Most of my current dresses being almost in pieces, I have needed to take up dressmaking again with some urgency. For complicated reasons I am now considering a much greater range of colours and styles and patterns than I have previously considered for many years.
This has proved extremely exasperating. Part of the reason I make my own clothes is that most of the rack clothing in non-stretchy fabrics doesn't fit. I can get away with stretch knits, but not with conventionally sized wovens. My shoulders are 24, my bust 15, my waist 18, and my hips 26 (English sizing). I'm also about 5'11'', prefer more modest necklines and hemlines, feel the cold, and burn really easily in the sun (hence, long sleeves all year). Off the rack clothing is sized to such different proportions it almost never fits.
Though I have little theory regarding what suits what sort of body shape, I do know approximately what works for me both with regard to aesthetics and practicality.
However, I am not confident with any guesswork involving choosing colours; indeed, colour has fazed me dreadfully. I wore only bright and dark blue (with some white) for many years, but at the present moment I do not wish to wear blue. Darker blues do suit me reasonably well. I know from previous experience that I can also wear bright pinks, most purples, most reds, dark browns and dark reddish oranges. And black and white together, though true white on its own remains a question mark. I have mixed feelings about grey. Light green and stone-cream are genuinely all right, at least with my hair covered, and I look truly awful in bright yellow. And there are two extra wild cards - my hair is a lot darker than it was 20 years ago, and I may not have been right in my previous colour choices every single time.
This experience was not helping much with any sort of extrapolation. I looked at rich dark red-, beautiful peacock green-, and sweet light brown prints, and felt I could not make any sensible judgement at all. Online shopping does not help here: it is at least possible to drape a fabric in a shop. Making a dress is a lot of work. I did not want to get to the end of that process, put it on, and find I felt so awful in it that I was reluctant to wear it. I want to look as human as possible. I don't want people to notice my clothes and wonder where the person is!
I have browsed into colour analysis more than once - light and the particular way the eye perceives it are just fascinating - but it didn't generally help the dressmaking questions much. No amount of white paper or silver-gold analysis would tell me if I had warm or cool undertones. I have eyes that are just about brown rather than amber or hazel, and my hair is more or less dark brown, but it's hardly an even colour. No two colour analysists seem to exactly agree on where the boundaries between the seasons are, or how far it can be taken for granted that one element of someone's appearance will match another, which other can or cannot therefore be deduced from it. Or on exactly what the best colour palate for each season is.
I eventually found an app that offered to work colour type out from a photo, and presented each of twelve possible seasonal types with a colour palate.
This was interesting. Depending on which photo I used it brought me out as anything between soft autumn and cool winter, returning warm autumn least often. Warm autumn is, in any case, obviously ruled out by bright yellow being my "on the point of death" colour! The only thing the app has never done, interestingly, is to conclude that I'm not dark.
Artificial lights always seem to bring me out as obviously cool shaded, regardless of the shade of the light, whereas in natural light the app has concluded both warm and cool, bright and muted, so among other things, the camera and the lighting are obviously influencing the results.
(I wonder if the spectrum of the artificial lights is skewed to lack much actual yellow wavelength, thus not picking up essentially yellow warmth so well? And the camera seems sometimes to misinterpret rosy flush as a golden tone, which is particularly annoying in context. "Dress for candlelight by candlelight," may not be an outdated concept: neutralish skin may do better with silver by night and gold by day, or vice-versa. And definitely take colour typing photos in actual daylight!).
This narrowed it down enough to see what I was working with, but in fact, it remained pretty mysterious. And the colour palates suggested, even combined with my experience, do not help that much; for one thing, soft autumn and cool or classic winter have almost opposing palates. Soft autumn would suggest that bright, cold pink won't work. Could choosing that colour have been a mistake? But on that occasion I also had the opinion of a friend who has good colour sense. However, even ruling soft autumn out leaves right through clear winter to dark autumn, and the suggested palate is still very different.
Autumn is warm and muted, winter is cool and bright: they are in that respect the actual opposites of each other. I can wear everything in the dark winter recommendation, but it doesn't suggest avoiding the bright yellows that I truly look bad in. And seriously muted reddish oranges are fine. Indeed, none of the palates is completely correct to my experience with regard to both being able to wear all the colours the app recommends and not what it doesn't recommend.
After ploughing through a couple of pages on the underlying theory, and doing a small amount of draping, however, I think I have worked out what is going on.
I have cool-neutral skin, contrast that is surprisingly high, and bright-medium chroma. And my eyes and hair are on the warm side of neutral; my hair probably only just. It is an ashy brown, but it will highlight both silver and gold in light, rather than having only cold highlights.
(It is a complexity as far as actually choosing dress colours goes, that I usually cover most of my hair. But the head-covering colour is a controllable variable, and the natural colour of my hair is not. Having said, I've eyeballed an average here in approximately a skin:hair:eyes ratio of 2:1:1; if you usually wear long hair down on your shoulders, 4:2:1 might be closer to how much contribution hair colour actually makes. The average still has a use, but most of what follows is about the effect of considering the warmth/coolness value of these features separately when they do not match).
Actually looking sickly in a colour seems to relate to the fact that putting yellow (warm) or blue (cool) fabric with the opposite undertone gives the skin a unnatural greenish hue.
Warmth or coolness in the hair and eyes looks better with some colours than with others, but it doesn't produce the death-warmed-up effect.
Therefore, I think skin undertone needs to be given a higher weight in determining a palate than hair or eye colour. I don't think that just averaging overall warmth in all features is likely to work at all well. Contradicting the skin undertone has a much worse effect that contradicting the eye colour.
As my skin is cool I can wear all the cold colours without getting that effect, in the right shade and saturation.
However, because my skin is not at the extreme of cool, it is possible to go quite a long way into browns and oranges (of the right brightness and hue/value) before the yellow overbalances and starts greening it significantly. Bluer greens are also fine.
At the same time, because my eyes and hair are warm-neutral, these warm-side-of-neutral colours set them off better than the coolest colours.
By the time I get to bright yellow clothes, there is too much yellow for the slight blue undertone that I have. And it is also too strong for the bright-medium chroma as well: my hair in particular is muted enough to look very washed out next to bright yellow. (Being almost neutral, my hair should take pretty much anything in terms of warmth, but not moderately light colours that don't hit the right contrast spot, or really bright warm colours which make it look dull).
This would also completely explain how many times I have looked at a fabric against my features, and been totally confused as to whether if it looks good or not. It depends if I'm considering it against my skin or my eyes or my hair, because different shades usually do look best with each.
Due to the higher contrast and darker coloured features, I also do better with deeper colours and higher contrast combinations, which explains the black and white.
I actually don't really quite type on this system at all. The closest type is probably dark winter, but the model is too simple to properly accommodate having both warm and cool features, nor can it truly accommodate being not really having a dominant feature across the warm-cool, bright-muted, and light-dark variables. The model wants one feature to be significantly stronger than the others, and that isn't actually inevitable. The app has occasionally put me into classic (four season) winter, possibly for this reason.
There is no colour palate that truly fits in every detail. Like Benedict's ironic commentary on Hero, I am too muted for a bright winter, too warm for a cool winter, too light for a dark winter, and too cool for any of the autumns!
Regarding the lack of a obvious single dominant feature in my appearance, I think in fact contrast (i.e. darkness) is slightly dominant (surprising given how light a brown my eyes actually are), which is why I say dark winter is probably the closest, in conjunction with the fact that it is probably the closest fit of any in palate recommendation terms.
When the nature of the variations and ways the model doesn't quite fit an individual is understood, however, they become much easier to adjust for.
In theory, and borne out to a reasonable extent by experience, the result of this particular variation in appearance - that is, skin which places cool-neutral and eyes that place warm-neutral - is that the range of colours that more or less work is wider, but the range of colours that are truly brilliant is narrower.
That is, the majority of the colours across cool winter, dark winter, dark autumn, and even many from soft autumn, could be worn, though the very lightest and very warmest are not likely to be the best idea. But the truly brilliant ones are likely to be the reds and purples and greys and neutral greens and darker browns that are in (or are close in shade in) both the dark winter and an autumn palate, and therefore should truly work with both skin undertone and eye-colour. And high rather than low contrast in clothing sets and prints is likely to work better, with high saturation.
So, what, in theory, should be the answer to the colour conundrums? Light brown is probably not a good idea in any quantity.
Dark red should work well, with an interesting caveat still not solved. I generally have a very rosy overtone, and I don't want to accentuate the red element too much and look sunburnt!
"Flush," i.e. how much the capillary blood changes the skin colour, isn't something I've heard discussed in this system: I don't know if this is because it is assumed it will be elided with make-up (which I never wear), or if it is because it really doesn't matter that much, or if it is because it is something that can still only be worked out by experiment and not theory.
The peacock green definitely should be very workable, though I may well not try it simply because it would not go with most of the other colours, and it is annoying having one dress that doesn't go with anything else.
Darker, more saturated colours are likely to work better on the cool side of the good colours, and darker, more muted ones for the warm colours just the other side of neutral.
Prints or accessories which have more contrast are likely to be worth considering; echoing the natural contrast between the features in the clothing is a side of this whole issue which never occurred to me until I truly started reading these colour analysis theories, though I have frequently done it on the basis of observation.
I'm still looking for an explanation of the true white conundrum, though I have come across comments suggesting that the true-white-washout-effect is a known observation regarding people with very pale skin, even when their approximate type is winter. It may be one of the places where the fact that my contrast is darkish rather than very dark comes into play. I am not quite dark enough for true white alone to give enough of a contrast. Or possibly I am simply wrong. I don't think I have ever worn white on its own, so my judgement here is limited to the fact that black and white choir dress works, while my hand does not look good across a piece of white paper!
I don't know if all this really says more about the colour analysis system or the limitations of models. Ultimately, models are extremely useful, but they are not the real world. Any model of this sort has to generalise to a great extent. It may be quite true that most people with cool or cool-neutral skin do have cool hair and eyes too, but it does not follow, particularly where, like here, the skin is on the cool side of neutral and the hair and eyes are on the warm side.
The notion that nature only creates the particular harmony of the set of types within this colour model isn't logical: I would want a lot of hard evidence to believe that. All these features are on a continuous spectrum of colour. If most people are closer to neutral skin undertones than they are to absolute warm or cool, the idea that people on one side of neutral with regard to skin will sometimes be on the other side with regard to hair and eyes, is not merely possible, but extremely likely.
No model of colour could incorporate every possible set of variations, from flush to skin colour, across variation in the comparative warmth/coolness of different features, or even within features. The model is not the real world. The real world is more complicated than our models. (And your body is right even if your hair and eyes are at one extreme of warm-cool and your skin at the other).
On the other hand, knowing what is likely to work and why, saves a lot of time and energy, and it is still possible to make the theory useful even when not quite ticking the boxes. I have to admit to being seriously impressed by any sort of success in teasing out even a workable rule-of-thumb theory when dealing with a set of aesthetics which has such complex nuances, let alone an AI that can do anything remotely reasonable on this point with a photograph.
Anyway, if you have also found colour typing is more confusing than helpful: if you find people or AI keep giving you very different palates, or if when you drape, you find a lot of colours are "ok" but few are really, truly, wonderful or awful, then you may be dealing with a similar problem with the underlying assumption in this model that all features will be in the same colour category. And it may be worth colour typing the features separately and seeing what results that gives.
When, as here, there is a noticeable difference that crosses the average cut off point in warmth-coolness between skin and other features, that does seem to throw the colour analysis model off such that it gives peculiar results. I don't know if bright-muted or light-dark differences between different features would do a similar thing (it might, but this is all so complicated...).
However, the seasonal model typing can still be cautiously but usefully used by looking for the common (or closest) colours of the conflicting palates, and being aware that anything from any of them might well work (because there are so many factors involved, there will always be surprises: a colour that doesn't compliment may hit exactly the right contrast or saturation, and that may be more important overall).
The models average out appearance in a way that works extremely well if you fit, and can still give useful information if you don't - as long as not quite fitting into the model is recognised as a real possibility.
Cherry Foster
P.S. two of the photographs I fed to the app
, both under natural light: if you want to disagree with my analysis, that would be very interesting, but please be kind! This is a bit of a study in the problems of colour subtleties and cameras: I think the first is more accurate regarding most colours, while the second shows my eye colour better, due to the lack of shadow. That chain in the second picture is actually gold-coloured, not silver.
P.P.S. The app in question.
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