I finally had my long-awaited colour analysis appointment on Saturday. This week has been packed to the gills with the minutiae of mom/household/work stuff, plus I spent last night in the ER with my croupy toddler, so this is the first chance I've had to string a few sentences together.

It was such a wonderful experience. Marjorie, who did my analysis, is warm and professional and lovely to work with. She told me later that she suspected I'd be a Soft Summer, but it quickly became clear I'm actually a True Summer. Suz, who's met me in person, suggsted that in this thread, and she was right. Here's what I wrote to Marj afterwards:

"It feels so fun and freeing to have my colours figured out. In some ways I was surprised by the result, but it makes perfect sense. So many of the colours are ones I've always been drawn to but wasn't sure about because they're often described as 'unflattering.' I see now that they're only unflattering on the people they're not suited for. What I like best of all is that they're the colours of my very own world, the natural landscape I love deeply and know intimately, the west coast--our grey skies, muted blue-green water, fresh rain-washed forests and cool cloudcover, pearly oyster and mussel shells, rhododendrons and lavender. In fact, I can see a sunset in my swatch book's pink, blue and grey out my window right now, behind some bare charcoal tree branches. I'm already feeling my ideas about fit, style and so on coalesce with these colours as context. I'm excited to see where it leads me."

I keep coming back to the word "soft," probably because for a lot of very personal reasons it's a word I've shied away from for many years, even though deep down I think it's truly one of my defining characteristics. I think a big part of my style journey this year will be about discovering how to embrace and incorporate softness and discover what that expression looks like for me (hint: I know it's NOT ruffles, lace, cotton candy and cameos).

I've included some sample True Summer palettes below. Note the absence of black, which currently forms about half my wardrobe. I hope to slowly replace most of them with the deep, hazy navies, purples, burgundies, greys, taupes and teals of my palette. I culled about half of my closet afterwards, which is something I've been planning to do for a long time. I have a bunch of stuff to take to consignment, and I'm hoping to post some of it here on Style Exhange, too. I can't afford to purge all my black items right now, so I'll definitely be looking for advice on ways to style them to make them work for me, and will probably put some of my limited "fun money" towards a few well-chosen pieces that will help with that.

On an even more personal level, I realized that a huge part of the pleasure of this experience was getting to spend a few hours doing something that was ALL ABOUT ME. It's a rare, rare occurance in this season of my life. Also, until recently, my mental health and self-esteem were in such a bad state that I wouldn't have ever considered giving myself the time and money to spend on something so self-oriented (I'm trying to avoid the negative connotations of the word 'selfish' here). The fact that I could not only talk about this idea with my DH in an unabashed way, and then set up the appointment, go through with it, and completely enjoy it speaks volumes about my progress in my life overall and particularly the past 6 months.

Maybe I need to reconsider that "Radiant Orchid" colour after all...