Color: Friend or Foe? Your Guide to Choosing the Colors that Make You Look Your Best

Best Friend or Worst Enemy?
When it comes to beauty, color can be your best friend or your worst enemy! The fact of the matter is that certain hues, as well as certain shades--and the two are different--look best on each of us, whether or not we're aware of it.

Every Woman is Unique!
Each of us is born with our own unique natural coloring. This one-of-a-kind combination of skin tone, eye, and hair color automatically places us into a certain specific category when it comes to choosing the most flattering colors for our clothing, accessories, and makeup. To look the most natural, our ultimate goal should be to choose the color families, as well as the specific colors--which in part means the particular shades (or the darkness or lightness of color)--that look best on us.

Are You "Warm" or "Cool"?
Most of us have, at one time or another, been introduced to the concept of "warm" and "cool" colors, and most of us know that we actually look better in one or the other color category--though not all of us know which one! There's a simple trick for finding out which category flatters your natural coloring best--and it isn't spending tons of money on makeup and clothing that you wear only once and then toss aside because there's just something about them that you can't stand, for some unexplained reason.

Find Your Color Family!
This method is as simple as finding two swatches of fabric--or perhaps towels, pillowcases, or articles of clothing--one of which is hot pink and the other hot orange. Hold each of these pieces of solid-colored material, in turn, under your chin, with the two sides brought up around each side of the head--no foundation, please!--until the face is completely surrounded by this colored "background." Then, look at yourself in the mirror, examining the effect of these two colored fabrics on your natural coloring. Does your skin tone look pasty or washed out with one color, but rich and glowing with the other? This is a safe indicator that the color which flatters your skin tone belongs to your natural "color family" and the one that doesn't doesn't.

Pink Means "Cool," Orange Means "Warm"
As you might well have guessed, if the pink fabric flatters your skin tone, your natural coloring belongs to the "cool" category, and if the orange is more attractive beside your face, your skin tone is in the "warm" category. This can be incredibly helpful as an indicator of the color families you should browse when purchasing clothing, makeup, and even nail enamel.

Color Cues
If your skin tone is "cool," you'll want to look at pinks, blues, lavendars, mauves, purples, cranberries, and "winey" reds. If it's "warm," you'll need to lean more toward oranges, greens, yellows, browns, and "flamey" reds. Of course, there will be variations! For example, in the blue/green category, "cool" skin tones will look best in turquoise or teal, whereas, "warms" will look more becoming in chartreuse or lime.

How Intense Is Your Color?
To look your very best, you will also need to pay attention to color intensity. Within your proper color category, you'll need to choose light, medium or darker shades, based on which color intensity is most flattering to your natural coloring. (Color intensity is another area of makeup expertise all its own, but using your handy dandy mirror should give you a fairly clear idea of how light or dark you can go before you begin to look "artificial."

Faded or Flattered?
Is that lipstick shade so pale against your own natural coloring that your lips appear to fade into the background or so deep that your lips become your only noticeable feature? If either of these is the case, your natural instincts should alert you that this is not the shade for you!)

Experiment!
So experiment! This is the only surefire way to best combine color family and color intensity into the most flattering look for you! (And don't forget to try the neutral shades--those that fit neither the warm nor the cool category--such as black, white, grey, and tan.)

My Color, My Friend!
Adding the above techniques to your regular beauty regimen will help you to make color your friend instead of your foe, giving you the tools you need to look your best!

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