My First Experience With Color Analysis

When I had my colors done, I was around 19 or 20 years old at the time. It was to be a birthday present to myself. The first book I ever read on color analysis was “Color Me Beautiful” by Carole Jackson. 


It was given to me by a friend since she knew about my interest in fashion and color analysis. It was quite informative, but I noticed that there were not enough models that looked like me, someone of African decent. I decided that having my colors done professionally would help me determine for certainty what my colors were. This is what led me to set up an appointment with a cosmetics company that did Seasonal Color Analysis.

I wore a light lavender cotton scarf that covered my head. When I arrived at the store, the consultant introduced herself and told me where to sit. I asked her if I needed to take off the scarf and she said I could keep it on and that it did not matter. This was confusing to me, because I know that colors can clash throwing off the analysis. This did not seem to concern her.

She did the draping, starting with gold and silver fabric to determine if I had a warm or cool skin tone. She thought that I was cool, because as far as she could tell, the silver fabric looked better. The lavender scarf was throwing the analysis off, but I was too shy at the time to tell her that maybe the scarf was interfering somehow, because I do not look good in silver. I decided to trust her expertise, which was quite foolish of me. She was not following the proper procedure.

We went through all the colors, and at the end of the session, I was classified as a Winter. This was wrong to me, because I knew that I looked better in warmer colors. I never get complements with cool colors. If you are a person with melinated skin of any degree, you are automatically classified a Winter. In most cases most of us are more warm than cool.

This happened to me twice, even when I was not wearing a headscarf. I believe this is why I started becoming sceptical of having a professional analysis done. When someone rushes through an analysis assuming that you are a particular season, are they serious about helping you? This is when I started doing my own research.

I am passionate about color and I would like to be a certified color analyst soon. I know that things have improved over the years, but there could still be more representation of other skin tones out there in the world from the lightest to the darkest. When I say lightest to darkest I do not mean dark skinned Caucasians and light skinned blacks which make no sense to me. I mean the entire range of skin tones seen worldwide from the darkest to the lightest in all nationalities.