It’s a scathing utterance you’ve heard from every fashionable caricature from Rachel Green to Carrie Bradshaw and even Fran Fine: ‘That’s not your colour’. What has become one of the most iconic style insults in the pop culture lexicon really shouldn’t be an insult at all. In fact, knowing your colours is one of the most powerful tools in your style arsenal.
The art of knowing what colours look good on you and which don’t is referred to as ‘colour analysis’. Using your complexion and pigmentation, colour analysis seeks to find which palette of colours are most harmonious with your skin.
Though colour analysis has blown up exponentially on TikTok and broader online forums, one of the most pervasive myths is that you can have your colours done online – but more on that later. Determined to discover my own colour palette, I drove out to Brentwood, California to meet with Brenda Cooper.
Brenda is not only a celebrity stylist and pioneer of the costuming vision behind The Nanny, she’s also a renowned colour expert. Stepping into her Brentwood studio, the Califronian sun poured in through every window, illuminating the room for what was about to be a metamorphic experience.
I promptly sat in front of a large mirror, draped head-to-toe in a light grey smock and headscarf with only my face peeking through.
“Well, that’s definitely not your colour,” Brenda laughs, starting the colour analysis earlier than anticipated. She then explains the science behind wearing the grey smock. “I have to neutralise the environment,” she says.
“Two colours next to one another can affect each other negatively or positively. The only two factors that matter is the colour of your skin and the colour I put next to it, and everything else needs to be neutralised.”
Then, it’s time to begin our descent into the maddening world of colour analysis. We start by holding my hand against a series of boards with differing hues – whites, browns and charcoals – which helps Brenda determine where she should start.
She nods silently, but knowingly as she disappears in a blur of grey. Moments later, she returns, heaving a clothing rack teaming with hundreds of swatches. She tells me that this is where the real fun begins.
Over the course of an hour, Brenda drapes me in sorbet greens, sunset pinks, marigold yellows and electric blues. I watch in the mirror intently as her expert eye scans every shade as she shakes her head. Because she’s keen to teach me to spot colour for myself, she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she simply holds up two shades of white and drapes them over my shoulder one at a time.
“Do you see that?” she asks.
One white is a glacial, pure white, the other is a creamy, vanilla white. The first of the two swatches instantly makes me look sick in the face, my cheeks go white and the bags under my eyes get darker. The second white electrifies my blue eyes and puts a plumpness back into my skin. I nod.
When it comes to colour, there’s two ends to the spectrum that you don’t want to sit on. On one end, you wear colours that wear you. They’re so loud and antithetical to your complexion that you get lost amongst it. On the other hand, there’s colours that are so lacklustre that they don’t compliment you or even stand out, they simply just drain you to the point where you look flat. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum are the shades that are the most harmonious with you, your season.
By this point, we had definitely ruled out that I was neither a Spring nor a Summer and we were edging closer to Winter and Autumn. We were then able to rule out Winter which left Autumn as the last season standing. But the analysis doesn’t simply stop at your season. Once you’ve determined where you sit in the season spectrum, it’s then time to determine whether you’re a ‘soft’, ‘true’ or ‘dark’. Soft, true and dark will guide you to whether low chroma shades or bright hues of colours look best with your skin.
“What music is to the ear, colour is to the eye. When you hear a note of music that’s off, you hear it. When you see a colour that is out of harmony, it’s called colour discord,” Brenda tells me, discussing shades of colours.
“Above all else, definition is what you want, you want to see the edge of the face and that beautiful bone structure… when you wear the right colours you can look like a completely different, more polished person from smoother skin to brighter complexion.”
After much internal deliberating and a thousand swatches later, Brenda conclusively declared me a ‘dark Autumn’. This essentially means that I look my best in warmer toned colours like mauves, deep blues, forest greens, beiges, browns and charcoal. But that’s not to say I’m exclusively limited to just wearing dark colours just because I’m a dark Autumn, it means that the shades of the colours that look best on me are spicy and rich as opposed to light and pastel.
I’ll be the first to admit that as a girl with a slew of mint greens, zesty oranges, creamy periwinkles in her closet – seeing none of those bright shades on my colour chart was a tough pill to swallow. Almost as if Brenda could read the slight dismay on my face, she promptly tells me that colour analysis is just that – analysis.
“It’s never about the colour, it’s about the tone of the colour…I simply deliver the accurate information of the tone of colour that harmonises with your skin to make you look most magnificent. The right colours can take you from a 2 to a 10 to make you look your most engaging and charismatic.”
Can a colour analysis be done online?
Contrary to what you might see and read online, colour analysis cannot be done via the web or a digital filter. You may be able to sweepingly put yourself into one of the four seasons but narrowing down whether you are a true, dark or soft hue is practically impossible without an expert being able to see your complexion and colouring in person.
“You can’t do a colour analysis online accurately because all screens are calibrated differently which makes our complexion and skin look different to how it might actually look in person. Anyone doing a colour analysis online won’t be getting an accurate read on a person’s true colours. It’d be wonderful to do it online accurately but you just can’t.
“When it comes to colour analysis, even being a little off doesn’t serve you well. An accurate analysis has to be done in the daylight with a person sitting in front of a mirror. The subtleties of colour can have a dramatic effect in a positive or negative way.”
What are some simple ways to spot harmonious colours in your own wardrobe?
Just because you can’t accurately have your colour analysis done online doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself. Though a true colour analysis is done by a trained expert, we all intuitively have an eye for the colours that do and don’t work for us.
According to Brenda, there’s actually a simple exercise you can do in your own wardrobe to understand colour theory. As per her book, The Silhouette Solution, Brenda says it’s great practice to go into your wardrobe and pull out two garments that are different shades of the same colour. For example, a pastel green and a forest green.
In a mirror, hold the garments under your chin one by one, taking a good look at your own face every time. What do you notice? Does your under eye area look darker under one garment than the other? Are lines on your face more visible? Do blemishes or marks on your face become more apparent?
Try this trick with different colours and shades in your wardrobe, making a note of the shades that illuminate you the best.
“From clothing, hair colour, jewellery, makeup, accessories, nails and lip colour. The right shade is like switching on the light in a room, it should just illuminate you,” Brenda says.
Is it worth getting a colour analysis?
Ever since Isaac Newton discovered that colour was a component of light, colour theory and science have pervasively existed in every facet from psychology to interior design and fashion. Colour has the propensity to illuminate and to dull, to excite and to placate. When it comes to dressing, the act of training your eye and learning about colours is one of the most powerful steps you will take in the realm of fashion.
For me, getting a colour analysis done instantly changed the way I shop, dress and looked at clothes entirely. Intuitively, we all have an eye for colour in varying degrees. I always knew that when I put on white that I didn’t look my best, or that when I wore mint green I looked especially pale – but I didn’t have the tools to know what to do about that until having a colour analysis.
Because colour analysis is one of those things you can see in real time, I was almost instantly able to start moulding my style around my colours. Now when I go clothes shopping, I find that I’m drawn to clothes that closely align with my ‘Dark Autumn’ palette because I know that’s what truly does look the best on me – though an occasional bright hue might still end up in my basket.
“It can be life-changing to be armed with the knowledge on how to make yourself look your most attractive. It’s very powerful and very confidence-building,” Brenda says.
“This is an exterior experience that can have a dramatic interior effect on how you feel about yourself, your look and your confidence. But only if it’s done accurately.”
So whether you’re in a fashion funk or you’re looking to take your appearance to a whole other level, knowing your colours and having an expert colour analysis is truly a life-changing experience that will change everything you think about yourself, fashion and dressing.
