Summary: Your personal color palette comes from two sources, and a draping session only reads one of them. This article covers three techniques you can run this week for next to nothing, plus where to go when you want to go deeper.
Color Analysis Got Compressed Into One Procedure
Fabric under your chin. A verdict. A season.
Three hundred dollars for a stranger’s opinion about you.
Color is the first thing anyone registers about you from across a room, before anything you say. When it’s right, they get you.
How Do You Find Your Personal Color Palette Without Draping?
Three techniques, and you can try all of them before you ever book an appointment.
Nail polish
Use the polish you already have. Buy a three dollar bottle and try something different. Or try something different at your next manicure.
David Zyla says you can find all your skin tones in your hand. That also makes a good shopping trick: hold your hand up next to a garment and see whether the color works.
Then notice how the polish looks against your skin over the following week.
I’ve tried colors that were too brown for my skin tone repeatedly, and it really shows up. Same with colors that are too pale. That’s what led me to conclude, positively, that brights are the best colors for me.
The colors you fixated on as a child
This one costs zero money, as long as you can remember.
My very first movie was at the drive-in, and I was a preschooler. Disney’s Peter Pan. I was fascinated, and I’m sure a lot of it was the color palette: light and bright, similar to Dr. Seuss books. When I was in kindergarten and first grade, if there wasn’t a Dr. Seuss book for me to check out from the library, I just didn’t want a book.
The Disney live action pictures from that same era had an earthier palette. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and things like that. I didn’t resonate with those at all. The hero loved them when he was a kid.
That’s a read on what you responded to before anyone came along and conditioned your taste.
Ten inspirational images
Choose ten. That’s what I ask people to send me when we work together.
These are things that resonate with your favorite vision of beauty. Landscape, art, interiors, nature. Deliberately avoid clothing, because it muddies the waters and gets confusing.
The colors in these images usually reflect your personality. You might love some of them for reasons other than color, so pay closest attention to the ones you love because of the colors. Each image can inspire one or more outfits for you.
Why Do Two Analysts Give You Two Different Seasons?
Undertone is real. Harmonies between colors are a real thing. Draping is testing something that exists.
And a lot of women get draped more than once, by different analysts, and come away with a different verdict each time. Different experts look at things slightly differently, or have slightly different preferences.
I was draped as an autumn at a Color Me Beautiful cosmetics counter in the 80s. I had brown hair and brown eyes, and I think that led them to assume autumn, at least back then. That is not my palette. It was what the person thought.
The Two Sources Behind a Personal Color Palette
Your inherent colors are pulled from your hair, skin, and eyes. Everybody in the color industry agrees this is one of the places you get colors from for a person.
Your personality colors are what show up in your images. That source is disputed.
Draping reads the colors you were born with and stops before it reaches the colors you love.
That’s why women sometimes walk out with a palette that probably looks good on them and they don’t like it. The way I work, that outcome is impossible.
What People Actually Compliment
A couple weeks ago on Sunday I was at church wearing grass green linen pants I got for twelve dollars at Marshalls. They are amazing. I got several compliments.
Looking back on it, I think people just like that I’m wearing color. A lot of the time, people like color and they don’t wear it. Neutrals maybe feel sophisticated. Color feels happy.
The next week at church I wore a very simple outfit. Lemon yellow jean jacket, cornflower blue jeans, earrings in the same color. At least three compliments between the parking lot and the pew.
Why Color Feels Risky
Color feels risky when it’s loud, and it also feels risky when the color isn’t right for you. I wonder whether it feels riskier now that color analysis has become popular, because people are afraid of getting it wrong.
When I was a teenager I borrowed a sweater from my friend Kerry. Tomato red, and it looked good on me. I never would have chosen that color on my own. I found out by borrowing hers.
The reverse happens too. You borrow something from a friend, you discover it doesn’t look good on you, and maybe that’s enough to send you into black for the rest of your life.
Neutral reads as silent, depending on how the neutral interacts with your personal inherent coloring.
Three Ways to Build Your Personal Color Palette
People think getting your colors done is a one time life event where a stranger drapes fabric on you and hands you a season. Here are three suggestions instead.
No budget
Use the three techniques in this article. Mine your memories for the palettes you liked as a kid. Mine your pictures for the palettes you see and like there. Hone in especially on where those two overlap, then test it with nail polish.
Under one hundred dollars
The Seasonal Energy Color Palette. I have twenty pre-built digital palettes. You identify your seasonal energy and tell me what it is, and I select the palette from the four or five inside that season that best supports your coloring. [LINK: Seasonal Energy Color Palette product page]
Everybody who has bought one has come back feeling very supported and really happy with it.
You also get input. You get to say who you are and who you want to show up as, which is input you don’t get with color draping.
Over one hundred dollars
Fully custom: Signature Color Palette. We take your hues from your hair, your skin, and your eyes and harmonize them with the personality colors from your aesthetic images. By we, I mean I do that part.
You get a booklet that’s roughly seventy pages, teaching you your contrast level, your personal neutrals, your power colors, your inherent colors, and how to use all of it. A fabric palette is available separately and it’s optional. A lot of the people I work with just use theirs on their phone.
Personal Color Palette Next Steps
Draping hands you a conclusion about yourself. My process starts with you. I’m reflecting back what’s already there, and you end up learning to trust your judgment instead of standing uncertain at the store. A lot of people find they don’t even need to carry their palette with them when they shop, because they remember what the images looked like.
There’s a gap between knowing you have something to contribute and being recognized for it. Color starts the process of closing that gap.
Building your personal color palette from your own coloring and the images you love is the most reliable way to wear color without second-guessing it.
Being read accurately from across a room means the conversation starts closer to where you actually are, and who you actually are. So what would you start, if you weren’t spending any energy on how you’re landing?
Here’s something simple you can do this week to integrate these principles into your wardrobe. Next time you change your nail polish, pay attention to what it looks like on your hand. Does it feel normal to you? Does it look like how you want to be seen? If it looks good in the bottle and it doesn’t look good on your hand, you learned something important about your coloring. For me, that’s anything too pale or anything too brown.
Ready to Talk It Through?
You can read about inherent color and personality color and still stand in your closet unsure which of your own clothes actually qualify. A conversation where we look together at what you already know about yourself tends to close that distance quickly. Book a free thirty minute Style System Synthesis call and we’ll find what’s missing.