Perhaps you remember a period called the 1980s, a time of heavy makeup, shoulder pads and a little phenomenon called "Color Seasons." A professional color consultant named Carole Jackson wrote this book called Color Me Beautiful, detailing how to find the tones that put the fab in your fabulous. The first I heard of it was in 1995, at my friend Nif’s house in Philadelphia. Nif and our other pal Staśa had always been beautiful, but that day they were exponentially lovely — Nif in a bright fuschia turtleneck that brought out the fresh pink in her cheeks and Staśa in a soft periwinkle sweater that made her blue-gray eyes the focus of her face. As it turned out, they had recently attended a swatch party, where they wore white shirts, sat next to a window and tested various pieces of fabric next to their faces to see which ones worked and which ones didn’t.

Staśa broke it down for me:

1. Figure out which flatters you more, silver or gold. Try two different bracelets, one on each arm; if you’re the wouldn’t-be-caught-dead-in-jewelry-even-for-three-seconds type, stick your arms next to a piece of tinfoil and something else equally butch, like gold lamé wrapping paper. If silver is the tone that makes you glow, look for cool colors, which have blue undertones; gold means warm, which have yellow undertones.

2. Figure out which flatters you more, bright colors or muted ones. You can go nuts and buy some fancy fabric color swatch books, or you can be cheap and raid the hardware store for paint chips.


3. Cool and bright, you’re a winter. Cool and muted, summer. Warm and bright, spring. Warm and muted, autumn. Naming your season is less important than remembering the tones and saturations that suit you. Gold versus silver and bright versus muted.

The key is to do this in natural light, so you can see what’s really happening.

If you, like me, are embarking on a mini research obsession about all this, I should warn you that most resources are focused on white women and many contain misleading information about women of color. Yeah, surprise! Jackson’s website features photos and descriptions like “The summer woman has light brown or dark brown hair without red highlights.” I recommend disregarding sweeping statements you may find along the lines of “Latina women look good in this, black women look good in this.” Come on. Latina like Cameron Diaz (spring) or Latina like Salma Hayek (autumn)? Black like Halle Berry (autumn) or black like Alek Wek (winter)? Not everyone from the same racial or ethnic background has the same undertones, and undertones are the key to this whole process. Oh, while I’m dishing out caveats here, the Color Me A Season website associates color seasons with personality traits, which seems more than a little parlor trickish.






You may look great in most, but not all, colors from one season, as well as some colors from another season. Sometimes the color family doesn’t matter as long as the undertones of the fabric work with your skin. As an autumn, supposedly I should not be wearing pink, but as long as I find a medium-saturated pink with neutral enough undertones, it looks quite fetching, if the compliments I receive are genuine.

Once you know which colors look good on you, you can play. I have a few color theories of my own. First, you can wear whatever you want, as long as the clothes nearest your face are in your best colors group. Can’t live without chartreuse though it makes you look pukey? Try it as an accent color — for example, charcoal pants with chartreuse stripes or a chartreuse bag or chartreuse toenail polish. My other theory is that any color can be a neutral depending on how you use it, which dovetails nicely with my first theory — your accessorized color becomes your neutral. So, if you’re in a rut of wearing all black and accessorizing with red, try wearing, say, all yellow and accessorizing with red. That actually sounds a little too McDonald's-y, but you know what I mean? Take that palette and run with it!

Stay beautiful, Chaia