Own Your Style Decalogue 4. Be Colour Savvy

The importance of colour

Most colour decisions you make will affect how you look dramatically. Think "Are you feeling OK?" versus "You look so good in that colour (by which they mean shade, but we don't want to be pedantic)", that I'm sure you have heard before.
The right colours and shades will make your skin glow, and your eye colour pop out. For a Deep Winter, for example, one such really flattering colour (or shade) is cobalt blue.
So, it is not only that you are wearing the right colour, it has to be the right shade. Saying "blue" doesn't really mean much, there are thousands of shades of blue, from the palest to the darkest, mixed with bits of red, yellow...

Don't be a (insert name of colour here) casualty!

Every year, come September, the racks are filled with Autumn colours, very much in the same way it is appropriate to eat strawberries in spring and summer, because it is indeed a lovely palette. Well, every year, in Spain, a country mostly populated by Deep Autumns and Deep Winters, you can see tons of what I call "orange casualties": that half of the population that does not look good in orange, most browns, or greens. They could have stocked up on bottoms in the Autumn palette, sure, but not on tops.
The same way not everybody looks good in shades of orange, it happens with the rest of colours, so it's of the utmost importance to learn when to include them, and when not, in your wardrobe.

How to go about learning?

You can use books. I recommend you Color Me Beautiful's (CMB) Looking Your Best by Mary Spillane and Christine Sherlock, 1995). The basic idea of the CMB people is that there are people who look best in cool shades (in the Summer and Winter palettes), and people who look best in warm shades (in the Spring and Autumn palettes).
You can use blogs and webpages. You can start with my blog, of course, which include description of how the people who look good in a season palette look like (eye colour, hair colour, general complexion), the palettes themselves and then sets I have made on Polyvore with those colours. To see the palettes, you can follow the labels on the right for the four palettes: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

MORE?

• Follow the label Colour savvy, a multiple part ongoing tutorial about how to become colour savvy, tricks to wear fashionable colours and more.
• Trend labels on the column to the right will include information about fashionable colours and who looks good in them.