“Color Me Beautiful” is so last century! And quite honestly those generic color palettes you order off the internet are often downright wrong. Furthermore, today thousands of additional hues are available, and they’re much more refined and subtle.
Case in point, below are two Color Me Beautiful palettes for a “Summer” type: the one on the left (way too bright!) from Carol Jackson’s original book, and the one on the right more current, but still too generic for most Summers.
The Caygill/Chrisman process. In the 1950s Hollywood color stylist Suzanne Caygill developed a sophisticated system for creating custom color palettes based on the client’s skin tones, eye and hair color, face shapes and personality. She typed her clients by “season,” which expressed itself both in color palette AND in an accompanying seasonal style of dressing.
But 4 seasons didn’t really cover the variability Caygill observed, because people are a mix of warm and cool temperatures and may be lighter or darker. Hence she came up with 6 subtypes per season to accommodate this wide variety, which equals 24 unique types around which to build a custom palette. Many copycat systems followed, often generic and extremely simplified. Color Me Beautiful was one of those. In the 1990s Sharon Chrisman further refined Suzanne’s work.
Becoming a personal color analyst in the Caygill/Chrisman process requires lengthy training. Below is a client with his too bright custom palette from 1980 (as if he were a cool light Spring, like the gal on the right below) and the much more appropriate one I did for him recently. He turns out to be one of the warmer and darker Summers, a “Dusk Summer.”
An accurate color analysis process is best done one-on-one, face-to-face. A custom palette usually takes at least two hours to create, and should include clear guidance on the function of each color and what clothing styles best express the person’s season. Below are two Springs: very different palettes (Sandy Spring on the left, Floral Spring on the right). And yet they both share the lively animation characteristic of most Springs.
And here are two very different but vibrant Winter women:
Isn’t it time for you to look like who you really are? A personal palette custom created just for you is an lifetime investment that gets more useful and powerful the longer you use it. Why wait?