Do You Know Your Essence Amounts?
Is it possible to determine a face’s exact percentages of style essences?
I think yes!
Next week’s blog post will discuss a method for doing this.
Below, we explore the benefits of knowing your essence percentages, plus how to estimate them.
Why Learn Your Essence Percentages?
Many people are flattered by matching the percentage of essences in their face to the percentage of essences in their styling.
So two Dramatic Ingenues might dress very differently from each other if:
one has 80% Dramatic and 20% Ingenue,
and the other has 80% Ingenue and 20% Dramatic
If you’re 80% Ingenue and 20% Dramatic, your best looks will have a vibe similar to this highly Ingenue dress, with a bit of Dramatic from the deep-V neckline in stiff-ish fabric.
In contrast, if you’re 80% Dramatic and 20% Ingenue, your best fashion will be much edgier, with just a hint of girliness from detail like a short chain necklace with heart pendant.
So knowing that you’re a Dramatic Ingenue (or any other blend) often isn’t enough to understand your best outfits, hair, and makeup. You’ll also want to know around how much of each essence you have.
How to Estimate Your Essence Amounts
Here are steps to get a good estimate of your essences:
Step 1: Find Your Essences
An obvious but important first step, since it’s pretty hard to know how much Ingenue you have if you’re not actually sure you have Ingenue!
Don’t know your style type? Here’s tips on determining it.
If you’re one of the rare people who has only one essence, Step 1 is your first and last step!
If you have two or more essences, you’ll move on to:
Step 2: Find Your Essence Order
After determining your essences, it’s helpful to decide their order of prominence in your face.
One of the easiest ways to do this: consider how you look in pure versions of each of your essences.
So, as a Dramatic Ingenue:
If you’re most flattered by fully Dramatic fashion, then you’re a dominant Dramatic.
If you’re most flattered by fully Ingenue fashion, then you’re a dominant Ingenue.
You may be able to answer this from real-life experience (like reflecting on your more and less flattering outfits).
If it’s too hard to tell from what you see in the mirror, you could also compare a photo of your face to pure versions of all your essences.
Try to focus on your reaction to the aesthetic harmony between your face and the fashion, rather than on factors like how suited the clothes are to your body shape or lifestyle.
What if you get stuck on this step?
Sometimes it’s pretty clear which essence is your best (especially if you have far more of one essence than any other).
Other times, it’s much more challenging (especially if some of your essences are very close in amount).
If you’re having trouble, it can help to consider fashion, hair, and makeup all together, and ask yourself:
“If I had to wear a head-to-toe look using only one essence, which would be most harmonious?”
Are you best in a fully Ingenue aesthetic?
Or a fully Dramatic aesthetic?
Your answer will likely be your dominant essence.
Step 2 is technically skippable. Completing it will make Step 3 easier, but you can still get a good estimate of your essences even if you’re not confident of your answer to Step 2.
Step 3: Do Clothing Comparisons
Next, you’ll observe yourself in different outfits that have varying ratios of your significant essences.
So, if you’re a Dramatic Ingenue, you’ll essentially just want to compare your face to many different outfits with varying amounts of Dramatic and Ingenue. As you do this, you’ll observe:
Whether you tend to be most flattered by outfits that have close to an even split of Dramatic and Ingenue elements (in which case, your essence ratio may be around 50-50 or 55-45)
Or whether you need moderately more of one than the other (maybe your ratio is somewhere around 70-30, or a bit higher or lower)
Or maybe you need far more of one than the other (your ratio may be around 80-20 or even 90-10).
You could do Step 3 in real life, by actually trying on clothes. But it will likely be faster and easier if you compare photos of your face to virtual outfits.
You can find virtual outfits with resources like the Truth-is-Beauty Pinterest boards or browsing other essence boards on Pinterest or Google. You can also make DIY outfits by pasting images into a word document, asking AI to create outfits, or even using photoshop if you’re super skilled!
Through this process, you can gain a general sense of your face’s essence percentages.
Limitations of Step 3
A potential issue with Step 3 is that it can be hard to be highly exact with it, since it’s hard to say exactly what it means for an outfit to be 60% Dramatic and 40% Ingenue, or 70% Dramatic and 30% Ingenue.
So Step 3 will give you an estimate of your essence percentages, not a precise answer. It can often provide a very good estimate, but if you’re looking for absolute accuracy, stay tuned for an upcoming post when I share a more precise method!
What if you have more than two essences?
Another limitation of Step 3: the more essences you have, the more complicated it gets.
So if you have a three or four essence blend, you’ll likely want to first do Step 3 with just your top two essences, in order to solidify your ratio of those.
For example, here’s how Step 3 would look if you’re a DNI, and your top two essences are Dramatic Ingenue:
First, you’ll compare yourself to outfits that contain only your top two essences. Through this process, you can find the ratio of Dramatic to Ingenue that looks best on you—let’s say the ratio ends up being about 70% Dramatic to 30% Ingenue elements.
Then you’ll take a harmonious-for-you outfit (that contains about 70% Dramatic, 30% Ingenue) and begin to add small amounts of your third essence (Natural).
You’ll continue to add small amounts of Natural, observing the effect on your face photo, until adding any additional Natural detracts from your harmony.
Outfit with highly Dramatic edge, moderate Ingenue sweetness, and just a bit of Natural slouchiness.
So your final ratio might end up being 65% Dramatic, 25% Ingenue, and 10% Natural. (Dramatic and Ingenue are still 40 percentage points apart, so you’ve preserved the ratio that you initially found was most harmonious between them. And you’ve also decreased their amounts by 5 percentage points each, or 10 percentage points total, to account for the fact that 10% of your look is Natural.)
As a bonus (or, for some, a major drawback) this also requires a little math!
What kind of face photo should you use?
I often analyze unsmiling, straight-on images, since being photographed smiling or from an angle can sometimes change the look of our facial features.
But ultimately, the best photo to use is the one that represents your face most accurately. And for some people, that may be a smiling photo or one taken at an angle.
You might also want to use two different photos (maybe one that’s straight-on, and another from a three quarter view) and see if you can get the same results for both photos.
Sometimes it’s also helpful to use at least one black-and-white photo of yourself, so you aren’t distracted by color season.
Step 4: Determine Your Exact Percentages
Steps 1-3 can get you a good estimate of how much you have of each essence. And for many people, this may be sufficient for understanding their best styling.
But what if you could determine your exact essence percentages?
I think there’s a fairly simple way to do that! More on what it is and how to do it next time :)
