Why do we tend toward wearing specific color combinations?
Have you ever noticed that you tend to revert to certain color combinations? It may not be laziness or habit! It could be an expression of your personality. In Episode 25 of the Signature Style Systems podcast, I’m talking about color psychology, specifically color harmony psychology. I teach you how wearing various colors in specific combinations can create specific effects and, more importantly, how to use color harmony to express who you truly are.
Discover your Style DNA!
And if you are ready to dive in to discovering your Style DNA, you can now get started with a Personality Profile & Palette revealing your Myers Briggs type and a supporting color
Wearing specific color combinations reveals personality
Whenever I do a workshop, like my Business Casual & Your Style DNA or my upcoming Decoding Your Myers-Briggs Type, I start with an icebreaker including the question, “If you were a color, what color would you be?” Personally, I always say I would be hot pink and orange together. Wearing this specific color combination reveals my personality. I know that would be nothing alot of you would ever wear, but when I wear hot pink and orange together, people respond to me very positively and interact with me in the way I like to be interacted with.
Art Theory and color vocabulary
If you look on any art theory website, you will find more color harmonies than the six I’m gonna mention. But these will give you an idea. Generally speaking, as a color scheme gets more complex, it takes greater energy and complexity to wear.
The other thing I want to mention is that you will notice some commonly worn color combinations contain both warm and cool colors; this is because, contrary to popular belief, most people’s coloring has both warm and cool colors in it. For example, my skin is a very pale yellow orange (warm) and my lips are almost mauve (cool).
Just a quick vocab lesson:
Hue is the actual color, the spot on the color wheel
Value is how light or dark it is.
Saturation is how bright or muted it is.
Six types of color combinations
- Neutral, you can have an all warm version, like shades of brown and cream, or an all cool version, like shades of gray or black and white, or you can have a version with both warm and cool, such as black and khaki, or charcoal and cream. The psychological effect of the all warm or all cool versions are mostly stable, possibly elegant, and the psychological effect of the mixed cool and warm can be very sophisticated.
- Monochromatic color harmony is the same hue in various values. The earlier example of brown and cream would be monochromatic as well as neutral. The psychological effect of a monochromatic outfit is calm and classic. You can make it a little more unexpected by varying the saturation or brightness as well as the value.
- Complementary colors create A more intense or dramatic affect. Complementary color schemes are colors that are directly across from each other on the color wheel, for example, red and green, orange and blue, or yellow and violet.
- This one’s my favorite: analogous colors. To create an analogous color scheme take two or three colors that are adjacent on the color wheel and use them in combination. So my hot pink and orange would be analogous, I also love to wear green and blue together. The effect of analogous is calm and friendly!
- Three colors equidistant on the color wheel is called triadic. The primaries compose a Triadic, Which Word Apple kept trying to change into a triangle when I was outlining this. The secondaries are another triadic combination. The psychological effect of the triad is playful, active, and energetic. If it’s more colorful than your inherent coloring, it’s going to take extra energy to wear.
- The final type of color harmony I wanted to mention is evocative. This is any time you’re combining colors in a way that evokes a specific application or connection. Like Easter egg colors. Or Seahawks colors. Or Halloween colors.
Creating outfits with specific color combinations
Clearly the evocative color harmonies are ones you will need to be careful with. So that I think would be a fun homework assignment, try to make an outfit in an evocative color scheme that is one you would actually feel comfortable wearing.
Have fun playing dressup!