Finding Your Best Colors
Paco Rabanne’s Metal and Sequin Swimsuit
To enhance your natural beauty, you may want to focus more on wearing colors than neutrals.
Why? Compared to neutral outfits, colorful fashion is more flattering for nearly every essence.
Color embodies Gamine creativity; Ingenue sweetness; Romantic passion; Ethereal dreaminess; Natural confidence; and more.
So, today we begin a series on the best colors and color combinations for every essence!
The series will also include tips on creating harmony between your essences and season.
This post is a general introduction and won’t delve into specifics. But check back for in-depth articles about each essence!
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Controversial Color
Does anyone else kind of have a love/fear relationship with color?
Recently, I was looking through old images I’d saved of fashion inspiration, and I came across some from the brand Etro.
These aren’t the exact images I’d saved, but they give you an idea of what I was looking at: bold colors and controversial print-mixing.
(With the Ethereal narrow sheerness, Gamine stripes and cropping, plus Natural leaf motif and earthy accents, this is a cool look for a daring Ethereal Natural Gamine!)
This all made me reflect that:
1. The essences generally seem more flattered by colorful than neutral fashion, and
2. Sometimes it feels intimidating to wear colorful outfits, since they can attract attention:
Especially if they also incorporate Etro’s signature paisley!
Color Enhances Visual Harmony
Gamine is the obvious essence that shines in vibrant hues. But colorful fashion also enhances the beauty of nearly every other essence.
This is because color is psychologically evocative.
Just like the style essences, color easily projects specific vibes: qualities like passion, intensity, joy, gentleness, sweetness, and dreaminess.
In contrast, neutral outfits tend to be subtler and to have less emotional range.
Compared to colors, neutrals feel more emotionally neutral (not too surprising!)
And since color is so emotionally evocative, color is also a powerful tool for enhancing your inherent beauty.
By wearing certain colors, and certain color-combinations, you can create magnetic harmony between the vibes of the colors and the vibes of your essences.
Why Colorful Fashion can be Scary
Color is powerful. So wearing it in high amounts can feel conspicuous—riskier than sticking to neutrals.
But, this also means that color tends to have a bigger payoff for enhancing harmony.
Staying Neutral
I love neutral fashion, too. This series on color and style essences will also explore the best neutrals for every essence (and whether neutrals actually tend to more embody that essence than colorful fashion!)
Neutrals and Formality?
Previously, I’ve mentioned that if you have a formal-feeling style type but want to wear casual-ish clothes, then wearing neutrals can be a useful strategy.
(Since a plain white or black tee tends to feel more formal than the neon version.)
And I still think there’s truth to that. But I also think there’s ways for even formal-feeling blends to simultaneously wear a lot color; fully embody their style type; and not feel overly dressed-up.
And for most essence blends, this tends to be a better strategy than wearing head-to-toe neutrals.
Plus, even for people who prefer neutral outfits, there could be an option to add color in details, like jewelry, accessories, or even makeup.
Especially if you add the color near your face, then you can still get the benefits of wearing it, while keeping the rest of your outfit mostly neutral.
Colorful Makeup?
Interestingly, fashion guidelines don’t always translate to makeup.
For instance, even if electric blue is your absolute best fashion color, it’s probably not your best blush color. It may not even your best shade for eyeshadow or eyeliner.
The beauty guidelines about what goes directly onto our faces are simply different than the guidelines for our best fashion.
Part of why is that on faces, it’s more expected to see a lot of colors that read as neutrals.
So, seeing a high amount of color in makeup, while it can work amazingly for certain style types, can (sometimes) feel out-of-place.
This is also part of why, while it’s beautiful if you have blue eyes or colorful hair, it’s not any less beautiful to have neutral-appearing personal coloring. Though that should really go without saying!
So, upcoming posts on the essences’ best colors may touch on makeup colors. But the latter topic is also complicated enough to warrant separate treatment.
Color Season and Essences
What primarily determines your vibe—season or essences?
In my view, essences.
The short answer on why: color is emotionally powerful. But shapes—including the shapes in your face that reflect your essences—tend to be even more psychologically powerful and noticeable. You can read more about that here.
But that doesn’t mean that color is unimportant. To the contrary, color easily evokes intense emotions, and the colors we wear can either harmonize with our essences or seem to clash with them.
This is why you’ll likely be most flattered by wearing colors that all come from your season, but in a way that matches the vibe of your style type.
How to Match Your Season to Your Essences
For instance, if you have the delicate Light Summer season and the intense Dramatic Gamine style type, then you’ll want to wear colors all from within your Light Summer season.
But, you’ll want to wear those Light Summer colors in a way that feels bold and Dramatic Gamine. To do this, you could:
Wear monochromatic outfits
Color-block with angular-feeling blocks of color
Wear large amounts of iconically Dramatic Gamine colors, like your deepest palette reds
So, in some ways, matching your essences to your color season can be pretty simple.
Can Your Season and Essences Clash?
But some people might still be concerned that their color season clashes with their essences. For instance, the bold color transitions such as color-blocking that flatter Dramatic Gamine might not seem entirely consistent with the gentleness of Light Summer.
So, future posts will discuss how to choose colors that suit your essences, and also how to combine colors in outfits to flatter both your season and style type.
Conclusion
Upcoming posts will discuss the best colors and color combinations for every essence!
There may be other posts about essence and season peppered in, too! : )
