Let’s face it: Learning to use our colour fans to shop for clothes can be… daunting? To say the least.
Especially having to overcome an instinct to try matching the item colour with an individual colour in the fan. We call this “dot matching” – and oh man, can it lead you astray.
The dot-matching approach is great for finding a potential lipstick to try on, for example, but it is seriously problematic when shopping for your clothes.
First: for any given clothing colour, I can show you dots from several different seasons that look like they could be a match. So a dot-match just cannot give you enough information to know that the item is in your season.
But also: with the dot-matching approach, you are automatically limiting yourself to the colours in your fan – meaning you lose out on the 100s and 100s of your season’s colours! In contrast, the approach of the “fan drop” means the fan becomes a tool for identifying all your possible colours.
But the downside is that “fan dropping” is definitely a skill that has to be worked on. I wanted to try and capture, in a photo series, a slice of what I do with clients at our appointment, in showing them how to use the fan. We know that real life doesn’t always translate to photographs, but this comparison seemed a good choice. So here we go.
The first step
Submitted, for your consideration, is…. a pinky-peachy top. (Rod Serling callback for the older crowd…)
My first step when I’m figuring out the season of an item is simply looking at it, to see whether it appears more warm or cool, and more saturated or muted; this gets me into a neighbourhood before I drop the fan. With this top, for me: first, there is visible warmth, suggesting this is not a True Cool, and not likely a Cool Neutral season. Next, it seems to lack the chroma intensity/muscle punch of colours in the upper half of the clock (i.e the 5 winter blends).
So just from eyeballing, I start with a guess of either Light Spring (LSp) or Soft Autumn (SA).
For an LSp or SA person, the next step is to drop their fan on the clothing. The idea is that the fan is you — your face — and we are looking for harmony between the fan and the clothing colour, just as we did between you and the drapes during your analysis.
There are a couple of key “fan drop” approaches: my main ones are i) “all fan arms spread out”, and ii) “lipstick arms plus the greens”. However, I am going to start this series with the instinctive approach of finding the colour dots in the fan that look closest to the colour of the clothing.
The instinctive approach vs the whole picture
We find an arm or two in the Light Spring (LSp) fan with a colour dot that looks like it could be close to the colour of the top.
Hmm, not bad. The peachy dot at the top of the right arm in particular seems like a good possibility?
But critically, this can be misleading. How about the whole fan?
For me, harmony shows up as the fan sinking into the item, like sinking into a cushion, or melting into a painting made up of the colours in that season. And both the fan and the material look lit up/energized by being next to each other.
This is the whole Light Spring fan, with the arms spread out so you can see the material between the arms (the proper “fan drop”)
But here, the whole picture is less promissing. I seem to see the fan floating on top of the item, separate from it, looking too candy, too bright for the top in some ways, and yet also, for some arms, looking too… powdery? And next to the fan, the fabric is diminished into the background; its hard to get to the item through the fan colours.
Here is a fan drop with the Soft Autumn fan.
Ahhhhhh… for me, what a relief. Those deeper, mellow, amber-infused colours of the fan just sink into the fabric, are one with it. This fan is not floating on top, rather its literally a part of the fabric colour.
And the energy of fan and fabric seems balanced, they are both energized by each other, not one disappearing the other.
Going back and forth between the LSp fan drop, and the SA fan drop, you just keep seeing more… Look at how much better the SA yellow arm works, and the blues, than the cartoon yellows and blues of LSp fan. The LSp yellow looks like neon highlighter against the top. And that LSp pink arm – so glad its gone! The SA smoky greys seem so much better than the sharper LSp greys..
For me, these two photos really show spring heat as brighter jelly-bean warmth, vs fall heat as mellow velvety-earthy warmth.
In addition to the “whole fan” drop, it can be very helpful to look at a slice of the colours: the lipstick arms (importantly, all of the lipstick arms in the fan, not just one), and the greens.
Would you wear those lipsticks with that colour top, or is something off? With the spring fan, one of the arms is alright, but the coral-orange in the other arms looks like kool-aid. Whereas with the autumn fan, all of the terra-cotta influenced lip colours resonate with the item.
We say the greens can show up as great or gross; our gut just reacts. With the spring fan, the greens look somewhat radioactive…while the blue-greens look almost drained. With the autumn fan, the olive and moss greens look belonging, and the blues include gorgeous desert turquoise.
I know for me which fan is separate from the fabric, and which one is belonging.
The trusted colour swatches/fans you see here, which many of us use, are from True Colour International.
You made this very clear. Thanks, Lisa!!
Beautiful pictures Lisa. I really see that the SA fan is much better than LSp!
The photos are very helpful! Is there a good Canadian source for the fans?
This was really helpful. One thing I would love, given this, is the chance to see what other fans look like. I am a DA, and just getting to see how it overlaps with and/or differs from the others would be incredibly helpful to get the sense of colour progression through the seasons. ie how DO the greens/the pinks look across the seasons, or the blues, yellows and browns…like that it might be easier for us to say…hmmm.. is this pink tending that way, or this way….so we can have minds’ eye images of a spectrum, so to speak, and locate our colours along that visually, rather than just in terms of words like ‘bright’, ‘warm’ etc.
this is incredibly helpful. Thanks. Especially seeing the two fans against the jumper and why one works and not the other. But it would be SO helpful to have something where you illustrate the ‘circle of reds’ or blues/greens etc ie help us to see how a range of colours for one season moves into those of another one. The words ‘bright, warm, dark etc’ isn’t the same as actually gettting to watch the colours change and to have someone like you explain what we are seeing and its significance. Probably I’m not the only one who has only my own fan – dark autumn – and so no real idea of what the other fans look like and how they differ/overlap with my own. But I would really find that helpful to see. Many thanks, Annabelle
So glad this is helpful! Swatching was definitely a skill I had to work at – and that frustration was a catalyst for creativity ( ha, something I wish I would remember better in the moment).
The short answer: There is no Canadian source for the fans that we CC analysts are aware of.
i found the tip about the lipstick colours and greens particularly helpful. just tried it out on a couple of things this morning. several tops i wasn’t sure about melted into the fan; whereas another one looked horrible against the lipstick colours. But, I suppose, the fact that something is in the fan doesn’t mean that it will look really good on you, as opposed to another deep autumn…and maybe that is what i was picking up on: that i loved the colours, but wasn’t sure that they really loved me so much, even if they blended fine. Still…it WAS amazing to see the way that they could melt into the fan, and that this is the effect we are aiming for. Incredibly helpful. thanks so much, annabelle
You are so right, Annabelle. We analysts end up deeply honing our swatching skills because we deal with all 12 seasons. Not only do we become familiar with the colours around the whole season clock, but also we have all 12 fans, so with any item, we can drop a range of fans on it, which is incredibly valuable.
Suggestions for clients:
-A great way to get a sense of all the seasons is through the Pinterest sites for each season by colour analysts; we have collected those by CC analysts here, at our CC website. https://www.chrysaliscolour.com/more/pinterest-links/
-But generally you don’t need to be able to identify the whole clock, rather as we say, it simplifies to: “is this Me, or Not Me?” So learning to recognize by eye the “really wrong for me” colours is worthwhile (and more swatching tips in the CC https://www.chrysaliscolour.com/more/harmonizing-tips/ )
—Some people do buy an additional fan or two, once they figure out there is a consistent area of confusion for them eg a neighbouring season on either side.
-The tip that I teach my clients (learned from my struggles) is to have a “yes” item with them whenever swatching: When you drop your fan on it, you can reliably see the harmony. ….which I am realizing needs another blog with photos to do it justice. (And a “no” item helps too lol) More on this soon! (And thank you for the question! Maybe the colour world is calling you to become an analyst..?)
o goodness! i’d love to train…when i retire that is what i’m hoping to do, and then start on a second career doing that and teaching people how to dye clothes. I do have my ‘i’m sure this is perfect’ tops/lipsticks that i try to use. but, so far, i find the best advice is your lipstick colours and greens…finding the right shade of green is SO hard… and i can’t seem to find dyes in the grass green shades on my fan, so i’m going to have to have to rip up some old sheets and start experimenting a bit. I’m also finding it hard to get the right navy…this seems to be trickier than I expected (even setting aside my love of mexican blues which might be perfect for lucky bright winters like christine, but is overwhelming on me. Some colours just don’t reciprocate my love (including that lovely pink sweater in your photos….such a beautiful colour…and that glorious mexican blue of Diego Rivera’s house (where Trotsky lived at one time) is just too much….even for home decorations. You need the right light….