The joy of colour is that it can bring our features to life, make us look healthier, and help us create balance and harmony, physically and mentally, in our outfits.
In our previous training on color, we looked at the basics of color and its properties. There are videos to help you understand and assess where your personal coloring sits on the spectrum of:
- warm to cool;
- bright or soft-muted; and
- light to deep.
These are the components that make up the basis of a personal color consolation and many of you may be aware of your seasonal or tonal color direction.
If you have not studied these videos and notes yet, then you may find it is a good time to refresh your knowledge. This training builds upon our previous training on color, however, you can still take this unit independently.
Our color changes over time
Our coloring is individual and there is a reason some people look great in multiple levels of color and yet others look best in all neutrals. It is down to our personal colour contrast.
This is the ratio of number of colors, compared to neutrals, we tend to look best in, on a physical level. However, it is your style personality and mood that plays a major role on how much color you feel good wearing, on a psychological level.
Aging reduces the natural level of pigment in hair and skin, plus our eyes become more muted as we age, losing some of their relative brightness. You will notice this if you study photographs of someone over a timeline such as when they were a baby/child, teenager, then each decade beyond that.
You are likely to notice a reduction in brightness of the eyes as the edge of the iris starts to lose pigmentation and becomes more blurred, usually greying, as our hair does. In a baby’s eye you will notice that the edges of their irises tend to be sharp and clear. Our hair greys with age as you might expect, and some of the pigmentation in our skin is also lost, so our skin also naturally pales somewhat with age, regardless of the original color.
However, many of us choose to enhance what nature has bestowed on us at that particular point of our lives through the use of any of the following:
- Hair colourants, hair pieces/extensions or wigs
- Tanning lotion or skin lightening treatments
- Eyebrow coloring, whether permanent or through make-up
- Colored contact lenses.
Understanding the difference between color contrast and value contrast
To determine your value contrast we will look at the difference between the depth of color you have in your hair, skin and eyes and the relationship between them.
To determine your color contrast we are going to identify how to use our personal coloring to create outfits in combinations that flatter our unique coloring.
Though these concepts are both referred to as contrast levels, value contrast and color contrast are different.
Go to our training on Value Contrast >>