Reading

Reading

Nine original, source-cited pieces on the evidence under personal colour analysis. Written for Percol in eight languages; free in the app, readable offline.

• Primer · 5 min read

  What a foundation is actually moving

  Shade matching picks an average. What has been measured on faces, over and over, is the spread around it — and the counter is not organised that way.

• Primer · 5 min read

  The pigment you can eat

  Melanin and blood are the two everyone names. There is a third in your skin, it arrives from food, it moves in about a month — and whether it reads as beauty depends on who is looking.

• Practice · 5 min read

  Hair colour is almost entirely a lightness

  Every natural hair colour on earth absorbs inside a twenty-nanometre band. What varies is how dark. Everything a salon argues about after that is a correction — bought with the reagent that costs you the fibre.

• Primer · 4 min read

  The two pigments under the word "undertone"

  Skin colour is mostly melanin and blood. Neither of them is warm or cool — that part is a convention, and the wrist test has nothing behind it at all.

• Primer · 4 min read

  How color got its four seasons

  A Bauhaus color exercise, a California stylist, and a 1980 paperback that put draping cloths in millions of hands.

• Primer · 5 min read

  The measured part of a face

  Hair is two pigments; a blue eye has none at all. The one thing about a face that has been quantified over and over, on four continents, is the contrast between the features and the skin around them.

• Field note · 3 min read

  The light in the room is a variable

  Two fabrics that match under a shop's lamps can separate the moment you step outside. That is metamerism, and it is not your eyes failing.

• Field note · 4 min read

  What Korea actually certifies

  241 personal-colour credentials sit on the national register. Not one is state-accredited, and the colour qualification that is has nothing to do with looking at a person.

• Practice · 5 min read

  The rule under draping was found in a dye house

  Two colours side by side are seen as further apart than they are. That is the whole reason an analysis is done on plain paper, one change at a time.