House of Blues
SLAH's Natalie Moore joins the elite force of "summers" following a color consultation with House of Colour's Amy Latta.
If you’ve never heard of getting your colors done, that’s probably because you couldn’t, at least in the Capital Region, until about a year ago. That’s when Amy Latta, a Saratoga transplant and true believer in the power of color, decided to become a consultant for House of Colour, a UK-based company that provides style and color analysis to help people of all ages discover what clothes look best on them. “There are three consultants in New York,” Amy told me when I arrived in her picture-perfect in-home Saratoga studio for my appointment. “Here, in Buffalo, and in Brooklyn. I get clients from Massachusetts, Vermont and Canada. Last week I had two people from an hour north of Montreal.”
What, exactly are those clients traveling all this way for? Some feel like they have a closet full of clothes, yet nothing to wear. Others are looking to build a capsule wardrobe—about 30 pieces that can be worn interchangeably. Others have recently experienced a big change, have a special event coming up, or just want to zhuzh up their style. “Some of my clients are in their 80s, and they say ‘I don’t want to look like an old lady,’” Amy says. “There are a million reasons to get a color analysis.”
For me, it was curiosity. When I first heard about House of Colour, I was a bit skeptical, but in talking with Amy (she sponsored Saratoga Living’s Cocktails & Clairvoyance group medium reading earlier this year) and seeing some before-and-after photos of past clients, I began to buy into the process, which involves Amy draping you in dozens of fabrics, comparing and contrasting colors to determine the palette that best suits you. Everyone, I learned, has one quarter of the world’s colors—you’re either a winter, spring, summer or fall. For those interested in how the seasonal colors are broken up, it has to do with the amount of blue or yellow in a color; you may remember from elementary school art class that all colors can be made from some combination of red, yellow and blue. “Red is the one color everyone can wear pretty well,” Amy explained. “But unless you are solid red like Elmo, you are yellow based or blue blue based.”
About a third of the way into my three-hour consultation, we’d determined what quarter I have, based on my skin’s under and overtones. “You’re a summer!” Amy announced excitedly. That means I look better in cooler, bluer, smokier colors than the autumnal green I showed up in—and which I have pretty much been wearing exclusively since September 1. That, apparently, happens a lot. Clients don’t know what colors look good on them, and tend to wear a lot of black, which doesn’t do most people any favors.
The rest of the appointment was spent finding my perfect lipstick, foundation and blush colors; determining which of the summer colors I look especially vibrant in (they have names like cornflower blue, sea green and amethyst); and taking photos draped in all my best hues. “This is the best thing about summers,” Amy said as she layered the colors on. “You just get better the more I put on you.” That’s the beauty of House of Colour’s four-season system—most of the colors within seasons go well together, but summers can wear three or four of their colors at a time.
I left with a color swatch booklet of all the summer colors, as well as a chart in which Amy took notes on each color—I could pull off a floor-length gown in clover, but should only wear dusty pink as an accent color, while rose would be a good shade for me to wear playing tennis, and french navy is a perfect BTB (better than black) color. But while I now have a playbook to shop and dress by, Amy says her consultations aren’t meant to deny people the opportunity to wear colors or clothes they like. “Some people are afraid that it’s going to be very limiting,” she says. “But there’s no color police.”
—Natalie
This week in Saratoga Living After Hours
On Tuesday (sorry—technical difficulties kept us from sending Game Time out on Monday) SLAH readers had to unscramble three words to finish a Saratoga-centric fill-in-the-blank.
Then, on Wednesday, we asked readers for their opinion: What do you like about SLAH? What do you want more of? What stories still need to be told?