My Personal Color Palette Journey
Allow me to let you in on a bit of the history of my personal color palette journey.
When I worked at JCPenney in the late 1980s, everyone I knew was reading Color Me Beautiful (Amazon affiliate) and trying to find their perfect season.
Like alot of people, I didn’t fit neatly into any category, so I went to the cosmetics counter to get professionally draped.
The analyst declared me an Autumn “because of the muted.” I had no idea what that meant, but I dutifully wore those colors for years, feeling increasingly invisible.
Fast forward to November 2022. I was in my advanced color training with one of the world’s top image masters, Carla Mathis, when something unexpected happened.
Carla picked up my luggage ā decorated with a vibrant Leonid Afremov painting ā and announced to the group, “This is her palette.” I was already wearing those bright colors ā red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, with white and black accents. Carla was simply confirming what I instinctively knew: in this season of life, these vibrant colors supported me in showing up as myself.
Today, I’m feeling called to revisit my palette again. Since losing my husband, somehow I feel more seen as myself than ever before.
Our Color Needs Evolve as We Do
As your first step in exploring these ideas, I invite you to download my free guide: “Discover Your Style DNA: A Guide to Seasonal Energy & Personality Colors.” In this article, Iām sharing why your personal color palette should grow with you, and how to recognize when it’s time for a change.
Most seasonal color analysts teach that your personal color palette is fixed for life. The idea is that once you’ve found your season, those colors will always be your best choices. But here’s the thing – when we get dressed in the morning, we’re not just wearing a color drape. We’re putting together complete outfits for real life. And that life is constantly changing. We’re growing, and what we need from our colors changes too.
Reasons Your Personal Color Palette Changes
Physical Changes:
- Natural or chosen hair color changes dramatically affect how colors work with your complexion
- Skintone and contrast levels shift with age
- Idk, maybe even changes in facial features, like developing more angular or softer lines, could have an impact
Life Phase Changes:
- In our late twenties through forties, we often explore new interests and ways of expressing ourselves, aligned with developing our third function in our Myers-Briggs cognitive function stack or what Personality Hacker calls our car model. (If you want to discover your cognitive functions, you can book your personality insights experience with me.)
- After about fifty, many of us begin developing our inferior or fourth function, which can lead to dramatic shifts in how we want to present ourselves
- Major life transitions, like career changes, becoming a parent, or losing a loved one, can shift how we need our colors to support us
Personal Growth:
- As we develop stronger self-awareness, we may need our personal color palette to express different aspects of our personality
- Our color needs might shift as we move from wanting to blend in to wanting to stand out, or vice versa
- Different professional contexts may require different approaches to using our colors
Even if your basic palette remains similar, how you use those colors should evolve.
A color analysis that simply hands you a set of swatches misses some things that are important:
- Which colors work best together in outfits
- How to create different effects with your colors for different contexts
- Which proportions of each color suit your current needs
- How to integrate new colors that resonate with your evolving identity
(Some color analysts do recognize that changes happen, but sometimes it sounds like these changes follow a predictable pattern – moving from one season to another in a set sequence.)
These expectations that things always work a certain way just serve to alienate those among us whose experience is different.
Five Signs It’s Time to Reassess
Is it time for you to reassess your personal color palette? Here are five signs:
- Your hair color has changed
- You feel invisible in your current colors
- You’ve been through a major life transition
- There is a disconnect between your inner identity and outer expression
- You feel intuitively pulled toward different colors
Here’s something simple you can do this week: Choose one outfit in your current wardrobe that makes you feel most visible and authentically you. What colors are in that outfit? How do they differ from the colors you’ve been told to wear? Journal about how these colors make you feel.
Want me to build a completely custom digital palette for you? Get started on your signature style journey.