All styles can be expressed in all colour tones.
Body type is innate and often hereditary.
A lifetime of dieting may bring you heart ache and possibly keep weight at a healthy level (or unhealthy, if you are pursuing a modeling career). But if your DNA is prone to one body shape, you're fighting windmills and swimming upstream by trying to change. It will be like a leopard trying to swap its spots for tiger stripes.
Your colour tone is like your blood type or hair colour. It's there, you don't have to work for it, it is inherent in your body.
Style, however, is learnt. Style is cultural and changeable.
Some say that having a certain body type is equal to being like a certain style archetype. There are style consultants out there who will analyze your body shape and assign you a style icon, style category or style archetype.
I had a style analysis with Rachel Nachmias of Best Dressed, and she showed me that the proportions and shapes of my body puts me in the Yang Gamine category. I loved the analysis process, and it gave me ideas of how I can work with my colour tone, personality and style archetype to create my own unique style.
So how do I express my style category?
It depends on me, my personality, preferences
...and colour tone.
Never once did Rachel say that a style archetype should overrule the palette of my colour tone.
A Bright Winter Yin Natural will express her style using the Bright Winter palette, bringing an unexpected sparkly energy into the femininity of Yin Natural style archetype.
A Soft Autumn Yang Gamine will communicate a unique style on the feminine side of androgynous, in a gentle manner like only Soft Autumn can do.
And in another style universe, a Soft Summer Dramatic would convey her style with Soft Summer colours and come across as a Dramatic with the understated elegance of the Soft Summer palette and be all the more uniquely dramatic.
Don't let anyone tell you that your style cannot be expressed perfectly within the palette of your colour tone.
Using clothing and makeup within your colour palette will express your style in the truest, most authentic manner.
If you try to use another season's colours to express your style, you will only look like you're playing dress-up.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in style consulting so I may not have nailed this dress as a Dramatic dress, but at least the colour of the dress did have a distinctly Soft Summer feel to it.
For putting together a stylish travel wardrobe that takes up minimal space in your travel bag, check out my article Checklist For Mini Travel Wardrobe
