In my posts so far I’ve talked a fair bit about color, and the lack of it in my wardrobe. Now for the most part I am happy with my predominately neutral wardrobe, but I do think a lot about color and often come back to the question of whether I should introduce more of it in my wardrobe. What prompted my train of thought this time was a comment from a colleague one day when I was wearing some rainbow, almost-neon-pastel colored hair ties on my wrist (borrowed for watching the Barbie movie, as I had nothing pink in my closet!), and she said (knowing my preference for neutrals) ‘I don’t want to freak you out, but you look really good in those colors’. Of course I was freaked out, but I started thinking back and it hit me that those Barbie colors were pretty much exactly what my mother would dress me in as a child in the late 80’s, and thinking back on photographs I’ve seen I did look really good in those colors. A few years later more earthy colors came into fashion with the grunge era, and I had a phase of wearing a lot of rusty red, and I look absolutely dreadful and unhealthy all throughout that period. As an adult I’ve experimented with lots of different colors, but there was a phase in my 20’s when I wore a lot of vintage dresses in pretty pastel colors like sherbet lemon, coral pink and baby blue, and again looking at photos (and aside from the fact that everything looked better on me in my 20’s), I’ve never looked better. Same goes for my mid-teens where I went through a blue phase.

These pastel colors does not fit at all with my current preferred aesthetic, which is much more…somber? Serious? Lol, I am not sure. But while I don’t think I look bad in the neutrals I am currently wearing, I can’t help but wonder if I should experiment more with some of these colors that might objectively be even more flattering on me. Is there a way of incorporating them without feeling like it clashes completely with my personality? I have always been labeled cute, sweet, innocent, etc, as that is just my natural look, and I know that is probably part of what I am fighting against. Especially now at 40, that’s not how I want to present to the world.

I do currently have two blue pieces in my wardrobe that fit into this color family, the cardigan that I knit this spring, which was kind of inspired in color by this top that my mother handed down to me. Prior to that I would never have thought to try that color, but I do look very glow-y in both of those pieces. However, I think the romantic style combined with the pastel color makes them way too cute on me. So perhaps I need to look for sleeker pieces if I am to try these types of colors?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Would you wear colors that look fantastic on you even if they don’t fit with your preferred style or aesthetic?