Your seasonal recommendation surpasses colour to fabric choices. “Yellow tones will draw out a yellow pigment in the skin, blues will make blue eyes appear brighter, and pinks will enhance the pink in your complexion: something worth bearing in mind if there’s a particular colour you don’t want to embrace.”
“The cardinal rule is that the colour worn closest to your face will accentuate similar pigments in your skin tone,” Gleeson says. Contrary to belief, a summer is not loud and vibrant, but delicate and feminine. It’s the opposite, as Gleeson explains, who says that being a pale and fair-haired “summer” palette, I should avoid ultra-bright or stark colours. Can you warm up pale skin with colour? The answer is no.
Gleeson carries out most of her styling via Zoom, or WhatsApp the fee includes a PDF with a personalised colour report and shopping recommendations.įive minutes in, and we’re down to brass tacks. I meet Gleeson over Zoom for a colour consultation – a service that, considering it’s only ever needed once, is reasonably priced at €30. “The wrong colour can make you look drawn or washed out,” Halpin says. “Instead, they see something on someone like Pippa O’Connor and go, ‘That looks amazing on her, I’ll buy it.’” At the recent launch of the Personal Shopping Suites at Kildare Village, Clara Halpin, deputy director of personal and private shopping, elaborates: “There’s a tendency to wear a certain colour because we’ve seen a friend wear it, or been inspired by an Instagram post, when in fact that colour may be completely wrong for us.” Often, the result falls short of the mark.
“We live in an age where people no longer shop with their complexion in mind,” Gleeson says. This is, largely, thanks to the copy and paste attitude we have to shopping that’s been induced by Instagram culture.
Albeit, a millennial one.Īccording to Isabel Gleeson, a Dublin-based virtual stylist, knowing how to wear colour has never been so pertinent. Yes, just as the fashion world embraces AI and the burgeoning metaverse, institutions like Colour Me Beautiful are having a renaissance. I, for one, am not: that’s what I discovered when I had a colour consultation. If colour is here to stay, shouldn’t we learn to wear it correctly? Of course, the fashion goths will snarl at colour, just as the minimalists will bawk: meanwhile, I am in search of an education. Today’s pieces are elevated by premium branding – and tantamount Instagram buzz – but the shades are just as searing. (Sadly, bad outfits quite frequently happened to clueless noughties teens.) The real showpiece was a matching Hav-A-Hank scarf. It was around then when I co-ordinated fuchsia corduroys with a fluorescent school bag during my after-school missions to George’s Street Arcade. The luxury online retailer recorded a 96 per cent lift in sales of green items hot on its heels was the colour orange, which lifted by 93 per cent, followed by pink at 65 per cent.Īs the catwalks nod to Y2K dressing, I haven’t seen such an unapologetic use of colour since the year 2003. According to Net-a-Porter, the current demand for colour is across the board. Suffice to say, the rush of “dopamine dressing” that flooded our feeds in the midst of the pandemic has yet to flatline. As I scroll Instagram, Stand Studio’s Charleen jacket pops up – a glossy, cropped affair in what I am dubbing a bright shade of Kermit. When Harry Styles (that crazy kid) delights us with another rainbow outfit at Coachella, we obsequiously gush. We watch as Hailey Bieber accessorises an iced latte with a lime blazer.
Post-lockdown, we’re living in a state of technicolour. The louder the look, the sweeter the taste of freedom. Indeed, the last two years demonstrate that clicking buy on a colourful piece is more than a fashion choice, it’s a power move a definitive flipping-of-the-bird to the drudgery of pandemic life. Bold! Brave! Bright! The recession may have spurred the lipstick index but the post-pandemic world is all about the colour statement.