Nat Laurel

Please note that none of them are wearing  serious photoshoot makeup and you are seeing casual shots.

Please meet my friend  Lena, who is a red head with freckles generously spilled all over her face. The first urge is to outfit  her in similarly fierce, flamboyant colors as her own.  But the moment you start throwing in those spicy reds, butternuts  and toasted browns  you will start  seeing Lena gradually fading and her luxurious red mane turning washed out and dull..

This is the result of the strong pink undertone hiding under the thin layer of warm freckles. Do not let the facade of brandied freckles  fool you, as it is only skin deep and there is more than meets the eye. This is the type of complex beauty that needs a pause and a more thoughtful approach than the assembly line styling.

I take a couple of warm, toasted hues like Maple Red and Oriental Bronze and start surrounding them with dusty mauves and teals that range from  cool to neutral. The final palette will resemble  a sunset with flames  that dies into  the dark purples and slate blues of the sky, forming a series of breathtaking ombres.

The soft gradients will support both, the warm and the  cool undertones of her complexion. But what is even more important, the ombre quality of color combinations  will complement the fineness of Lena’s facial bone structure. This is what contributes to her  Renaissance S-type beauty type.

Now, here comes Katya.  Despite the warm skin undertones she shares with Lena, her beauty is  is in striking contrast to Lena’s.   This is what I call  a Z-type, Paleo beauty type. Her Amazon  face requires  zero fuss hairstyling.  Please note Katya is also wearing zero makeup as  she came to my place unprepared for a photoshoot. I  snapped her as she was trying on clothes that  I picked for her, and she kindly agreed to have her  shots posted here.

Hers is the facial bone structure that has been staring at you from all the    cutting edge Vogue-level  online catalogs like  InterMix,  Farfetch, Net-a-Porter.   This type of beauty  has been pioneered by the legendary  Vogue editor of the 1960s,  Diane Vreeland. It was further supported by her successors, Grace Mirabella and Anna Wintour. It took three Vogue editors for this strong boned beauty to make it to the front lines.

Katya’s warm complexion has no pink undertones to it. It feels deeply caramelized  all the way to the bone.  You will have to take my word for it, because there is no way you can read the undertone off the picture. What you can read off the picture though  is how much her facial bone structure:  the wide bridge of the nose, the straight line of her eye brows and a very pronounced  zygomatic arch contribute to resemblance of a lioness.

These are all the fundamental  things that  your stylist eye should be attuned to.

picture source www.fuzzyundertones. 

Where  Lena benefits from  playing up her resemblance with the classic goddesses of the Renaissance paintings, Katya  is winning building up on her animal magnetism. This is when earthy colors come into play. Bring in all the ochres,  blend them into greens, toast those almonds, and don’t be shy on cardamon.

The Oriental bronze she shares with  Lena gets a different company. Instead of carefully selected reserved purples and mauves of the dusk, Katya’s Green Bronze joins the warmth of other feline greens and ochres forming a much more tactile aesthetic, not the  breezy feeling of the  skies.

For assembling personal color palettes  I use Seasonal System developed by a California stylist, Susan Caygill (1911-1994).  The featured palettes are Dusk Summer and  Mellow Autumn   based.  Find our more about my work  here.