Here are 4 benefits of color analysis to help you get started on your personal style journey.
When we talk about personal style, have you ever wondered where to even start? There’s so much information out there from style types to color to clothing and all these different things that kind of go together, but it can be really overwhelming to figure out which thing is the most important and where you should focus your energy.
Today let’s talk about why color is the best place to start, four reasons why I think that, and how you can put this into practice and experiment with color as the bases for your personal style.
Color and color analysis is the foundational piece that you need to grab style by the horns and take it, own it, and make it yours. When I talk about color, I’m talking about color analysis specifically, which is the set of colors that work best for you based on your skin tone, your eyes, your hair, etc.
For me, this became the foundational piece. When I was looking back several years ago, I wanted to create a capsule wardrobe based on this concept that no one had ever talked about.
I was wearing only dresses and everything I looked at said that my wardrobe had to be separates for variety. That you couldn’t create a capsule wardrobe out of dresses because it was just too complicated or wouldn’t give you enough variety. You would need too many pieces. All these different reasons why I couldn’t do this thing.
I realized that nobody was going to tell me how to do it. I had to figure it out on my own.
When I took this process on, the first thing I looked at was where do I start. I already knew about color analysis. I had already discovered my color season. I knew my best colors. I had this information already, but distilling it down and creating a cohesive color palette was the first step for me.
The first step in my process was a continuation of work that I had already done in discerning what colors looked best on me and how to make them cohesively work together to create a wardrobe that worked for me and really made me look my best.
Color analysis became the foundation of my business. And it’s still one of the driving forces of my business. It’s the one thing I get asked about the most. It’s my most popular content and I love to talk about it.
People ask me all kinds of questions about color, and I’m going to start answering some of those on the podcast because I think everybody has the same questions.
The reason I want to talk about color today is that it’s the part where you can start getting a grip on your wardrobe that doesn’t cost you as much as other areas. It’s not as complicated and it has so many different facets that make it this number one place to start.
Let’s jump right into these four things about color that make it the place to start to gain confidence in your wardrobe, start to feel good, and look put together in your clothes without really digging too deep into all these other areas of style that can be really confusing and overwhelming.
Table of Contents
Benefits of Color Analysis #1: Color is Created
Number one, your color is created. Your color was given to you by God in everything that He made up about you. Your color is a factor of genetics. Of course, from your parents obviously, but it’s cohesive to yourself. I want you to think about color in relation to an analogy like the things you see in nature.
If you walk outside, it’s not a jarring landscape. Everything works together, from a green springtime scene with bright green grass and colorful flowers to the snowy landscape of wintertime with all of its white and it’s dark. You can even take this to places like desert landscapes. All of those warm, rich tones work together.
God doesn’t make mistakes, and that’s one of the great things about your personal color, is that he designed it to be cohesive and to work together. The color of your eyes and the color of your hair are harmonious with each other. You can pull those harmonies out of your own unique genetic makeup to figure out the colors that work best for you.
They were created by God and are made beautiful in that way, they’re going to work together and it’s not going to be jarring and out of place with how you naturally look and how you appear to other people.
Benefits of Color Analysis #2: Color Doesn’t Change
The second thing about color, which is so amazingly powerful, is that it doesn’t change. Because of the fact that it’s based on these genetic factors, these things that were you created with, it’s not going to experience massive change.
Whereas something like your style type or the clothing that you like to wear is going to undergo so many iterations as you change and grow and mature over the span of your lifetime.
A great example of this is the shoes that you wear. When I was in my twenties, I wore heels all the time. Then I got in a car wreck when I was 30 and my doctor told me to stop that because my back couldn’t take it anymore. Now I wear only flats. This is just one tiny example of how our style changes frequently as we change.
However, your color doesn’t change. I know I’m going to get questions about gray hair when I say this, but those changes are going to be really minor and are not going to affect things within your overall big four season.
You’re not going to be in autumn for your entire life and then all of a sudden wake-up and be a spring. It might slide you into a different sub-season, but your overall color season, your big four season is not going to change.
Once you nail down these colors and figure out the ones that really work for you, you’re only going to make minor tweaks. A lot of those tweaks are going to be personality-based and preference-based, rather than actually being an actual technical basis for which colors work for you.
Once you figure this out, you can just run with it for the rest of your life. You don’t have to reinvent yourself or reinvent the wheel, you can just rest in the fact that these are your colors, they work for you, and you don’t have to go over this process again.
Benefits of Color Analysis #3: Color is Transformative
The third thing that makes colors so powerful as a starting point is that it’s so transformative. I’m not even lying when I tell you that I have had clients that have literally upgraded their wardrobe by 90%, probably just with this one piece of the puzzle, because it doesn’t just affect the fact that you can now wear clothes that make you feel confident.
It also affects how you shop because you’re no longer making decisions based on things that aren’t tangible, that aren’t proven. You’re making choices based on colors that you have that you know work for you. You’ve gone through this process and you know they work for you.
It’s also really, really powerful on the backside too because you can use this process to declutter your closet by getting rid of all the things that aren’t in your color season and aren’t flattering to you. It gives you a huge boost, and it goes back to that part about how these things are naturally who we are. It’s inherent in how we were created. They’re genetically engineered and it doesn’t change.
This piece of information can transform your wardrobe so much. I’ve had clients come to me and tell me, oh my goodness, I found out all these colors. I went into my closet and I got rid of clothes I’ve been holding on to for a decade that I felt guilty about.
I wanted to get rid of them and I just couldn’t. Once I realized that they weren’t even great colors for me, I just sent them out the door and it was such a relief. I’d spend a lifetime of agony thinking about this thing over and over again that I just got rid of.
It was a huge weight lifted and color has that power. There’s all kinds of color psychology too here that goes into this, but it’s really, really transformative. More so than any other style thing that I teach or I talk about color is the one that makes the biggest difference.
Benefits of Color Analysis #4: Color Helps you Streamline your Closet
The fourth thing here is that color helps you streamline your closet. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked into your closet and had a large amount of clothing. Some of you may have and some of you may have not, but you may have noticed that it was kind of all over the place.
You might have had a pale green over here and a bright pink over there. You had some navy and some black and some beige, and you just have all these different colors.
Then you have an issue where you might have this one shirt, let’s say it’s a pink shirt. This pink shirt only works with one other thing in your wardrobe. It’s not doing its job, it’s an outlier. It doesn’t really serve the overall purpose of your wardrobe for helping you to have a really cohesive set of clothing.
By knowing your color season and taking it that one step further and creating a color palette where you narrow down all the colors that are available to you into a subset of 4, 8, 12, whatever really works for you, colors that you’re focusing on and you’re bringing into your closet, you’ll notice how the landscape of your closet changes.
It becomes so much more cohesive. That one pink shirt…now it either matches five other things or it goes out the door. It doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb.
Realistically, when you look at your closet, you should get the same feeling that you get when you look at nature. It should have that same cohesive look to it that you find in any naturally occurring landscape because it’s designed to accentuate the landscape of you.
It’s supposed to make you look good. It’s not supposed to make anybody else look good.
Sometimes we can get caught up because other people have opinions about what they think we should wear and the colors they like. But you’ve got to let that stuff go and you have to wear the colors that are best for you.
I could go on and on, I could talk about color all day long because, like I said, it is the one thing that I put the nail on the wall and built my business on.
I did that because it’s the one thing that I believe really changes how you approach your wardrobe, how you feel in your clothes, your confidence, and your body image. All of those things can really be solved at least 50% by just figuring out this one puzzle piece.
Just figure out the colors that look best on you, that make you feel good, and that bring out the natural beauty that you were created with in your eyes, the tones of your hair, and the pink colors of your skin.
Final Thoughts on the Benefits of Color Analysis
Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go to your closet and find one color that you know looks great. When it comes to color analysis, I will stand by this until the day I die, I firmly believe that we are all gravitating towards our natural season because we have a lifetime of positive feedback telling us that people compliment us when we wear these colors.
Go to your closet and pick one color that you know looks great. Then I want you to commit to wearing it one time this week, just one time.
Make sure it’s a day when you’re going out in public, so other people are going to see you. I want you to see if you get any extra compliments.
See if you feel better and more confident, and if it changes your outlook on the day just by taking this one simple step toward your closet. Then take that feeling and run with it because that is truly the power of color analysis.
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These 4 benefits of color analysis will do more than just help you look better, it will change the way you feel about yourself too.
Stacey is the owner and creator behind Radiantly Dressed. She is a certified image consultant and AICI member focusing on creating simplicity in wardrobes via color and style.
