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Get your colours done by Samantha Bell

Just because you pig out at Christmas doesn’t mean you have to look like a whale in your New Year’s Eve outfit. Samantha Bell of Pixie Belle tells you how to drop a dress size in 30 minutes, just by wearing different colours.

 

While I am, of course, an advocate of living a healthy lifestyle, I am not a fan of feeling miserable about your appearance just because you’re a few inches bigger than you’d prefer. Because the truth is, you can instantly look (and feel) slimmer and younger with just a few careful tweaks to the clothes you wear. By wearing the colours that naturally harmonise with your overall appearance. Seriously!

 

If you’ve heard of colour analysis, it may well be from Bridget Jones’s Mum ‘having her colours done’ or some vague memory of it being ‘de rigeur’ back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It’s kind of got a bit of bad reputation for either being a bit too ‘woo woo’ (I’m sensing green in your aura), or being practised by slightly scary looking women who wear too much colour and put everyone else off. But here’s the thing. Whether you ‘believe’ in colour analysis or not, you cannot deny not everyone suits the same colours and, in fact, some people look positively ill in certain colours.

 

The truly marvellous, almost miraculous, thing about understanding which colours to wear is that you can instantly look at least one dress size smaller than you actually are and look 10 years younger. And it makes sense to follow Mother Nature’s palette and work with what you’ve got. Once you start doing this, you are creating harmony and balance between your face and hair and the clothes you wear. So just how does it work, and how can you figure it yourself?

 

Some experts in colour analysis like to complicate matters. It’s called ‘analysis’, so it must be scientific, right? Well it is science, but not of the rocket variety. So let’s get some basics covered. It starts with your hair colour. If you’re a red head (ginger, strawberry blonde, auburn etc) then you suit colours with a warm undertone (browns, salmon, yellow, orange, coral, kelly green). If you have grey hair (silver, white, salt & pepper etc) you suit colours with a cool undertone (blues, raspberry, sea green, grey, violet, purple). If you have naturally blonde hair, you look great in colours that are not too dark – white, light grey, baby pink, sky blue. If you have dark brown or black hair, you look great in colours that are deeper in their tone, such as burgundy, black, navy, bottle green.

 

If your hair colour is in the middle (mousey or dark blonde or light brown) then this means you suit colours that are also in the ‘middle’. Colours with no extreme such as lavender, jade, beige, light navy, golden brown, soft pink.

 

There are tonnes of information about this on the web and you can, of course, book a consultation with a professional, which is definitely worth the small investment. The key is to be a tad braver with the colours you choose and try something you normally wouldn’t go for. The effect is astonishing. Wearing the right colours makes you look healthy and vibrant. And when you like what you see in the mirror you feel better on the inside. Win win, I’d say!

 

The photos attached show Carol and Susan who looked old, unhappy and overweight. Yes – they had some make up and got their hair done, but you can see the difference wearing the right colours can make. The before and after shots were taken on the same day so everything to ‘transform’ them was done in one day. Carol looks drawn and sallow wearing beige – a common error made by women with grey hair because it’s considered ‘safe’ and is readily available. Because she suits colours with a cool undertone, dressing her in blues and pinks completely transforms her! Susan looks dowdy and frumpy in the brown sweater but because of her dark hair she looks much better in a deeper, richer colour.

 

The Best You

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