Periwinkle blue. And you?

When I was a senior in college, my roommate - and one of my closest friends to this day - gave me a velour bathrobe for Christmas. It was periwinkle blue. When I opened the box, Joyce said to me, "This is a color you should be wearing."

Fast forward a decade and 'getting your colors done' was a very big deal. So I had my colors done. I can't remember all the details - I think someone at work arranged for a 'color pro' to come in after hours and do color analysis for a bunch of us - but I definitnely had it done.

Sure enough, when they draped the periwinkle blue swatch so that it framed my face, periwinkle blue was my color. I was a Summer. Blues. Pinks. Violets. 

Turns out, those were the colors I'd always gravitated to, and this is probably true for a lot of people. You tend to wear the colors you look best in, the ones that make you feel good, the ones that get you the compliments. But I liked getting my colors done, as it explained some things. Like why I never, ever, ever wore the fabulous, deeply discounted, gorgeous camel-colored jersey dress I snapped up at Loehmann's. It sucked every bit of color out of my face and made me look like a cadaver. In contrast, on the same trip to Loehmann's I'd gotten a less high-end, less fabulous, polished-cotton shirt dress in China blue. Which I wore all the time.

The color analysis I had done was based on the Color Me Beautiful system. Folks took part in color session and/or bought the book, which was a wild best seller. (Just googled: over 20 million copies have been sold since the book was published in the early 1980's. A couple of people I know bought it.)

It is in no way a surprise that my friend Joyce analyzed my colors before color analysis was even a thing, as she always had a tremendous fashion sense. She had an uncanny knack for pulling outfits together from disparate pieces that I never in a million years would have felt went with each other. I always looked better when Joyce "dressed" me. (She went on to have a very successful career in the fashion biz, topping out as the head designer ready-to-wear buyer at Neiman Marcus. In her position there, she was a regular at fashion weeks in NYC, Paris, Milan, and knew all the major designers who, naturally, wanted their lines on the racks at NM.)

Anyway, although I do wear black on occasion, 95% of what's in my wardrobe is from the summer palette.

But I haven't thought a lot about getting my colors done until I came across an article in the NY Post on how "the hottest reservation in town is being told the colors you’ve been wearing for years are all wrong."

When I first saw the clickbait on this article, I saw the number 2,000, and thought that's what people were paying to have their colors done. That's not the case. But Seklab, a Midtown Manhattan salon that offers color analysis, does have a waitlist with over 2,000 people on it.  

In New York City, there are currently only a handful of businesses offering the service, and their appointments are going fast.

“It’s like booking concert tickets,” says Lizzie Heo, 32, co-founder of Seklab with sister Lily, 29.

The sisters book about five appointments a day, and when new reservations come available - which happens twice each month - they're quickly snapped up. A personal analysis takes 80 minutes, and costs $245. (My friend Shelly remembers getting her colors done when she turned 30 in 1984, paying about $40. General inflation would put that number at $120, but Shelly went as part of a group of five, and they were there - as she recalled - for about 2 hours. So $245 for 80 minutes for a personal appointment in New York City sounds about right.)

The Heo sisters trained for their business in Korea, where color analysis is very popular. 

Color analysis, by the way, has gotten more sophisticated over the decades.

Back in the day, you were a Winter-Spring-Summer-Fall. These days - based on Korean color analysis - each season has three subgroups. 

And old-school color analysis, with or without subgroups, could be faulty. 

One person interviewed in the article had had her colors done back in her teenage years (she's now 50) through "Color Me Beautiful," which declared her a winter (white, black, jewel colors). Seklab declared her a "light spring" ("Easter egg colors"), which she finds suits her much better. 

Interestingly, the woman who's palette changed was from a Korean background. It would not be all that shocking if it turned out that the original "Color Me Beautiful" system was more oriented towards caucasions. The Seklab Korean system may well be more nuanced. 

Seklab has competitors. At a House of Colour franchise in Brooklyn, it costs $585 for a two-hour private color analysis session. A color analyst on the Upper West Side charges $299 for a one-on-one. She's booked through July. 

I looked for local color analysts, and there's one in Cambridge where you can get your colors done for $400 for 2-3 hours. So the NYC numbers aren't out of whack at all. 

Now that there are 12 palettes (4 seasons x 3 subgroups), maybe I should get my colors done again. As long as I can still wear periwinkle blue...