Soft 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. This palette is my absolute favourite and when the colours are put together to blend as an outfit the effect is exquisite. This is definitely the gentlest palette but also the most sophisticated! This palette is one of the most limited on chroma (brightness to softness levels) every colour is soft and every neutral is very soft - it’s easy to feel in a rut, or to ask where your other colours are, but Soft Summer is anything but a bland palette. The more you interrogate this season tone, the more interesting it becomes - like Cool Summer it is darker than most people assume. As a neutral season sitting between Cool Summer and autumn it has far more choice of hues from cool to slightly warmed. Mixing these together can be very interesting.

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 my whole range 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 Soft Summer Colouring

You must have softness in your features. Hair and eyes should be darker than your skin but not highly contrasting with the skin colour - your features blend together well. You skin must have at least a slightly cool undertone.

Skin

You should have an ivory or cool beige skin - often appearing slightly tanned even when your aren’t. The skin should be pearlescent like Cool Summer. Cheeks and lips may be a pinky brown or neutral rose. There is an obvious softness to the skin.

Eyes

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

Hair

Your hair may be pale ash blonde, and all shades up to dark ash brown. Of all of the seasons, you are one that is most likely to want to put in highlights - if you do, make sure they blend to create a soft effect or they will look unnatural.

If you don’t look exactly like this - join the many exceptional Soft Summer people. This is the target Soft Summer, I have seen many variations, all sharing the softness and lean towards coolness.

Here are some examples from my Soft Summer clients:

All needed a foundation that flattered the pink undertone and did not make the skin look warm. If the skin is warmed with foundation it can appear blotchy and lose it’s silvered beauty (I used bareMinerals original foundation medium 10 and medium beige 11)

You can immediately 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 an antique pearly white - better still a gentler neutral matched to their skin tone. This is a bit harder to predict - it may be pinker for the first client (my elegant pink drape) or cooler for the third client (my seashell drape). As soon as too much warmth or coolness goes into the neutral it will be unflattering.

2) The skin tone will not just impact upon the neutral colour, but the whole of this palette. The warmer skin tone clients are pushing towards Soft Autumn and can easily borrow some of the cooler colours from that palette. The softness level is very similar - client three is the softest and can easily borrow from Soft Autumn if necessary. Going cooler is tricky - the colours in Cool Summer are brighter and you will need to be at the brightest point of Soft Summer to be able to borrow any - client two could look at Cool Summer and choose a few additions, but client one is far too soft to try Cool Summer.

3) The eyes are all significantly different colours - I would look for very different colours within the palette to enhance the eye colour and make the eyes sparkle - sage greens, soft blues and sea greens.

4) The iris is much deeper in the first and third clients - they will look great with the darkest neutrals, whilst the other clients will have slightly lighter greys, greens and navy. I matched the outer ring of the iris to a neutral for each client.

To see more examples of Soft Summer People click on this link to my pinterest page

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/mycolourstlyistuk/soft-summer/softsummer-people/

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

The skin really drives the colour analysis, followed by the eyes and then the contrast levels - obviously hair is important - there is often a lot of it as a percentage of the facial features - but it is not the driver, especially if it is dyed.

Let’s look at each client in turn and see how their unique features will influence the way they use the Soft Summer palette:

Client one - has the typical cool mid brown ash colour hair with natural highlights and the coolest skin undertone. She has beautiful grey green eyes and a typical soft appearance overall. Her features blend together closely and she will need to mirror this in the way she builds outfits - pops of contrasting colours are going to be tricky for this woman and might dominate forcing people to focus on the highlight colour rather than the woman. Greens are going to be great to enhance her eyes, and pink undertone neutrals will flatter the skin. She will be able to use the darkest colours in the palette due to the ring around her iris and the darker tones in her hair. Deep Olive would be a fantastic neutral for her.

Client two - had blonde highlights when I did her colour analysis - she has now gone natural and has hair more similar to client one. The overall effect has become more blended and her skin and eyes are more radiant with the darker hair. Soft Summer people are one of the groups most likely to highlight their hair. The desire to increase brightness of the overall look and be less muted can be strong. I have even seen some clients who have platinum blonde hair which pushes them to Bright Winter - they get to wear bright clothes and have more visual presence, but their eyes and skin are no longer as radiant. They look great from a distance, but close up they look older. A Soft Summer in her colours, may not have as much visual loudness, but they look stunning when this sophisticated palette matches their features. Back to client two - she has the brightest skin of the four, but when I draped her she definitely was a Soft Summer rather than Cool Summer. She wears less of the very soft colours from the neutrals and can occasionally borrow some of the softer Cool Summer colours to supplement her palette. Blue s the obvious focus of her wardrobe - enhancing her eyes.

Client three - the most neutral of the skin tones can wear the whole palette both warm and cool. Her darker eyes give her depth and she looks amazing in fig, navy, and deep petrol. She has grey hair which totally works for her - one of the biggest benefits for all summer seasons is that they go grey beautifully. She has a lot of blue and grey in her wardrobe which complement her eyes and hair colour beautifully.

Client four has the warmest complexion and darkest hair colour. She is able to borrow a few shades from Dark Winter - cassis and dark kingfisher would be stunning for special occasions or as part of an outfit - preferably not right next to her face. Her eyes changed as we put turquoise or green drapes on her and the turquoise greens were really special.

Think about your colouring and celebrate your uniqueness. Nature lways creates beautiful colour combinations to make us all exceptional.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this and will stay for the whole series. The next Soft Summer blog will interrogate your most important colour dimension - CHROMA - your softness.

Anni x