Get typed by me; your photos are always private: merriamstyle.c... Other typings I offer: merriamstyle.c... The Four Skin Undertones: • The Four Skin Underton... Color Harmony Calculator: www.sessions.e...
Merriam has truly helped me in so many ways. For instance, today I got back in my closet and sorted through all my clothes AGAIN. I've done this sooooo many times before. Since I'm keeping my hair this color, and since I've been officially deemed "cool and radiant", figuring out which pieces to keep versus throw out, has gotten 80 percent easier. Today I came up with 6-7 small plastic bags-full of clothes that are not right for my coloring. This is on top of that large white bag I filled yesterday. I still have PLENTY. I'm at a point where I won't have to keep shopping for pieces. Well, it's still fun... All my clothes come from $1 thrift store sales or from donations. Knowing my best colors helps me coordinate outfits and make up so much more quickly. Kudos to Merriam and her keen eyes and training and experience and lovely heart. I think it's time she heard from you gals that she, too, is beautiful. Her features are opposite mine -- dark brown hair, dark eyes... She's a cutie herself. Ladies, we are ALL lovely somehow. Redheads, blondes, brownies, brunettes, gray and silver foxes, multicolored hair -- just part of being artsy and expressive. One sign of true beauty is being able to lift another woman up, making HER feel accepted and valued. There is a wonderful group of ladies commenting and responding here. May you all be blessed. Remember Your Maker, the original Artist and Designer.
I'm cool and delicate! :) And high contrast, so burgundies, charcoal gray, and dusty dark greens! But also love to wear a cool dove white (one of my best colors in my opinion!) and ash pink!! :)
Hi @sweetteaelle I read your comment in the last video. I hope you’re doing better. Thank you for your pictures in the videos. Merriam also helped me find out I am a romantic also.
This makes a lot of sense. And it explains why a warm and radiant person with high contrast and lighter skin might not be able to pull off yellow or yellow-green, not because it's too warm for them, but because it is too close to the light/dark value of their skin.
this explains why i could never make up my mind what kind of summer i was in 12 seasons, because i could clearly pull off some bright saturated colors, like royal blue, bright saturated turquoise, bright magenta, even though i am light and cool and bright. some muted cool colors do not look bad on me as well, but i feel they are not enough sometimes. also true red was not in summer colors there, but i can clearly pull it off, with cool skin. this and some of your other videos are helping a lot and it all makes sense now. thank you!
Are you light or deep? Low/high contrast? I would say no cool and radiant colors should look bad on you if you're cool and radiant. If only lighter or darker cool and radiant colors look good on you, and not the brightest ones, you might be cool and delicate, because adding white and black to colors also mutes them slightly (not as much as adding gray or brown though!)
It could also be that you're in between cool and delicate and cool and radiant! Semi-muted cool colors. :) The categories are just for simplicity, but really the skin undertone lies on a spectrum.
@@merriamstyle I think I am cool, bright, medium contrast. So richer pinks or blues look good but lighter look worse. But actually some bright warm pinks look good and vibrant mango color too. However I am much safer on the blue side. The trickiest colors are green, since only dark green like a fir tree looks good:) Thank You so much for a reply:)
I wonder is it possible if these 2 factors - contrast level and chroma are selected correct, then the hue can be taken different and still look good on a person? Like if I take my level of contrast and the brightness but I take warm instead of cool...
I am the same as this lady. Pale and blonde haired (low contrast) on the cool and radiant end of the spectrum. Will try incorporate these colours more!! Thank you
Same! I am cool and very muted/delicate with pale skin and blonde hair but my eyes are a dark blue and since I'm so pale even the blonde creates a big contrast on me so I'm stuck with a neutral burgundy red, cool navy blue, black and grey. That's great for autumn but shopping in the spring or summer is a nightmare and trying to find swimwear too, I still don't know which white would suit me, cream certainly does not I found out after trying it on in a store with good lighting. I think maybe a video on which colours you can get away with that aren't traditionally in season could be good because I imagine low contrast would have the same problem but in autumn and winter instead.
Great job! I had my colors done yrs ago and I am a winter, but I love your very well thought out in depth system. I am also an amateur artist and I understand and appreciate your use of the color wheel and your understanding of color.
Ooooh I am loving this information about contrast! I think I understand. So do we only match the contrast if we are light and then opposite contrast if deep? What if medium?
If your features have high contrast, then you must NOT match to your skin hue. Because that will maintain your high contrast. If your features are low contrast, then you must match the skin hue. So if your hair, eyes, teeth, skin are NOT high contrast opposites (like she says in a black & white photo of you), and you are light, then your colour choices would be light too. Please correct me if I’m incorrect on this Merriam. Please will you share a link to a video that explains the contrasts for us to better understand! oxo
Soooo interesting. I really enjoy your videos. I’ve learnt so much, yet have so much more to understand. I used to think I was “autumn”, but my husband said “those are your camouflage clothes” because I disappear into them. I then decided I was “light muted”, but that includes cool and warm colours. Bright golden yellow and dusty pink look good on me (I think). Periwinkle is a colour I’m often admired in, which I’ve always found confusing, but now I think I know why - it’s seperate from me. Still don’t know if I’m cool or warm. I have 2 blushes - pink and peach 🙄. I think I like pink better, but everything tells me I should be warm 🤷🏼♀️
This was very interesting! While I’m not sure if I’m cool or warm, I know I have high contrast (dark hair and eyes with light skin). My question is, what happens when I get a tan and/or add highlights? I know in your video about redheads you said when they become more tan sometimes they switch from cool and radiant to warm and delicate. I notice the less contrast I have, the more colors I feel comfortable wearing.
@@di3486 Yes, I agree with you! Being a medium olive myself, even I get really pale & muted in the winter, despite being a little darker skinned. It looks like my face just loses pigment. My veins tend to look more blueish too. But in the summer, the golden hues return. Is it the same for you two ladies?
Net Myth Yup, same! I’m light olive. When I’m at my palest I’m greenish, leaning on the cool side. As soon as I start getting pigment I’m on the warm side.
Di :3 For me it also depends on my hair color. When I have my natural medium/dark brown hair, I feel like I need more contrast, so darker clothes. But when I lighten my hair I can wear lighter and warmer clothes.
Very well explained! Liked this video a lot! The blonde lady looks really radiant using her perfect colors, a great example. A question, do you think that using a slightly cooler blonde tone would be even more matching to her cool undertone? Thank you.
Hmm, one thing bothers me with this system - that basically in theory of colour for painters yellow is not always the warmest shade. In painting the warmest is often orange - balance red and yellow pigments. both yellow and red are cooler than orange. In this way, warm types are gold/orange - balanced, and cool ones are in both extremes - red (pink) and yellow (olive). In a way then blue, as a complimentary is just affecting the saturation, is muting the skin colour, moving it towards neutral. I was always confused with my skin, as it is VERY yellow, but it is not really warm, just the opposite. When I was playing with a funny website, that splits every colour into basic 3 + white and black it showed me that what makes my skin so unusual is not the proportion of yellow/blue that was pretty standard, but a very, very small amount of red pigment, in comparison to other people. There is so much green in me, that no matter the shade of it, it reads as cool. It is a funny skin shade, as i do look best in gold (in comparison to silver and rose gold), decent in many shades of yellow, as long as it is not having any red in it, and terrible in most of the shades of brown and orange. I find the fact, that I got so little red in me quite tricky when it comes to dressing. What I am hitting at, why picking the scheme with yellow as the warmest, you had some reasoning behind it? because intuitively I would say that the orange works better when analyzing human skin.
You can't mix color theory for painting with personal color analysis, each system has its own rules. I see this more similar to photography edition rather than painting, when you edit a picture you can change the temperature by sliding the cool/warm spectrum, which is yellow vs blue. Meanwhile green vs red (magenta) would be the tint Also in my opinion Orange is not too much of a flattering color in general, I'm warm and I don't like how it looks on me, meanwhile blue doesn't look thaaat bad, and that could lead to mistyping, yellow on the other hand is more flattering and makes it easier to spot a warm undertone
I am a painter too, and I'm with you, think that there really should be consistency between color analysis and color theory. Because theoretically, color analysis should be just a more specific application of color theory. It's all about how colors interact with one another, just in this case, one of those colors is that of human skin. I found out when I recently made a color wheel for practice, that if red and green are both neutral in temperature, (one because it has no yellow or blue in it, and the other because it has equal amounts of both), then the poles of coolness and warmth, if you will, are really blue-violet and yellow-orange. And I think that in a visual way, there is truth in this. Because at the end of the day, the way we see a color has a lot to do with the colors around it. However, I think that Merriam Style's system actually is pretty consistent with the logic of color theory as well. Much more than other systems. And if you watch her videos on olive skin tones, she talks about what you are saying, about how a person's coloring is a bit different if they have more green, and not as much red.
Thanks Merriam and the lady who volunteered her picture. One question, would you say that Lupita has unusually white teeth/eyes, or would you say that pretty much all dark-skinned ladies must be have high-contrast looks due to the contrasting colours of skin versus teeth/eyes?
@@aphr0d I certainly think it does! Just to use myself as an example: My skin is very light, my eyes are light, and my natural hair color is a mousy brown/blonde (perhaps a level 6). In other color theories, I think I would be called a "Summer". My eyebrows, however, are thick and darker than my hair. Because of this, I've found that a darker hair color (perhaps a level 3 or 2), giving me a more high-contrast look, is more harmonious than my natural hair color. My natural hair color always seemed "out of place" with the whole look. I can achieve this as well by choosing a "theatrical" color that contrasts with the color of my eyes, but matches their brightness. So, we can create a contrasted look in different ways. A violet, a bright but deep red, for example, are my best non-natural colors. I've noticed as well that, because of my eyebrows, "less is more" for my eyes. If I do a very bold eye look, I need to do a bold lip to balance it out because there's already a lot going on up there with the eyebrows. I could, however, wear a lipstick with just mascara and not look unbalanced. The same, I think, goes for lip color. I can't wear a tasteful, muted lip nor can I wear a pretty pastel lip. I will look undead. It seems to me that we need to match the level of our actual lips when choosing a lipstick-be it red, pink, purple, etc-so as not to disturb the natural contrast level of our face. And, just as with eyebrows, I think size must be taken into account. The color of my lips isn't necessarily intense, but because they are on the larger side, the color is more noticeable than it would be if they were thinner. I'm sorry to go to so much length, but this is a question that I've pondered for years now.
Unneighborly Arcades Hi, I'm Tammy, the lady featured. I toyed with the idea of darkening my hair again for contrast sake, but decided not to. I LIKE my lighter hair from the sunshine and my Maker. As for make up, I've learned that less is more for me. I can get by with just darkening and shading my brows, dark mascara, blusher in round circles on my cheeks and glossy lipstick. That's it. That's my softer, romantic look. If I want to look edgy, I have to wear eye liners, but I'm figuring out that more make up is too much on my small face.
@@SweetTeaElle I really think lighter hair suits you better than darker hair would. There isn't much difference between the color of your natural hair and eyebrows, nor do your facial features demand such a dramatic color change. I think facial features should be taken into account as well, just a bit. And you seem to, when speaking of your makeup. I have noticed the very same thing regarding makeup with a friend of mine who is 100% romantic! I did her makeup as I usually do mine (I'm a one-trick pony), but it looked far too harsh on her. All I did was put mascara and lipstick, but the color-despite her being a high contrast person-was too intense. Her features are small and delicate, so a lightly tinted lip-gloss looked better than the red lipstick we tried. The mascara, as well, was too heavy-a curl of the lashes was all she needed. Blush does well for her, but applied on top of the cheek-bones to accentuate their slight roundness. Her facial bones and features are comprised of D answers, very delicate, so a light touch is needed. On myself, it doesn't look like too much because I've got yang facial bones (except my nose), so I can carry that extra drama. You seem to have your look down pat!
Lupita also hs quite shiny and reflective skin so she has this big white skin highlights that are very obvious on her, another light element in her colouring.
Wonderful video, Merriam! I wonder if there are celebrities anyone can share who have radiant, cool and high contrast type with medium skin so I can look for reference 💖
How about Camilla Belle? Would you consider her medium, maybe she's still quite light? You could watch my video titled Comparing Two Deep Winters. I talk about her there and give some examples! :)
@@merriamstyle thank you for the response, I have in fact seen your video on that already :) I'm more like Naznin Boniadi when tanned. Oh, isn't she what I'm looking for? 😅 Gonna check her clothing out immediately! 💖
More amazing insights! To make sure I understand correctly, Merriam: I have a HIGH contrast level and a LIGHT skin tone (depth). this means I look best in DARK colors, is that correct? Thanks!
to repeat the pattern of your dark hair against your light skin. so just like that, your dark garment against your light skin will repeat the pattern, and the eye loves patterns so thinks 'this is nice!'
@@merriamstyle Appreciate the prompt reply! That's helpful. Since I am Cool and Delicate, along with the above, it means dark grey or dark cool pink, say, suits better than light grey or light cool pink ? I always thought it was the opposite for me but I did the draping this morning and you might be right. Wanted to confirm this also with you? Thanks so much, you are amazing
Very interesting and helpful tfs. Sorry to get off topic, but what is Lupita's Kibbe type? Also, I've seen a couple of photos of actresses Lisa Bonet and Emilia Clarke together on the red carpet, would they be an example of a Gamine (Lisa) and a Romantic (Emelia) or is Lisa a different body type? I ask because Gamine's are supposed to avoid boho clothing and Lisa personifies the boho lifestyle. thx
I have to admit that I probably don't really fully understand what the concept of radiance is. I always thought it had something to do with how opaque the skin looks. Might sound strange, but I'm talking about the difference of a person that looks like you could almost see through the skin and a person with a very opaque skin no matter what color the skin has. Does that make any sense? I also go by how much a color a person wears reflects onto the skin. e.g. when I wear a bright turquoise I instantly get a "color beard" that overpowers my facial features, when I wear a turquoise that is very muted, it works out well. There are brighter colors I CAN wear, but not many.
I give up, I'm soo confused, I will just memorize the colors that I know they suit me because I can't decide what I am, in the beganning I thought I'm cool n muted but now I doubt it.
You can do what she did , use a photo wich you know is as close as your real appearance un real life (no filters, good light), use a bright royal blue vs. Muted blue, try to decide wich has more harmony against your skin. If you are muted the bright color is going to clash against your skin, overpowering You and making look more gray, also it's going to be obvious that the background and your photo are two different images. But if You are muted the soft blue is going to be very harmonious, almost going to look like one image. But also un muted colors its a big spectrum, i'm a soft warm but i'm high contrast, I have dark hair, dark eyes, light medium skin, so the lightest muted colors don't work on me because they can't hold the contrast of My features, thats why I chose medium to dark muted colors and they work very well. This system is good as a guide but at the end you are going to try the clothes and make your choice.
This video touched on something I thought of before. Since black people are bound to have a strong contrast between their dark skin and their teeth/the whites of their eyes, would that mean that lighter colours will always look better on them than any darker colour? Or am I oversimplifying it?
I think that applies for really deep skintones like Lupita. And it's also not good to confuse ethnicity with skin depth completely (although of course it tends to be correlated).....there are lighter and darker 'deeper skintones' like Lupita vs Beyonce, and this matters too. I don't think Beyonce is high contrast. It depends on her hair, but when her hair is lighter, I'd say she is low contrast because her skin doesn't create that huge contrast like Lupita's does with her eyes and teeth, because it's not deep enough.
Maybe you should sell a colour palette for every undertone because I struggle with every piece of clothing I see (besides the very obvious ones :D). I especially struggle with reds and oranges.
I’m definitely cool & radiant but I have a cool olive undertone and it’s difficult to find my best colors besides black and white (I think bc my skin has more green). Merriam do you have any tips for a cool & radiant olive like me? (All I do know is that I look absolutely horrid in warm colors, all muted colors, and gold.
Diamonds, optic white, fuchsia lip color or fresh cool pink colors! Clear white sparkly highlighter (even silver may look a little too dull on you), pure black liner. For colors, depends on your overall coloring too and the contrast levels (to a smaller degree but still matters). Pure black, optic white, magenta, all clear purples, all clear blues, all cool and bright greens!
What if I am a summer radiant, with dark hair and fair skin? The best color should be cool bright and dark colors? Merriam’s channel helped me to find out I am a romantic out of confusion, as I am 5’5.5” in height, with a delicate round (not so hour glass left to right, but thick front to back). I am now following clothing lines and hair style suggested for romantics, everyone is commenting how radiant and refreshing I look! I would never have tried high waisted tapered pants, but they work like miracles on me!
How to determine contrast level for Indian skin tone like Priyanka chopra& Deepika padukone.. With wheatish skin which is warm & bright with darkbrown/black hair... What shade of colirs would look better on us light colirs or dark colors,..
When one is a cool summer and the other is a cool winter, their dominant characteristic is coolness. They are adjacent on the colour wheel and can wear some of each other's colours, not all. Their best colours are still different.
I just want to confirm what I understood from your previous videos which is I would look good in the colouring closest to where I am on the skin undertone line. So does that mean a cool and raidiant would look better in cool and muted than any warm colours. And if I was cool and muted and closer to neutral then warm and muted are better than cool and raidiant on me even though I have a cool undertone? Also, do you think that by darkening or lightening a colour it becomes muted or possibly cooler due to adding black or white to it?
Darkening or lightening a color does not make a color muted or cooler. To make a color muted, it has to have a grey undertone. To make a color cooler, it has to have more blue undertone.
My reasonings is that black and white are cool colors thus adding them to another color could result in it becoming cooler. Also, gray is basically black and white mixed together.
@@marionsmith9579 That's an interesting point! However, I'm not sure if that's true. Here's a video that might be helpful to you. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NtUTJkZw6rI.html
Hi Marion, I'd say cool and radiant will generally look better in cool and delicate than in warm and radiant. Cooler undertones just have a much harder time pulling off any warm colors than warm undertones to pull off cool colors. But warm and delicate, if very close to neutral, very delicate, can look better in cool and delicate than in warm and radiant. Also adding black and white to colors, that is, creating tints and shades, does mute the colors slightly. Seems like I've been in a battle trying to explain this to some of my other commenters (not you lol)! Imagine a fuchsia color, then if you add enough white to it, it will be pink, not as bright as fuchsia. And likewise, if you add enough black to it, then it will be a dark burgundy kind of a color, also less bright than fuchsia. So although lots of people will say that all of these colors (all tints and shades of the same parent color) have the same chroma, all you have to do is look at them for less than one second and you'll realize quickly that tints and shades aren't as bright as their original clear chroma parent color that they come from. But adding black to a color doesn't always make it cooler. The question is, which color? If you add black to blue, you may actually make the blue slightly warmer, because black is warmer than blue. It's kind of like temperatures of water. Blue is the coldest, black is pretty cold, but not so cold like blue. Yellow is the 'hottest', etc. So you can imagine mixing them! Red is room temperature (or neutral), because as soon as you add a little bit of blue, it becomes cool red, and as soon as you add a little bit of yellow, it becomes warm red.
@@merriamstyle thank you for explaining it thoroughly. I also forgot to thank you for this video. Looking forward to more of your thoughts and insights ❤
Ah, now we‘re getting into the nitty-gritty 😄 I‘m cool and radiant and used to die my hair dark brown, almost black for years. Looked great on me, very natural. Now that I cut my hair off, I thought I would go platinum blonde, before letting my ashy blonde natural color grow out. Worked quite well, went down to a white blonde in one go...but it didn’t suit me. Wonder, if that is a contrast thing then? My ashy dark blonde, although a boring color, looked perfectly fine, on the other hand. Not sensational, but ok. So, I‘m probably cool, radiant and high contrast? And does that mean, that my ‚best‘ hair color will always be dark? That would suck, because I specifically cut my hair off, to go blonde 😆
Rara Avis The sunshine has helped me get back to the color I was born with. I tried darkening it for several years because I wanted to be taken more seriously. Now that I've reached this level again, I'm not dying it brown and muting myself... You be YOU as far as what is on the OUTside. Others try to dim our lights so they can shine brighter. Shine your light and encourage them to shine from the inside.
Sweet Tea Elle 2018 Well, my dark hair was really just an experiment and I happened to like the result, so I stuck with it. Now wanting to go blonde is equally just a result of ‚being bored‘, so to speak. I really just want to look good, no outside pressure (positive or negative) involved. I would really like a light, sunny blonde, but not, if it doesn’t agree with my skintone.
Was the platinum colour perhaps still too much on the yellow side? I'd also like to figure this out, it confuses me xD. I had a friend who was quite clearly cool & perhaps muted or radiant, who went from brunette to platinum as well. It didn't work out either! So maybe we're on to something here; either the colour itself was still not cool enough, or the lighter look doesn't complement the Kibbe type (but my friend was also a romantic, so that can't be it), or the skin isn't radiant enough to carry the look? I'm trying to imagine Alexis Bledel (cool & muted) with platinum locks for example, but find it not great. Not terrible either, just not great. What do you think?
Net Myth Hmmm...I used a blue toner afterward and it was a pretty ‚clean‘ result. It really just looked...boring somehow. I mean, platinum blonde should look very cool and ‚exciting‘, but on me, it looked like a faded garment, basically. That’s the best way, to describe it. Like I had accidentally washed out all color from my hair. Ups 😂 I tried toning it back to ashblond this morning...didn’t go as expected. I didn’t want to use real die again, because my scalp is still sensitive from the bleach yesterday...but the toner made my hair coppery. Then I used a violet toner again, twice, and now my hair is darker and faintly violet. And that looks actually much better. Of course, it‘s still more of a muted color, not bright violet, but just the decidedly cool tone make a difference. I guess, I‘ll just go darker shade by shade, until I hit my personal sweet spot.
Net Myth I just thought of another good comparison...I looked (a little) like an albino. Human albinos can have blue as well as red eyes...and although mine are a darker blue, I had the same ‚colorless‘ to me.
The lady is not summer at all even with light hair, her hair shows some almost white strings and I am not sure if it's her natural color or dyed hair but she's obviously a winter.
Hi. I'm that cool and radiant lady. That was three and a half years ago! I'm three months away from 53 years old. Three months ago, I cut ALL the dye out of my hair and let it go natural. It is now mostly champagne gray with some light brown and golden highlights. The cool and muted and lighter to medium colors suit me best now. Im trying a light color palette in August 2022. Monochromatic is looking pretty good on me, too. I can wear black away from my face. White looks good on me. So do grays now. Navy looks good, too.
I'm still very confused, as my hair is now longer and all natural. My bangs are slightly greyed and grey is coming in in under layers. The top layers of my hair is a sandy blonde, but it has a strawberry blonde effect in direct sunlight.
