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The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN

August 1997

     &  

Color Analysis Comes Back with Bigger, Better Palette

Sense of Style

Barbara Bradley, Fashion Editor

From The Commercial Appeal, by Barbara Bradley

Carolyn Bendall, an image consultant, recently visited the home of a Memphis woman who had been told her only flattering colors were blue, black, white and maroon.

“She had three closets of just those colors,” Bendall said, “I opened them up and thought, ‘Holy cow! This woman needs some color!’”

There are right and wrong colors, said Bendall, 39.

She is forever spotting African-American women who look best in cool reds, walking around in hot lime.  If a woman likes it, that’s fine, Bendall said, but she should know “her outfit is walking 2 inches in front of her.”

Color analysis—much of it based on the seasons system that used the four seasons of the year to describe the colors best suited for four skin types—was good for its day, she said.  But it was too confining, too difficult to use, not as accurate as it should have been and was being used by too many analysts who weren’t properly trained.

Bendall offers a new system, learned at the foot of color analysis guru Gerrie Pinckney, the very woman who started all the hoopla back in the early ‘80s.  Pinckney, co-founder of Fashion Academy, Inc., formerly in Costa Mesa, CA., didn’t invent color analysis, but, according to her son, George Pinckney III, she was the one who applied it to wardrobe and make up and turned it into a business.  It was Pinckney who taught color analysis to Carole Jackson, author of the huge best-seller, Color Me Beautiful, he said.

“From ’79 to ’86 everybody was doing it,” he said.  “But maybe one out of 20 people were really educated and had the tools to do it.  The science of it really got prostrated.  After ’86 it took a dive.”

Then a few years ago Gerrie Pinckney decided to go after the flaws in the system with the help of son George and new computer technology.  Working at the academy’s new headquarters in Orem, Utah, they introduced a new system based on color theory by Albert Munsell, a well-known colorist and artist.

The system divides people into six, instead of four, color groups—three cool and three warm.  Instead of using color swatches, an analyst helps people find their color group by finding the client’s eye, skin and natural hair color on color spectrum charts.

What a client is analyzed, she’s given a chart the size of a checkbook that contains 32 colors, most of them shaded from pale to intense, which greatly expands her choices.  She pops it into her purse and shops.  No fuss, no mess.

The new system, launched in 1994 and called Your True Colors, fills in the gaps, said Pinckney.  It takes in black and Asian skin as thoroughly as Caucasian, he said, and it puts everybody in a single color group.  Nobody is some of this and some of that.

Bendall, a native Memphian, who had worked as a Mary Kay Consultant and a dress buyer for a small boutique, moved back to Memphis from California with her family five years ago.  She learned the system from Gerrie Pinckney in 1996, when Pinckney was in Memphis.

Pinckney and her husband, George, are Mormons who were here for 18 months doing community service work as Mormon missionaries.  Bendall, also Mormon, met them through her church.

The two women became good friends, and Pinckney taught Bendall the new system.  According to George Pinckney, only a handful of analysts in the state have received such training.

The new system is more responsive to a woman’s personality, said Bendall.  For example, a woman who shies from bright colors can simply choose the pale intensities of the colors on her chart.

Women are also divided into four style types: natural, romantic, classic, and dramatic.  Most people are predominantly in one category with influences from a second category, she said.

For example, one client she classified as natural/classic, moved to Memphis when her husband got a promotion and suddenly found she had nothing to wear.  “She was gong to all of these galas, and the dressiest things she had were suits,” she said.  Bendall helped her ease into formal dressing with silk pantsuits and one beaded suit she wore to a wedding.

Classics are practical people who have trouble tossing out their oldies, she said.  Among them was a Memphis attorney, whose husband hired Bendall to go through her closet as a birthday gift.  As clothes came flying out, the woman’s daughter watched and cheered.

Bendall charges $50 for color analysis, which includes the cart of colors.  For $200 you can get the works, including color analysis, body type analysis, wardrobe clean-out and planning, and make up clean-out and planning.  She also shops with clients for $50 an hour.

One of Bendall’s most recent projects was acting as wardrobe consultant for the makeovers of three local women for a story that ran in this newspaper July 5.  We thought her work was impressive.  She not only picked colors that made the women glow but in short order seemed to zero in on the type of clothes they would like and that suited their personalities.