Crimes against Aesthetics: When attempts at looking beautiful don't deliver the desired outcome

Her lips and hair colour clash. Her lips are warm and muted and her hair colour is bright and cool. This is disharmony at its best. Sometimes women invest time and money into procedures that do not enhance their beauty.

Hair Colour

Over the years, I have seen so many women dye their hair a colour that was not flattering to their face. It looks as if they are wearing a wig that does not flatter them. There are too many women walking the earth with a hair dye that does them disservice because it is not in line with their natural hue, value and chroma dimensions of colour. Cool Colour Types (CTs) dye their hair warm rust or auburn (or even orange!) while Warm CTs dye their hair platinum or ash blond (i.e. cool). Soft CTs wear blue black or bright red hair colour while Bright/Clear CTs mute their natural hair colour and wear tone in tone blended (= softened) look. Deep CTs wear light hair dye while Light CTs wear deep chestnut brown or black. I used to think that perhaps it is the hairdressers who are responsible for that until my friend pointed out that many women dye their hair at home and choose the hair colour themselves. Before you alter your natural hair colour, make sure you know your CT, i.e. the unique combination of hue, value and chroma colour properties you represent. Do cool (ash, purple) or warm (red or orange based) tones in your hair make you look your best? Do you need a tone-in-tone blended look (think Rachel from Friends) or is a bright unified hair colour (think Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe) better for you? Do you need depth (think Monica Bellucci) or lightness (think Reese Witherspoon) in value or something in the middle?

Fake Tan

Some women are obsessed with fake tans. Fake tans often leave a warm/orange/bronzy overtone (film) on the skin. This may be desirable for people whose undertone is on the warm end of the hue spectrum of colour, i.e. warm CTs. However, if the woman is a cool CT, then it may strongly disrupt her beauty. She may end up looking like an orange person that is not supposed to look orange! She ends up having seemingly warm skin but her hair, eyes, lips, eye-whites, eyebrows and teeth remain true to her natural pigments, i.e. cool. Her features, her natural beauty is cool and clashes with the unnatural artificially altered skin-tone. There is war, there is disharmony. Ladies, if your CT isn’t warm, think twice before applying any fake tan.

Eyebrow Tattoo

Over a decade ago, model Natalia Vodianova ended the era of thin over-plucked eyebrows (thank God!). And by the time the model and actress Cara Delevingne took the fashion industry by storm, the thick eyebrow trend was in full swing. Women went from over-plucking to over enhancing their eyebrows nearly over night. Some women over-enhance their eyebrows too much which either clashes with their Image Archetype or CT (or both).

For instance, Light Spring with natural blond eyebrows might tattoo or perm them deep/dark brown and loose the lightness in her face. All you end up seeing are the eyebrows. A Soft Gamine Image Archetype with naturally thin and arched eyebrows might tattoo them thicker, straighter and more prominent. Then the eyebrows end up looking very Yang (more Yang than the woman for sure), as if they were copy/pasted from a different (e.g. Dramatic Image Archetype) face. Make sure your facial features are in balance no matter the trends. You can enjoy the trends but always adapt them to your face, your Colour Type and Image Archetype. Your version of the thick eyebrow trend does not have to look identical to Cara Delevingne’s mighty eyebrows. She pulls off the look because she was BORN with the eyebrows and all the rest of her facial features are balancing them out. Honour your facial features and your eyebrows and neither over- nor under-enhance them.

Warmer Hair Colour With Age

Some women as they age end up wearing warmer hair dye than their original hair colour. With age we never get warmer. Pigments with age never get warmer and brighter. Pigments either stay the same of get slightly cooler, slightly lighter in value and slightly more muted. Warmer hair than our ideal has a very negative effect on our face. On all my clients that are not warm in hue dimension of colour, warmer than ideal colours have a very negative effect on the texture of their skin, their bone definition, eye-whites and their overall appearance of youth and health. Now imagine they put a drape of an unflattering warm colour (= hair) right next to their forehead and cheeks… Not to mention that the older we get, the greater the penalty of unflattering colours on our face. Ladies, I understand that you want to look youthful and put together, that you want to cover the grey in your hair. Do so, but stay true to the level of warm or cool you are most flattered by. If your skin undertone, your eyes and your natural hair colour is on the cool end of the hue spectrum, then stay away from warm hair dyes (and vice versa).

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