stylessed

One of the most valuable things you can learn as you develop your sense of style is what colour palette suits you the best. A colour palette is essentially a range of colours and in terms of your personal style, they are generally divided into two categories, warm and cool.

The first step in determining what colour palette suits you is determining what skin tone you have. The easiest way is to look at the veins of your forearm, if they are blue/purple, you have a cool skin tone; if they are green/olive then you have a warm skin tone. The lucky few who have blue and green veins are neutral toned and can, therefore, wear any colour well.

The second step in determining the best colour palette for your best style choices is to look at your eye colour. Brown and Black eyes can generally pull off any colour but lighter brown eyes can have warm or cool shades. Blue and green eyes are generally cool-toned, but some green colours can be warm toned. With hazel eyes, it is more difficult to determine as hazel can have a combination of many colours.

I myself have a cool skin tone, however, my hazel eyes are warm toned. Because of this, I find that I can wear olive green as it has a similar colour to my eyes. It also means that bright jewel colours that usually suit cool tones sometimes don’t work for me and I often need a more muted version of the jewel tone to really suit me. It is a general rule that skin tone will most certainly override eye colour but as my eyes are probably my most prominent facial feature that rule sometimes doesn’t apply to me and others with the warm/cool mashup.

Warm colours generally have a yellow bias, whereas cool colours have a blue bias.

Here are examples of warm and cool tones.

Sometimes it isn’t always as simple as only wearing cool colours if you have a cool skin tone. If we look at this colour wheel, we will see that red and yellow tend to be warm and that blue and green tend to be cool.

This means that people with a cool skin tone can often wear warmer toned blue and green colours and people with a warm skin tone can often wear cooler toned yellow and red colours. It’s really a matter of trial and error something I’ll be covering in later posts.

Featured Photo provided by Pexels