Cool 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 Cool Summer clients “ Where’s my red?” This palette is one of the most limited on hues, it is really focussed on blues, blue-greens and pinks plus neutral greys - it’s easy to feel in a rut, or to ask where your other colours are, but Cool Summer can be varied. The more you interrogate this season tone, the more interesting it becomes - it is darker than most people assume and less soft than many people expect.

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 Cool Summer Colouring

You must have absolutely no warmth in your skin to be a Cool Summer. This is a pure seasonal tone and every colour in the palette will be totally cool.

You should have an ivory, pink-beige or cool beige skin, often with cool pink cheeks - you may blush easily. There is a softness to the skin which can appear translucent and delicate and requires some softness in colours.

Your eyes are likely to be blue, grey-blue, grey or soft blue-green all supporting the gentle softness of the skin.

You have some softness in your features that requires grey to be added to your colours (compare to the high contrast of Cool Winter with dark hair and icy skin).

You have no very dark or light features, so a medium contrast between skin eyes and hair.

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

This is the target Cool Summer, but I have seen darker and lighter hair, even occasionally warmer golden hair. Eyes are sometimes brighter and occasionally green. Skin colour is the one fixed aspect - always totally cool. Some of these clients came in the summer with slight tans - it can enhance the warmth in the skin, but the pink undertone is still present. Here are some real examples from my Cool Summer clients -

All looked fantastic with purely cool foundation - I used bareMinerals original foundation fairly medium and medium 10. 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 tissue white but would vary in their best “skin colour” neutral matching their skin ton. It is very hard to find a cream or beige to suit a Cool Summer client - as soon as a little warmth goes into a cream or white sand, the colour can be unflattering, often I find it is better to go for a greyed pink.

2. The skin tone appears brighter on the fourth client - she can push the boundaries of brightness a little towards winter, but only a little.

3. The blues of the eyes are all slightly different - I would look for the perfect blue in the Cool Summer palette for each client to enhance the eye colour and make the eyes sparkle. The fourth 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 and greyer in the fourth client - she will look great with dark charcoal as her darkest neutral and slate blue as her best navy. She will be able to wear darker colours than the other clients. The first client will look better in a brighter mid blue rather than dark navy or dark charcoal.

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 Cool Summer.

Client one has the typical cool mid brown ash colour with natural lighter highlights. She will be able to wear every colour in the Cool Summer palette and look stunning.

Client two has obvious gold and red tones in her hair which contrast with her pink undertones in the skin. As she had natural colour contrast in her features we were able to make stronger colour contrasts with her colours - she looked amazing with rich turquoise and peacock greens.

Client three has lighter cool ash blonde hair which she highlighted - she has now reverted to mid ash brown and her skin looks so much more vibrant. She is still on the lighter side of the colour palette and a little overwhelmed by the deepest neutrals in the palette.

Client four was the hardest to find colours for with many fighting with her golden hair, but the pink undertone and cheeks very present. We found that as her skin is a little brighter than a typical cool summer we could use some of the richer shades from Cool Winter to contrast with her hair whilst still blending with her skin tone. She did not use the lightest colours in the palette.

The whole purpose of this introduction was to show you how varied each season can be - that being told you are a Cool Summer and given a colour palette does not mean that every colour in that palette will be your best. Think about your colouring and celebrate your uniqueness. Nature always creates beautiful colour combinations to make us all exceptional.

The next blog will interrogate your most important colour dimension - HUE - where we will look at the colours on 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