Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark. This month we are talking about… seasonal color analysis!

We’ll be getting into:

⭐️ The complicated legacy of Color Me Beautiful

⭐️ Is color analysis a little bit racist?

⭐️ Is color analysis…a diet?

⭐️ What colors can Virginia wear, and why are there so many shades of taupe?

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Episode 193 Transcript

Corinne

I have been waiting for this episode! I’ve been waiting months!

Virginia

You really have been waiting for months.

Corinne

Listeners, I am really excited to announce that we are finally going to talk about seasonal color analysis. Some of you probably know that I got mine done a while back. And then I had to drag Virginia kicking and screaming.

Virginia

Not even! I just kept forgetting about it.

Corinne

I had to scroll back years and years through her Instagram to find pictures that were suitable for submission.

Virginia

I was so lukewarm on this topic. It was also a complicated process. There were a lot of photos you had to find. And I just kept being like, “I’m sorry, Corinne, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” And then you finally were like, “I will find all your photos.” So Corinne did my homework for me for this episode.

Corinne

It was maybe slightly overbearing.

Virginia

No, no, no, no. I mean, here we are. It’s going to be an amazing episode. I’m very excited.

Corinne

Okay. So, I don’t know what your results are, and I have a lot of questions for you, because I feel like you have a more in-depth history with this subject. So I will just say I first encountered this book in young adulthood or late childhood perhaps because one of my good friend’s mom had it. The book I’m talking about is Color Me Beautiful by Carole Jackson.

Virginia

The Bible.

Corinne

It was written in 1980. The basic concept for anyone who’s not familiar—though it’s hard to believe at this point that anyone would not be familiar.

Virginia

If you’ve met Corinne you are familiar because it’s like 40 percent of her personality at this point.

Corinne

Yes. What is your season, and what is your sign?

So, Carole Jackson divides everyone into four color seasons—winter, spring, summer, fall—based on the color of your skin, hair, eyes. For each of those seasons, she recommends which colors you can wear to make you look best.

Then the second half of this is just that the seasonal color analysis thing has really gained popularity through TikTok in the past few years.

Virginia

It’s gotten so big again! It was gone. I didn’t think about my colors for 20 years, and now it’s back.

Corinne

Part of it is I think these videos where they show people getting color analysis are just algorithm candy. Because it’s so subjective and divisive, it’s so good for social media.

Virginia

It’s that meme of what color is this dress? But with people’s faces. Remember that dress? And it was like, is it gold? Is it blue? It’s like that, but more.

Corinne

Yeah, as a person who spends way too much time on TikTok, I sort of got obsessed with watching these. Then I got specifically obsessed with this person, Carol Brailey, who was doing color analysis on TikTok. And then I decided that I needed to pay her to do my my colors.

Virginia

And then you decided that I needed to pay her to do my colors as well. This is not sponsored!

Corinne

Yes. We paid for this out of our wallets.

So I want to hear about your personal history with color analysis. You had your colors done as a kid, right? Or no? you did it yourself?

Virginia

I did it with the book. My mom and I got really into the book in probably seventh grade. So this would have been like 1992, maybe 1993 is when I got very into the whole color analysis.

I had a copy of Color Me Beautiful. My mom had done her colors. I think she had just started a new corporate job, and was buying new suits, getting her whole look together. And so she was interested in it to simplify dressing for work. And I, as a seventh grader, also aspired to be a corporate business woman and was obsessed with it too.

I did all my friends colors. For my birthday that year, my mom got me this little wallet. It kind of looked like an old checkbook, and inside were little fabric snippets of all of your colors. So you could carry it with you clothes shopping. I would bring it with me, and hold things up to it and see if it was my color. I was in deep.

And, yeah, I loved it. I think it was a point in my life where I was trying to decode beauty. Like, I was reading a lot of fashion magazines. I was very aware of who all the big 80s and 90s supermodels were. I was trying to decode beauty and girlhood and how I was supposed to appear in the world, and Color Me Beautiful and color analysis gives you this roadmap, right? It gives you a very clear set of rules, which, of course, is why I have more mixed feelings about it now, as someone who professionally analyzes systems that give us rules on how to live our lives.

Some of the Photos Corinne Submitted

Corinne

Yeah, that really, really makes sense. Should you tell us what your results were then and your results now? Or, how should we do this? Should I guess what your results are?

Virginia

I actually do want you to guess. I think that would be fun!

Corinne

Wait, okay, first of all, are your results now different from your results then?

Virginia

No.

Corinne

I feel like I know what you were. You were a summer, right?

Virginia

I was, and I am… a true summer.

Corinne

Wow, true summer.

So what was it like to receive the email from Carol Brailey announcing that you’re a true summer?

Virginia

Well, step one was I missed the email and it went to spam for a month. And then I had to ask for them to send it again. You were so mad that you’d done all the work to gather the photos and that I didn’t even keep track of it.

But then I got it, and I think I was hoping for it to be different because I would be like, ooh, plot twist. It has evolved. Or like, this is something new and different. And to be clear, Carol Brailey is a different person from Carole Jackson who wrote the Color Me Beautiful book. There are many people now who do color analysis now, they aren’t all named Carol. But Carol Brailey is one of the most popular ones. She seems very skilled at it. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we did ours. But there are plenty of options.

And yet, while this is supposed to be this new and improved high tech version of this—and I never did before have somebody else analyze me, I analyzed myself using the book—it still feels like exactly the same thing.

They send you a PDF with your results and explains all these details. And then there’s these photos of your face surrounded by different colors, which maybe we can look at. But then they also send you color references, and <a href="https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=1bbf12dcdfda0a2c&sxsrf=AHTn8zqLnGaZitPWqn0ecgZIZ0uX8SjhOg:1747235784043&q=True+Summer+color+palette&udm=2&f