![]() Or as one exasperated client once put it, “It’s like we’re the Dulux beige of human colouring, the standard spec home decorator stuff that is supposed to go with everything but doesn’t really work with the new couch after all!”īut this sort of experience isn’t limited to the softs – all the Tones can feel like no-one is catering. Many of them have tried just about everything, their subtle neutral colouring inviting experiment like a buff-coloured canvas, but with most of it feeling a bit brash or off or whatever and without any of it really feeling like it sits exactly right. Sometimes the warms come in suspecting they’re cools, and vice versa, and that’s not unusual in PCA by any stretch. The darker ones may wonder if they’re winters (usually the Summers, who’ve worked out that they’re basically cool but who find that pastels and clean pinks and blues aren’t really their best either) or Darks (often the brown-eyed, darker-haired autumns, who might have found that truly warm colours are just a bit much, often struggling with both Spring and True Autumn colours in their wardrobes). Our job is to help us both be honest about it.)īoth of the Softs are broad churches. PCA is the process of working out what the client’s colouring is telling us, but everyone walks in with the answer already there. ![]() (Analysts don’t – shouldn’t – decide what Tones we’ll see, our clients do, or rather their ancestors do. This is a case of local demographics and then the further self-selection process that clients go through in deciding to have a PCA, but keep in mind that other analysts elsewhere may have a very different perspective on all this – a colleague in South East Asia once reported seeing a lot of clients who turned out to be Winters and Darks, for example. A qualification: the majority of my own client base to this point is of European ancestry. In my practice they are the most commonly seen Tones, and there are some pretty straightforward reasons for this preponderance. ![]() Wabi sabi is everywhere in nature, and so are the Softs. I saw that the same culture can value them both, and everything in between. If the Brights are festival colours and decorations, fireworks, and the clean, stylised, bright forms of origami, the gentler colours of the Softs could be said to capture this counter-balancing approach (though of course we can take this analogy too far, as many Softs may be drawn to intricacy, formality, architectural shapes, symmetry and engineered precision, as expressed by their own or other palettes). It is about the extraordinary beauty of what might be termed ordinary, but it’s only ordinary in the sense that nature gives us so much of it that we can take it for granted, and the subtly dimensional colours and organic textures involved are the hardest to reproduce convincingly. ![]() It is an aesthetic related to the Japanese idea of Wabi Sabi, a difficult philosophy to explain in a few words (many have tried) but which we can try to sum up as about valuing the natural, the irregular, the worn, the imperfect, the faded and the effect of time and usage. I am a Bright Winter and the drama of this palette feels completely right, but I also love to be surrounded by simple organic shapes, natural forms and desaturated, softer colours. Wintry extremes of saturation and value could be seen in both the bright colours of young women’s festive formal kimono and in formal menswear and older women’s high formal kimono, but at the other side of the wheel, in the dusty, gentler colours of older women’s visiting kimono and the subtle, cleverly harmonizing choices of many of the young people I saw, I also began to recognise what I now know as the equally sophisticated, strikingly poised tones of Soft Summer and Soft Autumn.Ī few articles back, we talked about how we often love things not because they look most like us, but because they don’t. Looking back now, I suspect that this trip was also an early lesson in the beauty to be found in opposite approaches to chroma, and most of it could be picked up with a glance into my new friends’ wardrobes. Many, many years ago, long before I came to practice Personal Colour Analysis, I had the time of my young life as the guest of a family in Japan. After all the recent focus on Winters, an analyst dropped me a line, figuring that it was time to do a one-eighty: “A Soft Revolution, the PCA equivalent of the Velvet Revolution? … Maybe you’ll consider a blog post about the matter?” she suggested.Īnd indeed we shall – and the Softs have the numbers on their side, that’s for sure, so here we go.Ī bit of background, first.
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