PYW
I was completely amazed to see how much Lora and I have in common – like our love of Kevyn Aucoin, our belief in Paula Begoun’s work, our over-40 vintage, our season (Autumn), the fact that we colorcast people within a few minutes of meeting them (though I’m not nearly as good at it as she is), our thriftyness (but we are not cheap!) and our passion for finding beauty advice that works in the REAL world.
She doesn’t pull any punches. We are in perfect agreement when she states, in The Truth About Beauty , that the cosmetics industry lies to us day in and day out and we still can’t give them money fast enough.
Though it may be not be fair, she is also right that we are judged immediately by others and most of it is on appearance. We are not judged on whether or not we’re Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes. We are judged on the use we’ve made of what we have. Following the “Even someone naturally beautiful…” link on that page will take you to the famous Dove billboard ad and how much artifice the beauty industry is based on. Empower yourself. Learn which products work. Learn your colors.
I love Celebrity Style because it shows celebs in their various hair color tryouts.
Just for fun, but fun it is, there are 4 pages of celebs without makeup. Would we look twice at any of those faces in the mall or pushing a grocery cart? We would not. Their 5’10”, 110 lb bodies, maybe.
How to most improve your looks
I totally get that not everyone wants the bother of makeup. Most women probably don’t. But, listen. Makeup is EASY once you know your season. Your makeup colors ARE your clothing colors. It’s all right there. Even your hair colors are in your palettes!
What I don’t understand is why a woman would not take the time to know her colors just to make good clothing choices. It totally transforms how you look. Why spend $200 or $100 or $10 on something that not only doesn’t flatter your looks, but actually detracts?
You might prefer a certain style of dress or cut of jacket and nobody could argue with your taste. But only 1 of the 3 Springs will ever look gorgeous in black. A Summer never will. You might as well paint a drab grayish foundation color on your face, darken the shadows under your eyes, and get it over with.
I know Autumn women reading this will be saying “I like ballet pink and I’m g.d. well going to wear it.” Do what you gotta do. Hopefully the pink thing doesn’t cost a lot. You will never look rich, vibrant, and powerful in pink. Wear it but not to a meeting. Or an argument. Or a 10 year reunion.
Experiment with success
Many women have some sense of what colors suit them but there’s still a lot of confusion out there. The whole topic seems intimidating. They might have a sense of their general category or some good safe basics. To find a collection of 50!! colors that would be great on YOU – now that’s a gift. You could be more adventuresome, get away from safe, and look amazing.
Where do you start? How do you find your colors when you go shopping? Well, you start here. Like everything else, you get help when you need it, even if it costs money. You send in your picture. You buy the swatch book. You take it shopping. The swatch kit on Lora’s site, and all the extras that come with it, looks fantastic.
Remember the articles on Gift Ideas 1 – 5, back in December? Well, no gift, and I mean NO gift, NONE, could come close to buying a woman her color swatches. Gift certificates are available but the surprise and gratitude of giving a woman her own colors would be worth it.
The palettes themselves aren’t at PYW – or anywhere on the internet. Lora recommends looking at the book Color Me Beautiful’s Looking Your Best for good explanations and 28-color layouts of each of the 12 Seasons, with verbal descriptions of the full 48colors for each season at the end. (The Click to LOOK doesn’t work, it’s just coming from Amazon.)
I bought this book and it’s pretty good. The best thing about it is that it explains the 12 Season system quite well, particularly how a season can crossover and borrow colors from another season. This expands your palette but in a controlled way that is understandable. There is still the hair/clothing/style advice but it’s outdated (the first version was published in 1991). Most disappointing to me was that the 28 colors are hard to see. They look like they’re painted on concrete, grainy and rough. The swatches in the original book were better. Still worth it for the explanation of the 12 Seasons if you’re into it, though.
Have your colors done!
Still don’t believe your color analysis can be done on the internet? In a future post (once I know the date, I’ll post it in the Upcoming link on the front page of this site), Lora will do an in depth color analysis using pictures of me with makeup, without makeup, close-ups of my eyes, and pictures of my hair color when I was young. I’m off to her site to fill out the questionnaire.
Take a serious look at what you get for $89.95 on that same page.
Comments
9 Responses to “Sites To Know : Pretty Your World”
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Hey Christine,
Love this article!
I find colour is so tricky. Half the time I can’t explain to a client why i pick a colour for them.
I need this book.
Thanks Jenepher
Hi Christine,
I thought I was the only one who read the Sherlock Color Me Beautiful book. However, I’m still confused as to whether I am a soft summer or soft autumn. I checked out the Pretty your world site and thought it was great! I particularly liked identifying the celebs seasons. Please continue to blog about great sites like this one.
Kathy
Hi, Kathy,
Is that not the best site?! I learned a whole lot there. The examples were very useful.
So, which are you?
What I really would love to know is how you decided which you are. Soft Summer and Soft Autumn seem very different. I always get hung up between Summer and Spring.
So tell me did you do the $89.95 survey and get your color swatches etc?
I am tempted but wonder if you have done and what you think.
I think I am a deep autumn as she states that 80% of her diagnosis goes by eye colour and mine are dark brown but not sure .
Do you think it was worth it?
Looking at the celebs in that category and not certain if I am like any of them. Perhaps my skin has lightened since I had them professionally done almost 30 years ago. Gawd has it been that long? yikes!
I did the survey. In an article I’ll post soon, you’ll see Lora’s analysis of me, which she did at no cost, in exchange for publishing the article about Pretty Your World.
I did buy the $63 book of swatches, which anyone can do without the full analysis. I know my colors from the original 4 Season Autumn chart by heart, but not every color is bang on great on me. You and I are both Autumns, but wear quite different colors to look our best. You can do black and I can’t.
I wanted to know which were the perfect colors for me. As well as I know the 4 Season charts, once we get into 12 Seasons and 48 colors, I get mixed up. There is no doubt this system works and empowers people, inside and out, and it’s too easy to achieve this. Why would anyone settle for so-so or just-missed when you can get to holy-s—-you-look-good?
My swatches haven’t arrived yet because Lora tells me that a new kit is being released in March and I decided to wait for that one.
If you want to wait till then, I’ll definitely tell you what I think of mine.
I agree that you are a Deep Autumn. Rich, dark colors and gorgeous in tomato red, not so good in fuchsia.
I am natural autumn. Could you tell me my colours? Thank you!
I don’t recognize the Natural Autumn distinction – in the 12 Season scheme that I know best, the choices for this season are Soft Autumn, Warm Autumn, and Deep Autumn. There are other naming systems, perhaps Natural Autumn came from one of those. Can you find yourself among the Autumn choices at Pretty Your World (www.prettyyourworld.com) ?
I’d gladly tell you your colors if it were something that could just be told. I would guess that pink is not your best color, at least not powder pink. Beyond that, you can wear most colors, as long as you stick to certain shades of those colors.
If you’ve looked online and had trouble finding your shades, I sympathize. The colors are not easy to find on the internet. You can look at http://www.ireneeonline.com, where there are some good examples. I think you’ll have to login and go through the questionnaire, but it’s worth it. The problem is that the final color selection is a bit limited, like 20 colors or so, and you’re still not sure it’s right for you because nobody’s ever looked at you.
Your best bet is still going to be to have yourself color-analyzed to identify your own best season and own your swatches. That way, you’ll always know which reds, yellows, greens, etc are YOUR 50 or 60 most flattering shades. That’s how you end the wondering when you shop.