That Moment of Wonderment in your Colour Analysis: A Valentine for you
I can still feel my gasp, looking in the mirror when the headscarf (which had covered my hair during the analysis) came off.
Was that MY hair? That subtle gorgeous mix of shades – bark, sand, teak, frost – could not be my “mousy” hair. I was almost in tears, could not stop staring. At myself.
I could see that it all sang together in the mirror: the draping fabrics looked rich and dusky, my eyes were arresting, no longer the nondescript blue-grey they had always seemed to me. And my skin looking so …nourished.
This is one of the abundance of gifts that comes from a colour analysis: truly seeing yourself.
That you are riveting, as you are.
And that same new lens opened up the very idea of beauty for me. I realized I’d been living under a belief system so ingrained that it had never even occurred to me to question it: that there are the lucky few who are indisputably beautiful, and then there are the rest of us – who have our moments of shining, but deep down, know our place on that scale. As if there were only so much beauty to go around.
That could not be more wrong. We are all, every single one of us, riveting as we are.
The Science of Colour Harmony
There are multiple dimensions to this topic, clearly. For this post, I want to spotlight the revolution inherent in the very concept of the 12 seasons: each season is breathtaking, each evocative of a different universe – and one is not better or more beautiful than another. The automatic “1-10” scale by which we can reflexively see the world simply does not apply. My teacher Christine Scaman describes each of the colour families by landscape and time of day, and that framing so captures the rich range of colours within each of the 12, a range that includes lighter to darker, and cooler to warmer looking, that all harmonize to create magic.
And one of these incredible palettes is your home, your superpower.
Different eras, different cultures may normalize one or other of the colour families, and we all can have our individual baggage around responses to some colours – but as colour analysts, we know it is impossible to deny the sheer radiance when we finally get to the person’s season.
Everyone is riveting, as they are.
Its science, the science of colour harmony. We just need a chance to see ourselves in our colours to understand.