A view of Andy Warhol's artwork on Marilyn Monroe. (Credit: PAUL ELLIS/AFP)
Every other Thursday, Nima invites a viral social media trend back to her place, and dissects it under a Middle Eastern ring light.
Cue drumroll… Personal Color Analysis: The study of how the colors you wear affect the way you look. Personal color analysis suggests that there are four main color seasons: summer, winter, autumn, and spring, with additional subcategories under each season.
This theory operates under the assumption that absolutely everyone, no matter their race or ethnicity, falls neatly in or between these boxes. It’s worth noting here that the first few women who wrote about personal color analysis were white. Which most probably means Middle Eastern features were not on their radar.
Carole Jackson’s “Color Me Beautiful,” published in 1980, popularized the idea that each season corresponds to a palette of colors that would supposedly enhance one’s appearance. The trend later resurfaced in South Korea and is now all over my social media.
As far as I understood, if you have a warm undertone which means your skin is more yellow than pink, then you are either a spring or an autumn, whereas if you have a cool undertone you can be a summer or a winter. If you’re just now understanding what Richard Gilmore meant when he said he was “an autumn,” same here.
So someone with brown eyes and rich brown hair with a warm complexion would typically be under the autumn season. And would then be sub-categorized based on how much contrast they have in their features. Following that logic, someone like Anne Hathaway would be a dark autumn, while Billie Eilish would be a soft summer.
Color analysis is loosely rooted in the scientific understanding of light, perception and color psychology. It is based on how light interacts with color, how those colors reflect our natural features and how our brains perceive them.
However, there is no scientific evidence proving that, based on your skin color, you will look better if you swap out your gold hoops with silver ones. Just as there is no scientific method of proving that the wrong shade of white will ruin your wedding look.
Frankly, and don’t tell anyone I said this, I never really saw the difference in how the person looks in those videos. I mean, sure, if I drench the screen in electric blue and then switch to a butter yellow, the colors will change — but isn’t that just how light works?
Don’t get me wrong, I personally love color theory. Learning how colors interact with each other is a huge help in makeup, like if you add some blue to a red lipstick, it won’t make your teeth look yellow anymore. But I also acknowledge that colors are subjective and psychological biases affect how we see things. And I am painfully aware of how things like lighting, angles and makeup (to name a few) can manipulate how a person looks.
In theory, the right colors can even out your complexion without drawing attention away from your face. But is the purpose of fashion, prints and colors to hide the red blemishes on my face and the dark circles under my eyes? Is that what personal color analysts consider my ‘best?’
Regardless of how real Personal Color Analysis actually is, the entire basis of it conforms to the same set of societal beauty standards that birthed restrictive diets, dressing for your body type and plastic surgeries. This far-from-human image is sold to women time and time again to market one product or service after another. It feeds into a man-made desire to be perfect in every way, and do anything to look as close to a porcelain doll as possible.
