Return To Your Natural Colours Paperback & e-books Sold Out. New e-book editions coming April 1 (or sooner)!

How Summers Intensify Eye Colour

The attempt to strengthen eye colour with more makeup has two possible outcomes:
  1. To strengthen the eye colour.
  2. To strengthen the makeup at the expense of the eye colour.
Natural skin and eyes can only compete with so much pigment before the cosmetic takes over. Luckily, when the colour is one that already exists in you, you can apply it liberally and it will appear as a believable part of your face, but there are limits.

There is a lot more to intensifying eye color than eye makeup.

Clothes

Never underestimate the power of colour analyzed clothes colours to amplify eye colour. This alone will do more than makeup on anyone by its larger area. The bit of separation is also more forgiving and less distracting than the same colour right next to the iris.

Try the closest matching colours, and also the neighbour colour on the colour wheel. Green eyes look greener when wearing blue.

Wear your white. Every colour in your palette will clear the white of the eye, just as it clears the skin, but white captures the eye white most immediately. This creates a perfect showcase for your eye colours.

Brows and Blush

Colour Analysis will bring attention to your eyes like never before, even if you do not wear makeup. Groom your brows, have them beautifully shaped, and pencil in the thin spots. Think of eyebrows as the picture frames for the eyes.

Once many women get the right shade of blush, their first comment is  that it brings out the eyes. Absolutely it does, instantly and strongly. Look for that effect to happen when you buy blush. All makeup should strengthen the eye colour. The eye is the jewel in the face, the focal point of the entire appearance.

Eyeshadow Palettes for Eye Colour

Think twice about investing in palettes made for certain eye colours. Have you ever seen them work?  This is the reincarnation of the silver bullet we know as 'the lip colour that suit every skin tone'.

There is no universal formula for every green eye. The makeup that works on one skin will be too weak or too strong on another. There are many greens in a green eye,  too confusing to be able to pick out the correct ones. Besides, green or blue makeup next to green or blue eyes sets up competition and distraction from the eye itself.

Also, all Seasons and skin tones appear in all families of eye colour. A blue Summer eye will not be the same as a blue Spring eye, and their eyeshadows will be different too. If the eyeshadows are made for a cool-skin woman, it will drain the colours of a woman with warm skin.

Intensifying eye colour happens with repeats, complements, and contrasts.

In 12 Season PCA, there are 3 Summer Seasons, the True, the Soft (blends an Autumn trace), and the Light (a dab of Spring).

True Summer

True Summer eyes look best when they are gazing out of a misty pool of cool, soft grays, which may have a cast of cool yellow to appear greenish, or a wash of blue or lilac.
  1. Soft navy eyeliner, not blackened sapphire. True Summer often has very deep blues in the eye that can be repeated. Take care when you select a colour that it looks good with the entire swatch book. Too often, we see eye makeup in colours that nobody would pair in an outfit with the colours in the eyes or wardrobe. If the combination is uncomfortable in an outfit, how can it be attractive on the face?
  2. Denim eyelinerrepeats the overall color and darkness level of the eye. Annabelle Blue Grey is one of the best I know for True Summer.
  3. Cool gray or blue gray eyeshadow (much more gray than blue, like rainclouds) repeats the True Summer undertone and blends nicely into the skin. Mauve-gray can work, but many Summers have pink in the eyelid rims, which risks an eye looking bloodshot.
  4.  Rosy browns create the right warm-cool contrast with these blue eyes.
----------

Soft Summer

These eyes are gazing out from a cloud of lavender smoke. Neutral tan-brown and mauve-browns are lovely, with misty pinks and antique whites as base and highlight colours. No hard edges, everything quiet, blurred, and diffused.
  1. Repeat the tan brown in the eye with eyeliner.
Smokey Tonal soft summer

The eyeliner is the bodice colour.

Your medium and dark eyeshadows are all contained in this dress (linked to Jones New York, but no longer available).

2. That tan brown can be repeated again in the highlight colour in the hair. Think of a pine cone. Beach (and bleach) blonde highlights do not work, they look like grey stripes, like a strangely intended aging effect. The right highlight is cool taupe, not too much lighter than the base hair colour.

3. Contrast. The Season is low in contrast or separation of colours on a light to dark or warm to cool scale. Saturation is quite low and makeup is most sophisticated when it continues the subtlety of the palette. Neutral Seasons have a little heat in their skin, and cooler and warmer choices in their palette, and part of the magic of this colouring is its ability to make these small shifts appear meaningful and effective. Combine taupe with pewter and smoky brown with mauve for an expensive look in which blue-green eyes dance. These are the ranges for the complementary colour in Summer.

4. Attire! This is usually a blue or a blue-green eye, where the eye color becomes very strong in pine green clothing.

----------

Light Summer

A Light Summer eye is shown below. Black mascara has no place here. You could barely find any colours that are even medium in darkness. Gentle light colors are key. Airy and fresh is what will look healthy and young. Imagine the colours you would paint around a rainbow to define it from its surroundings without dimming its gentle magic.

In the middle swatch, Photoshop sampled the gray shade from the middle of the iris around the 4 o'clock position. It is an excellent eyeliner. The lower colour is a lovely eyeshadow, barely yellow as Light Summer skin is, finding the very same colours in the iris and elevating them further.  Because the colours are a harmonic match, there is no competition. Quite opposite, they have an additive effect with one another.

Light summer eye and greys
  1. Eyeshadows are soft dove grays and silvered blues. Use light colours because the eye color is very easily overwhelmed.
  2. Repeats? In makeup, although coloured eyeliner takes over and drama is the only thing anyone will see, a beautiful accent is a cloud of cornflower or periwinkle at the outer corner of the upper lid. In clothing, the aqua and cornflower blues from the palette are superb for intensifying the iris colour.
  3. Complementary coloureffects are beautiful when wearing your mauve and purples in clothing. These will bring out the pale yellow sunlight you may have in the eye, an uplifting and sparkling effect.
  4. Contrast. While there are no light/dark extremes in a Summer Season based in lightness, all Seasons have their lights and darks. The palettes are pre-set for the ideal light to dark range for each Season. All you need do is know which is yours.
To not do

What detracts from eye colour?

1. Avoid too-warm yellow in the hairunless Nature gave it to you. Your highlight is just on the neutral beige side of silver if you are a True or Light Summer. Some Light Summers wear a yellower beige than others. Many Light Summers look far better with no highlight. Avoid also hair that's too light (because your lightest colours are pastels, quite far from white) or hair that is one big highlight (which interrupts the natural outdoor vibe and looks parlour).

2. Big dark lashes. Unless you are aiming for the look of false black eyelashes. The viewer can barely peel their eyes away from the lashes. It may sound good but think of a time when you saw this on another woman. Her lashes feel like they're not part of her. To paraphrase Isak Dinesen, when God wants to punish us, he grants our wishes. Summers should wear dark grey mascara, or softer navy blue, which is excellent.

 

-----

 

Search