Colors of Beauty!

When I was a teenager I realized my eyes looked different colors based on what color shirt I was wearing and I thought it was pretty cool.  I also started to be interested in fashion magazines and tabloids that contained pictures of all the gowns the celebrities were wearing and best and worst dressed lists.  This interest in clothing and fashion corresponded with one summer evening where my dad went to an estate auction and came home with a box of grab bag books.  This is a common way for auctioneers to liquidate large book collections so if one book catches your eye you often end up with a box of other books that you might not be interested in but who wants to waste a whole auction selling individual books?  In this box was a fashion book from the early 1980s (not the book my dad was interested in).  I cannot remember what it was called but it was something very similar to this:

 

 

The one from the auction had two authors and they were both rather matronly women who I don't think I would have taken fashion advice from but the main idea was the same.  Apparently, women's appearances could be categorized into four seasons based on their hair and eye color and skin tone.  I quickly found myself to be an oddball because the book put all redheads into the "autumn" category but then it said that autumn ladies never had blue eyes.  Well, OK then.  I finally found a one line disclaimer that said that if a red haired woman had blue eyes she was a "spring".  I was a spring and my sister was a winter if I remember right.  Then it had all sorts of color swatches and pictures of women wearing the colors that enhanced their season.  It went even farther in helping different "types" of women make the best fashion and color choices for themselves and it had rather insulting descriptions to help you decide who you were, including a very feminine type who was practically a spoiled child and a "gamin" which was a woman who was very sporty and wore a pixie cut.  Then there were lists of body types and the styles of clothing that flattered them most (as an athletic teenager this hardly meant anything to me but I certainly learned a lot of fashion terminology that was quite impressive to my co-workers in the costume department at my college work study) and lists of clothes that should be included in a wardrobe.  This was very baffling to my sister and I because it said you should own three pair of underwear.  What?  We asked my mom if that was the norm in 1981 that and she didn't agree but said it probably referred to people who only wore expensive underwear that had to be handwashed.  But still...three?  Then there was some quite outdated advice about style choices for various scenarios in life.  Some that stood out to me included never wearing jeans anywhere except to do housework and how to dress for travel (no wrinkly linen on airplanes!  If you are driving a car wear flat shoes but keep heels in the car in case you have to go into a restaurant!)  If those ladies saw the flip flop and t-shirt wearing masses on airplanes and in gas stations these days they would just die.  If they saw me most days they would not be impressed at all.  They would really lose it if they saw my jam packed "unmentionable" drawer that barely closes because it is so full of 7 for $25.00 Victoria's Secret bargains.  Some of us don't have time for handwashing, OK?  I got a kick out of that book, if you can't tell, and also probably learned enough fashion and textile terminology to complete half of the fashion degree that was popular when I was in college.  I think it survived the farm teardown last fall and I wish I had brought it home with me!

 

So, where am I going with all this, you might ask?  Well, yesterday on Pinterest I saw the following chart:

 

 

Well, look at that...this is still a "thing"!

 

 

Here's another one:

 

So it looks like I am still a spring and more specifically I think I am a warm spring. I like the colors for the clear spring and cool spring more but whatever.  Red hair really throws these things off.  Based on that last chart I have no idea what I am.  I think maybe a "clear" or "warm"?  Who knows.  It's still fun though.  I wish I had more reasons to wear interesting clothes.  I often got compliments on my clothes at my former job and when I was in law school.  It must have been my knowledge from the color book manifesting itself without me even thinking about it!  Haha. There is truth to this stuff.  If someone were to drape, say, a pastel yellow or beige piece of cloth around my shoulders and take my picture and then put a royal blue or dark green drape on me and took another picture I think it is obvious that the yellow and beige ones would be the least attractive. 

 

FYI: I don't really know the rules of Pinterest but I should mention that I didn't make these charts and I am not pretending I did.  Most things I see on there have been shared and reused many times, but just in case...if you search "spring color palette" or "color me beautiful" all sorts of these charts come up.