Move over Color Me Beautiful, an Emmy Award-winning costume designer shows women how to find their authentic style archetype.
David Zyla has made women look sensational on the runway, television, and Broadway for twenty years. In Color Your Style ,David shows how every woman can unlock her authentic style based on a combination of her personality, her eight true colors, and one of twenty-four color-palette archetypes-from the Wholesome Flirt to the Romantic Poetess to The Maverick. Through quizzes, charts, and stories, women can discover the colors, clothes, and accessories that will attract love, power, energy, and attention. Color Your Style is like getting an astrological reading-only color-inspired-allowing you to learn more about yourself while you make over your wardrobe.
We are at our best when we feel comfortable, confident, and know we look fantastic. Zyla and Color Your Style shows women how to be their best-without being slaves to designer labels or the latest trends.
The concept is really interesting, but I didn't like the way the book was written. There is an almost lyrical style to the book that would be better suited to a fiction novel. I didn't feel points in the book where I really felt like I should stop and do something. It was so easy to just keep reading past until a later chapter where you are finding your archetype and realize that you should've been finding all the other things before getting there. This is very much a book you need to read with great intention and do the things as it talks about them. No reading and taking notes and then going back and doing things. Usually with self help books, I want to treat them like instruction books, or recipes. You read the whole thing through so you know what to expect and there aren't any surprises, then you go back and follow the instructions one by one until you finish. You can't do that with this book. You have to follow the instructions as you go or you end up with the need to skip like 30 pages because you don't have the information you need to understand them. It's like the beginning chapters are teaching you German but not telling you that you're learning German and then you reach a chapter in German and are completely lost. Really, I don't love how this was written. It was too soft and flowery to feel like a self help book. The ideas of the various colors and how to find them was really nice though. I don't know how much I love them, they take your hair into consideration for two of the colors and for me, that means bringing browns into a palette that doesn't work for me. It's one thing to dress 100% in the colors that are meant for you, it's another thing to wear colors you don't like, and I don't like browns. I like blacks and grays and I have no problem wearing colors that are 90% for me if it means avoiding those browns. There is a reason I spent 70% of my life dying my hair. I don't like brown, but especially not in clothes. It's just not me. I had the biggest problem with the archetypes, because nothing seemed to fit me. I didn't recognize myself in any of them, even the ones that weren't my season type. This was a library book, so I took photos of key pages, including all the archetype pages, so that I have them for later, maybe I need to look at the colors again a few times to get a better handle on them. I think this book is much easier for people who have a great grasp of the names of colors, since you need to know loads of colors to find your colors. When you are a HEX code sort of girl, that is difficult. I wish that Pantone color swatch packs weren't so expensive, because I would grab one of those and really look into it.
Overall, I feel like this book is a great idea, but hard to do yourself. By the end of it, I felt less confident in my colors, my ability to find my colors, and my choices in general and just firmer in my belief that I needed to find a really great stylist who could tell me my colors instead, because finding them out yourself is really hard, and book or not, I'm not confident that I am even a bit right in any of this. I honestly want to just step back and retreat into the Cool Winter palette that I was told was mine and stick with that, because at least there are colors I know I love, even if they aren't 100% mine or not.
