Why you should wear your best colours
Wearing the colours that look the best on you is essential no matter how old you are. Nevertheless, when you reach a certain age – over 50 – wearing colours that do not suit you can make you look old, tired and even ill. As you age, your skin often gets paler and loses elasticity. In other words it doesn’t bounce back and look as good as it did when you were between twenty and forty. With that in mind, we need all the help we can get to make our face look good. Obviously good skin care, make up, sleep, exercise and a healthy diet go a long way to help. However, wearing the correct colours next to your face is vital if you want to look youthful and vibrant.
Colour Analysis
I would very much advocate investing in a professional colour analysis. It is having a resurgence now and is not just something that ladies did in the 1980s! During a personal colour analysis, a variety of drapes will be used to determine your colour direction or season. Once you know the colours that are in your palette, it saves you time and money in the long run. If you do decide to have a colour analysis, at the end you will have a wallet of colour swatches that will best flatter your skin, hair and eyes. These colours should all work together and you should be confident that whatever clothing colours you choose are going to look good on you. You can then sort your wardrobe out accordingly and start to phase out the wrong colours. If you would like to have your colours analysed please contact me and I will be happy to help you.
A word about black
Black is the colour that so many people like to wear – black coats, black shoes, black trousers, little black dress – the list goes on. It has become synonymous with ‘French Chic’ and people like to emulate that. But black is a colour that many of us, quite frankly, look awful in. If you have a cool and/or deep skin tone and are what is termed ‘winter’ in seasonal colour analysis, then you can wear black. For the rest of us an alternative neutral to black is preferable.
How to wear black if you really have to
If you need to wear a black outfit for work, to a funeral or a formal event, try and add a scarf or a necklace in a colour that is flattering for you, or in the case of an evening dress which may have a low neckline, the area of skin separates the black from being right under your chin which softens the effect of the black. Of course, you could then add jewellery in the correct metal or colours for you as well.
Sorting the ‘wrong’ colours from the ‘right’ ones
Most of us though still have a wardrobe full of the ‘wrong’ colours, which we probably paid good money for. So, should we rush to our wardrobes and get rid of everything that is not a flattering colour for us? My advice is, once you have had a colour analysis, then do have a sort through your wardrobe with your swatch wallet to hand. You will never be able to identically match colours to your clothing, so the best thing to do is to lay your swatches over the item of clothing that you are looking at and see if the item of clothing blends. If it does, it’s the right colour, if it doesn’t then you should be able to see straight away that it’s not correct for you.
When you are sorting through your wardrobe, have a look at the quality of the items there. If you find something that is the wrong colour and is made of poor quality material or badly constructed, then it would be better not to keep it. If there is something, e.g. a coat or jacket, that is not the right colour but the material is good quality and you paid a lot for it, I would suggest keeping it. There are, however, other reasons for keeping or letting go of your clothes including style personality, body shape, scale and proportion, but in this post I’m just going to deal with colour. Below I have put a guide for deciding which clothes to keep:
Wrong colour/Poor quality – Don’t keep
Wrong colour/Good quality – Keep for now
Right colour/Poor quality – Keep for now
Right colour/Good quality – Keep
As I mentioned above, the clothes in the wrong colours can be adapted by wearing a scarf or piece of jewellery in the right colour next to your face.
I hope you’ve found this helpful when it comes to choosing the colour of your clothing. Please contact me if you would like further help.
