When we’ve known our best colors all along — a coming home to self

A Tawny Spring

When Em came to see me she was already an accomplished color consultant in her own right and very confident in her seasonal typing as a Spring. But she shared that something about the color palette she’d been given, almost a decade before, had just never sat completely right with her. She had found a few of the colors in her palette worked quite well and she had stuck to them pretty closely but others always felt a little off. She showed me her palette, we agreed on the obvious need for a hair-related color change, and then as we sat and talked, my brain humming away in the background, it registered with me that perhaps she’d been given the wrong Spring colors.

So of course it was time for a whole new color palette — and this time, as we matched each swatch to Em we discovered that what she needed was medium value colors with just a drop of toner in them. Also, she looked amazing in smooth textured fabrics. She was indeed a Spring who crossed over to Autumn — a Tawny Spring.

We look at the quality of the color and what that brings out in the person to determine the Seasonal type and sub-type.

Em loved all the colors in her previous Floral Spring palette — but the skin tones, pinks, and reds didn’t feel quite like they matched with “her” coloring and many of the lighter value colors left her feeling washed out. Indeed, while the colors related on one level to her spring energy, they sat apart from her apricot skin tone instead of fully harmonizing with it.

Of course this change of sub-type came as a surprise, but not an unpleasant one, for Em. She could see the difference this small shift in the quality of the color in her palette made in the way the colors related to her skin, hair and eyes. And as it turned out, Em had sensed these colors belonged to her all along. Before we met, before any changes to her color palette, Em had decorated her home in many of the colors on her new palette. She had instinctively been drawn to the colors and textures that relate to her personal seasonal color harmony.

Em is not unique. Sometimes, after receiving their palette, a client will tell me that all those colors are found in their favorite piece of artwork, perhaps in a quilt on their bed, or the colors in their garden or maybe even the colors they were dressed in as a child. Sometimes it is not the colors that are familiar, but their seasonal description is reminiscent of how others have always described them. Or perhaps it affirms something they’ve always felt about color but didn’t know why. Like why they never felt right in black and white, or why they never liked the color orange, or why their favorite color has always been blue.

When I receive this feedback from clients I can see that even if their wardrobe has long ago drifted away from what colors & styles suit them best, at some level their seasonal color palette is a coming home to self.

For others, it’s about letting go of an image of self that was imposed upon them by a parent or partner’s need for them to be perceived in a certain way. Or maybe they let marketing or peer pressure steer them off in the wrong direction until they lost all sense of what was inherent to them. But for those clients too, it’s a coming home, at long last, to a realization that ‘this is me’.

What did you discover when you had your color palette made? Was it recognizing something vaguely familiar? Did it feel “just like me”? Or was it stepping into a whole new level of understanding about yourself?