How to Use Your Seasonal Color Fan
So you’ve had your colors done, and now you’re looking to use that funny-looking color fan that seems like something you might find in Home Depot. I will tell you how to get the most mileage from that!
What is a Color Fan?
Color fans are available from many different sources. My favorite—and the one I use in my studio—comes from NDU Colors (if you want to purchase one of your own, use code KIGOCOLOR for 10% off.) A color fan provides you with a sampling of your season’s best colors. It does not contain every single shade that you will find in clothing—think of it as the possibility space and average of what your colors will look like in the real world.
Color Fan Basics
Color fans may be held up or placed over any item of clothing or jewelry to determine if the item falls in your color season or not. Your fan and the item should “complete” one another, and not compete or clash in major ways.
This is an exercise in comparison. The fan and the item should both look beautiful, in-focus, and normal. What does normal mean? Well, the colors should look the way they do under other circumstances. A palette that is perfectly muted and soft doesn’t look dirty or dingy unless it’s placed next to an overly-bright object.
warm/cool
bright
muted
dirty
garish
The Light Spring color fan placed over a Light Spring fabric looks “right.” The fan and the fabric look equally bright, balanced, and clean.
The True Summer color fan looks dirty and shadowed compared to the Light Spring fabric. At the same time, the fabric also looks less beautiful, and not as vibrant as it should.
Imagine the Possibilities
A color fan will help you understand if you are purchasing a color that belongs to your season. But it will also help guide you towards making inventive and beautiful color combinations.
This purple and white skirt belongs to the True Winter palette. Both the fan and the skirt look equally vibrant, cool, and dark.
Once we have determined the item belongs in our season, then we can move on to finding fun ways to combine it with other colors in our season! Your first instinct might be to look for neutrals, which is a great first step:
You could pair a black, a white, or any number of grays with this purple skirt.
But what if you want to go beyond wearing a single color in an outfit? Those who are interested in color analysis are often specifically trying to come up with inventive, unusual, and attractive combinations of multiple colors. If you glance at any of the strips in isolation, you start to come up with ideas for color pairings that are beautiful and interesting:
It is easy to imagine wearing a berry blouse, emerald flats, a cerulean scarf, or hot pink lipstick with this skirt. The color fan allows us to see that these colorful additions don’t clash, but rather complement the vibrant purple of the skirt.
Avoid Matching, Look for Harmony
You may get tripped up by looking to match color strips exactly, instead of appreciating what the color strips represent. Below, I have photographed the same blouse: 1) alone 2) with Bright Winter fan 3) with True Winter fan 4) with Dark Winter fan.
Your eye is immediately drawn to the red on every single fan to see if those reds “perfectly” match. The issue is that humans love to match… and so we will convince ourselves that almost any red matches.
The best way to avoid falling in this trap is to hide all colors that appear in the item you are testing:
Once we hide the strips containing red, the picture becomes clearer. Right off the bat, the Dark Winter fan can be eliminated—the colors look dusty, faded, and dirty next to the red blouse.
Between True Winter and Bright Winter, there are a few more subtle observations:
The Bright Winter fan looks uncomfortably light next to the red blouse. There are almost no colors that feel as rich or deep as the deepest tones on the blouse. The True Winter fan looks juicy and vibrant, and the blouse looks equally so.
It is easier to imagine outfit combinations using the True Winter fan on the right… even the most contrasted emerald greens could be used to accessorize as a shoe or a bag. But the Bright Winter fan on the left is harder to imagine as outfit possibilities. The lighter blues look way too light. The greens look neon or childlike next to the red.
Overall, it is harder to picture slotting this into a Bright Winter closet.
Do You Need a Color Fan?
A color fan is an easy and accessible way to assist you in recognizing your best colors. It is not critical to own one, although I find it helps enormously in the first 6 months to a year after having your colors analyzed. However, you may also use Pinterest as a free resource to discover harmonies in your palette and come up with creative color combinations. Pinterest can be helpful for online purchases but will not be as helpful for judging clothing in person.