colour seasons in the 1980s + a mild obsession with beauty guides

   Before you had identically hot people telling you what to do to be hot on the internet, you had to walk to the store and pick up a magazine or, if you were thorough, an actual book- so that slightly less identically hot people could tell you what to do.

 Commercial beauty & hygiene (tomayto tomahto) guides seem to have been a thing since publishing went vogue, but I personally associate them the most with eras like the Gibson Girl age, the stringent 1950s, the 80s-90s, and in a different sense the magazine-heavy 2000s. We used to have actual purchasable print material that would tell you which of three pink lipglosses to wear to a New Year's Party. I miss that. 

 Sometime I'll find my giant old seventeen magazine beauty book from ca. 2011, which I think is kind of like the vestigial tail we dropped shortly after instagram & pinterest took over, but for now I've been haunting the internet archive and looking at some 80s & early 90s guides, and I loooove the hair...the styling...the photography. It's so Prim but so Loud. The downside: these books tend to be super white, unless you find one specifically catered to Black women or women of colour. A lot of the wordage in these books is...flawed. To say the least. 

  These pages on colour seasons (and apparently secondary colour seasons? I had no idea we ever had that nuance.) are from a book called Always in Style with Color Me Beautiful, written by Doris Pooser and published in 1985. Excuse my slightly sloppy screenshots. 

Get a load of Joan. Like, she knows. I need that blouse so bad. 

Holly has a sort of Jodie Foster thing I love. 

I'm almost surprised there are only three L[au/o]ri[e]'s? Lori looks like a Fern Gully character and it's so glam. 

Jeannie is another case of 'blouse I must have'. The pleats!!!

What's your take on colour seasons? I'm horny for taxonomy and archetypes so I think they're kitschy and fun, but I find taking them too seriously kind of depressing. I think I'd be an AUTUMN winter according to the styling here? I'm auburn-headed and pale. I do know for a fact that I look hot in deep purples and golds! 

Here are the ladies' close-ups as individual images. Thank you for your glamour Patricia, Susan, Joan, Carol Ann, Sharon, Holly, Laurie, Valerie, Lori, Jeannie, Phyllis, and Jennifer!