Every spring, designers satisfy our yearning for sunshine and warmth and present us with fashions and home furnishing in a seasonal array of effervescent spring and summer colors. Overnight, it’s as if the planet is populated with walking garden salads in shades of zingy spring green, vibrant
tomato red, zesty lemon yellow, sunshine orange, and myriad shades of sweet and chili peppers. There are also fruit salads galore in frothy shades of yellow, melon, orange, and green.It is an image consultant's nightmare!

That's because many of the colors of spring are a bit brassy and flashy. Fashion and Image consultants, as well as color psychologists classify food colors as less classy than jewel tones or floral hues, for example. Picture a sweet yellow pepper and a juicy ripe tomato. It makes you hungry for food of any kind, and you might even feel a bit restless if you stared at these colors for any length of time.

Image consultants have noted that we dress to “match the seasons” for many different reasons. Since the beginning of time, mankind has dressed to blend into his surroundings so that the dinosaurs won’t see him. It is pure survival mode. Consider the inhabitants of large cities who wear dark colors that match their skyscrapers. Abraham Lincoln wore a stovepipe hat that enabled him to blend into a skyline that was dotted with stovepipes, in an era of coal and wood-burning stoves.

With thirty years experience as a color, fashion and image consultant, I have concluded that the majority of humans look less attractive in yellow-toned colors, particularly grunge shades. Most people simply look better in cool colors such as navy or royal blue, black, emerald or racing green, fuchsia, and cherry red. Alas, most of us choose colors from the “heart and soul” and not from the results in the mirror. We feel good, but our image suffers.

This summer, resist the urge to look like the image of a garden salad! And when autumn comes, resist grunge colors with a passion. Consult your mirror and change your image. Go to an image consultant. Start a revolution! Wear true red long before Christmas arrives. Something amazing will happen. People will look at you and smile. You won’t be the invisible person who blends into the background and gets overlooked. You’ll stand out in the crowd, and it will be okay because the dinosaurs disappeared a long time ago.

Sandy Dumont, THE Image Architect is a fashion and image consultant based in Norfolk, with 30 years of international and national experience helping individuals and Fortune 500 companies improve their image. She conducts customized Branding for People™ image workshops on a regular basis.
For more information, visit www.theimagearchitect.com or call 757/627-6669.

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by Sandy Dumont, THE Image Architect © 2005
Originally published in Tidewater Women, June 2005