It's hard to pinpoint exactly who deserves the credit for the idea of personal seasonal color analysis. The two names that come up the most are fairly recent history: Suzanne Caygill and Carole Jackson, who both had their peak in the 1980s.
Suzanne's work in color analysis for the individual started in the 1940s while she was working as a milliner and designer. Her book, Color: The Essence of You, opens describing her approach to color theory as proposing an "intuitive and instinctive impulse in every human being toward a constellation of colors in the universal order to which he or she is cosmically related. " She saw connecting with our natural color harmonies as essential to connecting with exactly who we are. Many credit her as being the first to align personal color palettes with seasons of the year. Though she used seasons in her color analysis work, she believed in the uniqueness of each individual and created custom palettes for each client carefully painting color swatches to get the precise color she wanted. Suzanne worked with thousands and trained others in her method through her Academy of Color. Many consider a palette from her or one of her proteges the gold standard in personal color analysis, but such a palette has never come cheaply. Official training to Suzanne's approach was an expensive multi-year endeavor which meant her experts were never plentiful. This model made their time quite valuable and meant travel costs were often part of the cost of a palette.
The answer to this getting-color-analysis-to-the-masses problem was addressed by two women around the same time: Bernice Kenter and her book Color Me a Season, and Carole Jackson and her book Color Me Beautiful. How? These books simplified color analysis into a question of "which of four seasons fit?" The books then proviced four ready-to-go palettes, one for each season, that the reader could then adopt as the palette of best colors. In addition to the books, Color Me Beautiful had an army of color consultants who would go through a series of color drapes to determine which season fit best.
Bernice Kentner came to color while working as a cosmetologist in the 1950s and focused on skin tone with an eye toward well-chosen cosmetics and hair coloring. As she worked more in coloring, she focused more and more on eyes; both in their color and in the patterns within a person's iris. A blog interview with Bernice Kentner can be found online here.
Carole Jackson's Color Me Beautiful found much success and started a series of books about color and style. Search Amazon today and you'll see books in the Color Me Beautiful line are still being written. You'll also find that you can buy CMB palette swatch fans for each of the four season. For a blast from the past, check out this old video special walking through the Color Me Beautiful system .
The Color Me Beautiful company is still alive and well. Others have popped up over the years some expanding the four seasons means four palettes solution to 8 or 12 palettes with 2-3 per season. This keeps the complexity down while providing a better "fit" for each person.
Dressed In Color takes an entirely different approach to solving the complexity/cost of personalized color palettes. With a little computer magic we can pull out the colors in your skin, eyes, and hair from photographs - solving the location barrier of an in-person analysis. Just to make sure the colors haven't been distorted, we send you those colors we've pulled to confirm they accurately reflect the real you in person. From there we apply theory from the Munsell color space and algorithms trained off the guidance from Suzanne Caygill's book. A color expert then reviews results, tweaks and modifies based on your questionnaire answers, and there you go - a custom palette that's within reach for anyone.
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