by Jorunn Hernes (Norway)
Why do I ask you to bring clothes to the colour analysis?
Well, you’ll show up wearing clothes, but when you book a colour analysis with me, I always ask you to bring clothes too (and accessories) to the appointment.
Some bring a few select items, others come hauling a suitcase or several bags. And I rub my hands together in gleeful anticipation, thinking about what’s to come.
Because after we have gone through draping sequence and arrived at your Season, and after we have seen you in the Luxury drapes of your Season and wallowed in all the glorious colours of your Season and how to combine them, we will start on the last, very important part of the appointment.
You get your Season’s colour fan in your hand. We take a deep breath, and I let you take a moment to slowly unfold your fan and look at it, with all its colours perfectly harmonized with your Season.
And then, invariably, the question that bubbles to the surface is “but how do I DO this?”. And I incline my head, squint my eyes and wrinkle up my forehead in my best Yoda impression, saying “If no mistake you have made, losing you are. A different game you should play.” and I adjust my imaginary long robe and gesture towards the bags of clothes that you brought.
And we get to work, laying the colour fan on your items, one after the other, and we look. And we talk. And we combine. And we bargain. And we sort.
I have the best clients; they ask such great questions. A client getting ready for her Personal Colour Analysis in London, UK, asked me a useful question after receiving her pre-PCA instructions.
She asked if she should bring her favourite items, or the questionable ones. And that is an excellent question. The question stopped me in my tracks because I haven’t thought about giving my clients instructions on what kinds of clothes and accessories to bring, I just say “bring clothes and accessories”. My answer is yes to both.
The object with this teaching part of the PCA is to teach you how to use your colour fan using your own clothes as examples. Kind of a head start on the job you’ll be continuing when you get home and start living your Season, and your first task is to clean out your closed using your colour fan as a guiding light.
Bringing favourites can be risky. It may come in as your absolute favourite and leave at the bottom of your “donate” bag, because you saw that it no longer fits with the colour palette of your freshly minted Season and was duly demoted.
On the other hand, you can rediscover the beauty of your favourites, deepening your love for them in the light of the combination possibilities with other, surprising colours of your Season. It is very useful to explore WHY a certain item is a favourite. It sometimes holds the key to your style, you just needed to have fresh eyes look at it together with you, connect the dots and expand the possibilities.
We can find out a lot from looking at questionable items. We’ll learn so much from analyzing what it is that has caused that niggling doubt in the back of your head about a colour, a pattern, a detail, or fit. Or that it was a lone ranger in your wardrobe, perfect but simply lacking something to bridge it, so that you could create a complete outfit with this item. And we might find the answer to that something in your colour fan.
Bringing both kinds of clothes to the colour analysis is a brilliant opportunity to explore why you feel a certain item is questionable and more importantly what to do about it. With the favourites, we study exactly why you love them and how you can expand the use of those!
There is a lot more to a Personal Colour Analysis appointment than just the draping, and giving you a head start on adjusting your wardrobe is one of the added benefits.
Are you looking for reasons to not have a colour analysis? I’ve made it easy for you, READ THIS.
