Can you tell?

... that I have time of college? After weeks of writing one test after another I finally have time to lounge around my parents house, cook, sew and write blog posts :) Today is all about my personal colour palette. And how to find yours if you're hard to fit into the classical four colour seasons or the 12 or even 16 flow colour seasons.
So as I mentioned before it has been really, really hard to define my colouring. I saw the 70's seasonal colour analysis fail quite quickly. For all of you who don't know it sorts people into four colour categories:

• Spring which has light and warm colouring
• Summer which has light and cool colouring
• Autumn which has dark and warm colouring
• Winter which has dark and cool colouring

The principle is quite simple. You find your season and all the colours you'd normally associate with your season (every colour an autumn leaf might have or the bright pastels of spring flowers ...) will suit you well.

 Here's the problem:

A very quick (read: don't expect anything artistic) sketch of what I look like. I  should probably have traced that photo ... instead I just selected the colours.

As you can see there's a lot of different colouring going on. My hair is quite dark and cool but my skin is very pale. It also has cool undertones and warm overtones. So which one do I choose? My eyebrows are a lot lighter than my hair and my lashes are almost chestnut coloured. If you zoom in on my eyes you'll see that they are crazy! They have a dark blue outer circle and then change quite abruptly to a dark blue-gray* to gray to gray-green to almost olive green with a few bright green stripes and a good sprinkling of brownish-orange spots everywhere  that get more condensed toward the centre. Unfortunately they really don't photograph well.

The point is that I really don't fit into any of the four seasons. Then I came across flow season colour analysis where they have things like autumn flowing into winter and winter flowing into spring. The later is coincidentally what I decided I am. But not from taking one of the many on line quizzes.

Tutorial: Finding your colour season/ flow colour season

Here's my method:

1. find a good colour or a colour someone makes you a compliment on 
2. exclude all palettes without this colour 

OR

1. find a colour you can't wear at all (bright orange for me)
2. exclude all seasons and/or flow seasons which have this in their palette
3. every time you find a colour from one of the left over palettes dash into the sunlight and get out your mirror
4. ask yourself: does this colour make me look good (healthy glowing skin, no dark circles, sparkly eyes, shiny hair) or does it make me look bad (greenish or yellowish skin and/or hair and/or eyes, mousy, like you really need a holiday) or is it just okay
5. go back to the top and repeat until you only have one palette left
6. hope that your family and friends are too used to you being you that they don't get annoyed

The hardest part here is being perfectly honest with yourself. I had to admit that my favourite light yellow-orange blouse just wasn't my colour after several friends had worried about my health while wearing it. That also explains why I look so much worse than everyone else when I have to put on fake tan for a show: Self-tan-orange is my worst colour :(

You have to take the dashing into the sunlight part literally btw. Trying to eat a tomato ended in me dashing to the bathroom, tomato still in mouth and deciding that I really shouldn't eat tomatoes when there's a handsome guy across the room :P

Especially not  like this ...
(not my picture but I couldn't help sharing)

I'm of to find inspirational pictures to show you which colours I'm going to be able to wear. The nice thing about these palettes is that if you stick to them you can mix and match all your garments because the colours never clash. As a "Clear Winter" (winter flowing into spring I actually have the gayest colour palette so I might not mix quite that freely. Highlighter pink and plum anyone? ^^ I also hope that it will help me to embrace my new colour "choices" instead of feeling they're just a bunch of stiff rules dictating my fabric choices.

Butterfly

*Anyone know why Blogger wants me to write that with a capital letter?