Light Summer Colour Guide - Part 1 Your Features are Unique

You are unique, and you may not fit into one colour palette perfectly. Twelve or even sixteen colour palettes will never be enough for everyone to find their perfect palette - but they are a good starting point. There are many reasons you may be wanting to challenge your colour palette - I often get asked by Light Summer clients in cold weather “ Where are my dark colours - navy, dark charcoal and black?”. This palette is one of the most limited on values (depth), it is really focussed on light to medium colours with absolutely no dark colours at all. It’s easy to feel in a rut, or to ask where your other colours are, but Light Summer can be varied. The more you interrogate this season tone, the more interesting it becomes - it is darker than most people assume as it is described as light but has many light and medium depth in the palette. It has a really wide choice of hues from slightly warmed to purely cool. It is the brightest of all the summer seasons with clear colours that have a hint of water about them - like a rainbow which emerges through rain.

I am putting together this full guide to help you push your use of your colour palette, and you can pick and mix some additional colours from mine if you need them. Hopefully I am going to show you how to put this season together perfectly for you - your lifestyle, your personality, your body shape, your variety of occasions and your colouring.

Let’s start with a typical Light Summer Colouring

You must have absolutely no darkness in your features and a cool to cool neutral skin tone as a Light Summer. Being a neutral season leaning towards cool, you may have some warmth in your features but your skin tone determines your season, and this must have some coolness and no obvious warmth.

You should have an ivory, pink-beige or cool beige skin - you may burn easily in the sun. Generally skin is lighter and fresher looking than the other summer seasons. There is still often a little softness to the skin which can appear delicate and requires slightly softer colours than Light Spring.

Your eyes are likely to be blue, grey-blue, grey or green and generally lighter and brighter than the other summer seasons. There may be a crackled pattern to the iris and often there is no dark line around the iris.

You have a little softness in your features that requires white to be added to your colours to water them down a little in comparison to Spring or Winter colours.

You have no dark features, so a low to medium value contrast between skin, eyes and hair and at most a medium colour contrast. This will dictate how you will mix your colours together - avoiding combinations that will overpower your natural contrast levels.

If you don’t look exactly like this - join the many exceptional Light Summer people.

This is the target Light Summer, but I have seen darker and warmer hair, brighter and softer eyes. Skin colour is the one fixed aspect - always some coolness, but sometimes more pink undertones and sometimes only just a cool neutral. Here are some real examples from my Light Summer clients -

Foundation needs to be matched to the lightness and coolness of the skin. For Client one and four with the light porcelain skin I used Fair 01 bareMinerals original foundation and fairly medium for clients two and four. You can see differences between these clients that would affect their colour palette:

1. It is very important to find your perfect white and your perfect neutral to harmonise with your skin tone - these clients would share a lace white but would vary in their best “skin colour” neutral matching their skin tone. Client four has the least amount of pink undertone and may find sun-bleached taupe and clotted cream work, whilst the other clients will find these too warm. It is very hard to find a cream or beige to suit a summer client - as soon as a little warmth goes into a cream or white sand, the colour can be unflattering, biscuit works well on most light summer clients - it’s like a light frothy coffee.

2. The skin tone appears lightest on clients one and four - they will choose some of the lightest colours in the palette where more white has been added to the colours. The other clients will be able to push the overall colour effect to a medium depth.

3. The blues of the eyes are all slightly different - I would look for the perfect blue (and there are many!) in the Light Summer palette for each client to enhance the eye colour and make the eyes sparkle. The second client has a hint of green which will be enhanced by some of the ocean green-blues.

4. The rim around the iris is better defined in the first and final client - but still only a medium charcoal or navy. As this is the darkest feature on all of the clients, they will be overwhelmed if they wear darker colours near their face. Their heads will appear disconnected from their bodies if they wear very dark clothing near to their upper body. This will make them appear shorter and wider as the body will not be viewed from top to toe - more the dominant block of darkness from neck down.

Now I’m going to add the hair clips of the clients above and you will see why colour stylists over the hair when they are doing the drape tests:

The coolness of the skin is more important than the colour of the hair. All of these clients have very different hair colouring which will impact on how they use the palette, but does not stop them from being a Light Summer.

Client one has very intense blue eyes, porcelain skin and strawberry blonde hair. She will be able to wear every colour in the Light Summer palette and look stunning.

Client two has white hair that she colours with a little blonde - primrose was the perfect way to highlight the hair colour. Her eyes suited teals as well as blues and almost changed as we moved the drapes. Deep coral was the show stopper - absolutely fantastic reflecting her warm personality and bringing her face alive.

Client three has light blonde hair with warm natural highlights - again making primrose work well. Her deep blue eyes looked amazing in the bright navy, and the pink undertone in the skin worked with the many pinks in the palette whilst struggling with the few coral and salmon colours.

Client four had the softest features typical of summers and grey was very evident in the eyes and hair so was the most natural choice from the neutrals. The few brighter colours in the palette were overwhelming, as were the warmest colours in the palette. The main focus was on the pinks, mauves, blues and blue-greens of which there are many.

This post is just to highlight what a huge variety of features are present within this season tone. Think about your colouring and celebrate your uniqueness. Nature always creates beautiful colour combinations to make us all exceptional. Check out your palette and start to think about how you can make it fit your features.

The next blog will interrogate your most important colour dimension - VALUE - where we will look at the depth of colours in your palette and how to mix them to reflect your personal style and colouring

Hope you have enjoyed reading this and will stay for the series

Anni x