TIMES article - December 22, 2004

Would we be swayed by a swatch? Lisa Armstrong The Times team was rather sceptical about meeting a Color Me Beautiful consultant. So were we converted? Up to a point

LINGUISTICALLY speaking, Color Me Beautiful is on a sticky wicket before the poor consultant gets through the front door. It’s not just the Americanised spelling, but the Americanised memories I have of being told by an early evangelist to wear royal blue (the most hideous colour in the universe) and focus on executive earrings, whatever they are. Silver? Gold? Can’t remember because I chucked the swatch book in the bin before I left the building.

That was then. Color Me Beautiful has changed, or so I keep being told by the CMBs who write to me every time I make a specious reference to their breed. For one thing they’re slightly less appalled by their clients’ foibles and errant ways.

For another — and this is where things started to look up — colour analysis is becoming popular entertainment. The idea is that trained CMB consultants come to your house. While you share champagne and canapés/swap divorce stories/discuss the pink spectrum, she radically changes your life.

It was time to put them to the test. On the ground that this was a far more seemly approach for the Times fashion department than engaging the services of Madame Vs, who come to your home and teach you and your friends (admittedly intriguing-sounding) sexual techniques, we asked Julie Houldsworth to come and preach beautiful colours, sorry colors, to us.

When I say that not everyone in the department was 100 per cent behind the project — comments ranged from “Is this a joke?” (Alice) and “How naff” (Eve) to “If she tells me I can’t wear black, I’m walking out” (Emily) — you will appreciate that Julie was taking on a bigger challenge than she perhaps realised.

Things got off to a shaky start when Julie began explaining the basic concept: that CMB divides people into six so-called dominant categories — light, deep, warm, cool, soft and clear — which can in turn be applied to two of four seasons. So you could end up as a light summer-winter, for instance.

As a basic concept it seemed overly complicated, especially as we all proved to belong to different climatic hemispheres — between the six of us we racked up five separate categories. Julie (a definite pink) rolled her eyes a bit, said she’d never had a group that was so diverse or difficult and looked as though she’d rather be buried alive in cement (khaki obviously).

And then she began holding her stack of swatches up to our faces and something in the room’s rather tense molecular composition changed. Alice (Deep Winter; can wear murky, dark shades together) began intently studying the swatch book Julie gave her at the end of her consultation; Eve (Light Spring, but according to Julie, dyeing her hair the wrong shade of blonde) asked very casually whether Julie knew a good colourist; Carolyn (Warm Autumn, can wear reds, coppers) began getting swatch-book envy (she thought everyone else’s colours were nicer than hers). Nicola (Soft Summer) sought some additional make-up advice. I (Clear Spring) surreptitiously compared the CMB swatch book I was given with the one another image consultant had given me eight months earlier and rather gratifyingly saw a huge amount of crossover, the only real point of difference being that CMB says I can wear black.

Which is more than can be said for Emily (another Soft Summer, though not that straightforward). The moment when Julie told Emily that white-blonde hair and black — two staples of her style — weren’t her right colours was another tense one. Fortunately, and it seems to me that this is where CMB has evolved most, Julie recognises the importance of personal style and that while Emily was breaking the Color Me rules, somehow it worked for her, in the same way that Gwen Stefani seems to be able to get away with not sticking to her range. An Emily-Julie truce was reached.

The fact is, when you hold up the “right” swatch to your skin, the instant improvement to your complexion and eyes is incontrovertible. And another fact is that what initially made the system seem so complicated — there were six of us, all so different — becomes irrelevant once you focus on your own diagnosis.

By the time Julie was ready to leave (three hours later; I think she went into more detail with us than she normally would), there was a palpable softening in the air. Although expectations of its usefulness were limited — owing to the fact that we are fabulously stylish and have no need of such advice — the general feeling was that it had been much more fun than we had expected.

Two weeks on and this is the situation: on Julie’s recommendation, Eve has dyed her hair from blonde to brown; Carolyn is “obsessed” with her colours; Alice is colour-combining as directed: Nicola is veering away from black, into the hitherto dreaded pink (but refuses to go anywhere near salmon); and Emily says that “while it seems a dull, archaic way to approach fashion, it does offer an excellent framework” (ie, she is adamant that her hair will remain as close to white as possible and remains convinced that black and coral suit her — navy, however, is making inroads).

As for me, I’m sure that in most cases it’s true that people are instinctively drawn to colours that suit them, but I also know that those same people are also drawn to colours that don’t.

Clearly Nicole Kidman shouldn’t wear black. Renée Zellweger (Light Summer) is having problems pulling off her transition to Clear Winter and Anne Robinson, who wears black only on The Weakest Link, has clearly being doing her CMB homework because the rest of time she’s in the greens and golds that are perfect for her.

So I now find myself examining the colours that complete strangers are wearing in a way that is probably unhealthy. And this time I’m hanging on to the swatches.