I have been obsessed with color for as long as I can remember.
I started playing in my mom’s makeup when I was about 2 or 3 years old. I even “painted” the entire outside of our toilet with a tube of my mom’s lipstick. I distinctly remember my thought process while doing it was that the toilet would be so pretty in the berry color. My mom said that there was not one inch of white left to be seen. 😂
My parents are general contractors so I spent a lot of time at hardware stores with them and collected thousands of paint chips that I played with and spent hours creating different color combinations with. (I still do that to this day!)
I have always been told that I’m “good with colors” but that never translated into anything that I could do with my life, (i.e. to make money doing) I did consider becoming an interior decorator when I was in junior high and high school but I never found a college that taught a course on on it that was close enough to where I live.
My parents started letting me select colors for the homes they were working on when I was in my teen years. And they still ask my advice even now. It’s one of my side jobs. 😂
When I was about 14, I discovered a book called Color Me Beautiful which opened up an entirely new world to me. This idea of different colors looking better on different people was something I was already very much aware of but never realized that it was an actual thing with books and guidelines that you could look at.
I spent I don’t know how many hours with this book and hunted for other ones or any other information I could find at every book store I went to. (This was before Amazon and before you could really do much on the internet yet) The books all had info in the back where you could mail order for information and training but by this time, it was all irrelevant because they were so out of date.
So, I sort of kept this color analysis thing going as a hobby, never thinking I could do anything with it because I never knew where to go from that point and no one else I knew seemed very interested in it. I studied my books a lot though! Just for fun because I have such an obsession with it.
In 2002, I started a Mary Kay business which allowed me to play a lot with color and got me some experience helping other people with their makeup colors (and skin care, of course) And you can still shop with me here!
This lead me to becoming a personal assistant for my National Sales Director and I worked for her, out of her home office until she retired in 2012.
I was restless and wanted MORE COLOR! But I didn’t have a clue what to do. I had no motivation or focus other than knowing that I was “good with colors”
I started my blog, Teal Inspiration in 2015 as a way to share my love of colors with whoever was willing to read it! 😂
From my blog, I started getting requests from people to have me tell them what season they were. Something clicked and I realized that I could be getting paid for my color expertise!
I started scouring the internet for image consultant courses so that I could refine my skills and get certification so that I could be a professional at this color analysis thing.
It was incredibly difficult to find what I was looking for, but I eventually found a lady in the UK who teaches online courses on image and color consulting. I signed up and studied Advanced Fabulous Colour Analysis and got my certification online.
I learned a lot of more practical application tips from taking an actual course. And I discovered through discussions with the Facebook group for my course that I’m a Bright. I’m not exactly a season, I’m somewhere in the middle of Clear Winter and Clear Spring.
Knowing that I don’t exactly fit in with a seasonal group helped me to be able to help clients so much more because even though everyone wants to know what season they are, I can now tell them even more precisely what their personal colors are. Not everyone fits in with one of the 4 seasons or even the sub-seasons. There are also the tones: Deep, Light, Warm, Cool, Clear, and Soft. And many people, fit more into one of these categories than a seasonal box.
