How to determine your color type: stylist's advice

Color is a very effective tool in working on style. How to choose your perfect color scheme?

The choice of color is not easy. We know that the right shades help us look perfect, and inappropriate colors, on the contrary, can ruin the whole picture: emphasize even the most minor skin defects, make us older. How to determine your color type and choose those colors that really suit us? With these questions, we turned to the stylist, the head of the Wardrobe Rehab image studio Oksana Bolbot.

Question: there is an opinion that absolutely all colors go to each person, the main thing is to choose the right shades. Is it so?

Indeed, almost all colors suit man. It is not at all true to believe that you need to find for yourself a gamut, for example, in ten shades, and adhere to it all your life. Agree, this is very boring! However, you still need to choose the right colors, and there are certain secrets for this.

How to choose colors

First of all, you need to determine which colors harmonize well with your face and neck. There are three important parameters that you need to focus on:

1. The color should be in good contact with the chin area, not darken the neck, but also sculpt the chin and cheekbone of the face well. In this case, the color will impose the correct shadow on the face, modeling it and making the appearance more elegant
2. Color should even out skin tone, becoming a kind of analogue of a good foundation. Correctly selected color temperature copes with this task - a cold or warm gamut of colors. At the same time, curiously, if the color does not suit you, the face begins to exfoliate into separate zones. Sensitive areas on the face also appear, for example, bags under the eyes, a white stripe around the mouth, blue spots on the cheeks and so on ... You can easily check whether these are your colors or not by these sensitive areas.
3. Color should equally emphasize both eyes and eyebrows. It is a mistake to say that color is good when it makes eyes bright. Only paired with underlining eyebrows will our face look harmonious!

Important: it is important to consider all appropriate color characteristics in the area near the face. The color of clothes from the waist and below can be absolutely any! The main thing is that it is combined with the color of the "top".

Question: everyone knows that there are 4 color types: autumn, winter, spring, summer. Is this classification correct and are there any other color types?

There are a huge number of varieties and subtypes of seasons.

A bit of history

Initially, almost 100 years ago, in the film industry, they thought about how to build a color script in the frame. This was extremely important in the era of black and white cinema: even in the absence of different tonality of color, I really wanted the characters to look aesthetically pleasing on the screen. A little later, with the advent of color cinema, the task became more complicated - it was necessary to correctly build color spots on the screen, to make sure that the color as well as possible emphasized the appearance of the main characters, rebuilt them from other actors. So there was an applied technique of individual selection of color for a person, which experts called color typing. Initially, color typing was an extremely figurative concept, and all appearance types were equated with different seasons. Suppose if you have dark hair, eyebrows and eyes, while white skin - the color type was defined as winter. If red hair, freckles, colored eyes - like autumn, and so on. This approach has one minus - it was not very flexible in definitions and did not take into account the fact that all people are very different in color characteristics, there are practically no identical types.Actually, the rest of the century, this technique was developed and reached the point that each season now has 4 subtypes, including transitional coloristic types. It is quite difficult to determine the subtype independently. If you take the matter seriously, it makes sense to do it with a specialist.

Directional color analysis method

Currently, the most advanced color matching technique is the directional method of color analysis. This method appeared in the UK, in the 90s, and was just a real revolution in color. He conditionally divides the appearance into certain zones, and the specialist, using a huge number of color drapery scarves, tests colors precisely on the zones of the face, making the most accurate color picture of your appearance. However, for many women, seasonal definitions of color types are more common, so it is better to combine directional and seasonal analysis. This gives the most accurate result.

Question: how to understand which colors / shades exactly fit, and which absolutely not? Is there any step-by-step algorithm?

First of all, we should look at three parameters of our face:

• the chin
• skin tone
• eyes and eyebrows.

Applying colors with different characteristics to your face, you will see that with some combinations, the appearance is transformed, and some tones, on the contrary, change us for the worse. Actually, the most important thing is to apply color to your face during the day, in good light, to be at this moment without makeup and distractions. The most important thing is to learn to truly see yourself, and not to follow some kind of prevailing self-image. Learn to carefully look at yourself in the mirror, without requirements and prejudices! You will discover many new things!

Color Algorithm

1. Prepare your workplace with a mirror and good lighting
2. Choose clothes of different colors
3. Wash and remove all makeup from your face, remove jewelry, open your neck as much as possible, remove hair from your face, if you wear a bang, stab it with something, if you wear long hair - braid it in a tail or braid.
4. Apply colors to your face according to the principle of contrast (light with dark, bright with muted)
5. Try to see the difference and remember what colors evened out the skin tone, emphasized the chin, highlighted the eyes and eyebrows.
6. Take the right colors for your memory. Just make sure that the shades in the photos completely match the shades of the clothes in reality.

Tip: you should not do this experiment next to a girlfriend or in a company with loved ones - you risk starting to wear your favorite colors of loved ones, and not your own.

If, choosing different colors for yourself according to all the rules, you still can’t determine which shades suit you, consult an experienced colorist for advice.

Question: how to choose things or fabrics in the store? Indeed, in fitting rooms there is always artificial lighting.

As we already said, you should not focus on lighting in stores: whether it is a fitting room or a trading floor. If you understand that you really liked the thing and want to buy it, do not rush to cut the tags at home. Look at yourself in this thing under different lighting conditions - does color work well with the face? Will you grow up? Does it make slimmer? How does color come in contact with tooth enamel? Is the color itself knocked out of the general gamut in a wardrobe? Look at yourself day and evening, consider what kind of lighting will be where you go in the new thing. If a thing doesn’t fit in for some parameter - feel free to return it. In this case, the wardrobe will become really good in emphasizing appearance over time.

Try to photograph yourself from different angles, carefully consider yourself from all sides. Do not trust the comments of others too much: if you are told that the color does not fit, specify why a person thinks so. Remember that the opinions of others are not always objective.Often a person aloud voices to us his fears, which may have nothing to do with our appearance at all.

Question: a lot in our image depends on the combination of colors in clothes. How to combine certain shades?

We live in an interesting time - there are so many options and fashionable ideas around that sometimes a head starts to crack from a choice. Actually, several tools may come to our aid: a color wheel, a set of paints, and a set of colored paper.

Color circle

Everything is quite simple with the color wheel - this tool helps designers quickly and accurately navigate which color combination will be in harmony with the appearance. Briefly, the principle of operation is this: we select the color of interest to us on the circle and determine the gamut. It can be calm - and then the choice of "neighbor flowers" or a festive one will be a good decision - then we can choose a color that is opposite the chosen one in the circle. It is important to remember that initially the color wheel is an average concept, in which all colors are pure and may not correspond to your natural color characteristics. Better draw your own color wheel. You can draw with ordinary gouache, correlate with your photo. In this case, the tool will become more accurate. In addition, when painting, you learn to distinguish between pigments that are contained in colors. This knowledge helps a lot in creating color combinations.

There is the so-called principle of color chains: the colors in the ensemble must be in contact with each other, supported by a common pigment. For example, green color contains pigments of yellow and blue tones. Actually, you can safely combine green with blue, yellow and all colors in which there are similar pigments. And the last: train your eye as often as possible, learn to trust yourself. For example, you can cut a piece of blue and yellow from a regular set of colored paper. Applying these two colors to clothes, you can determine the color temperature of the fabric. It remains only to choose your own.

Oksana Bolbot - leader and ideological inspirer Image Studios Wardrobe Rehab, developed a system of independent work on an individual style and presented it on online resources. Simple and effective WR programs were very popular with users, and literally in a year, Wardrobe Rehab sites were among the hundred most visited female-related resources in our country. In July 2011, Oksana opened a studio Wr in Moscow, where anyone can get a consultation on the style, including an analysis of the color of the exterior, such as the shape and face, the selection of the best styles, accessories, the analysis of the wardrobe and the formation of a stylish image. You can see examples of the works of Oksana and her fellow stylists in the section of the website of the same name. Professional way:

• 2002 - 2005 Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design, London
• 2008 - 2011 held leading positions in the field of image and PR consulting of large domestic and western companies
• 2009 entered the top 10 leading experts in image consulting according to the magazine "White Business"
• In 2010 - 2012, a teacher at the school of stylists "Persona"
• In 2011, she founded an image studio Wardrobe rehab
• From 2013 to the present, he has been developing the project in Russia and Latin America

Photo: Oksana Bolbot's personal archive, fotolia.com Material prepared by Anna Soboleva