WHAT NOT TO WEAR

The false promise of seasonal-color analysis

- ELLEN CUSHING

As long as people have been able to dress in color, we've been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow's worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.

The press created a minor moral panic ("un scandale optique," a French journal called it), which it then attempted to solve. An 1859 issue of Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely read American women's magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help "ill-dressed and gaudy-looking women" by invoking a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors were most "becoming" on various (presumably white) women. Chevreul advocated "delicate green" for those with fair skin "deficient in rose"; yellow for brunettes; and "lustreless white" for those with a "fresh complexion," whatever that means.

Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades look best on them. They are doing it via seasonal-color analysis, a quasiscientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that holds that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that do not that wash us out, make us look ruddy or green, emphasize our flaws, and minimize our beauty.

According to this method, everyone belongs to a "season," and a "subseason," determined by the coloring of their skin and features. Bright winters, for example, tend to have sparkling eyes and dark hair and look great in jewel tones; true autumns are defined by their golden undertones and should wear earthy colors.