Marilyn’s Story

Today

I have total control & confidence knowing how to choose and use color for terrific looking outfits and naturally beautiful makeup. I know exactly how to create striking home decor & colorful yet tasteful landscaping. I enjoy understanding how color, style and personality relate to others and myself. I get enjoyment and confidence from my knowledge. It allows me to have fun and be more creative. Though small, I love my closet and everything in it. I have less clothing but more outfits than ever before because of my knowledge. My biggest clothing challenge is to let go of old clothes because I still love them.

But It Wasn’t Always So

In my twenties and thirties, I felt constant anxiety and frustration in how to put my appearance, our home, and our yard together.

In an advanced tailoring class, I spent long hours toiling over an expensive wool coat. I’d bought the highest quality fabric because I thought I would love wearing this coat for years. But only one year later, wearing it made me feel tired and depressed. Horrific guilt surfaced every time I looked at it because of the cost of the fabric and the tailoring class, plus the time it took to make it. I didn’t know why.

I didn’t know how to prevent other clothing mistakes. At the same time, I had a cheap cotton gingham blouse that I wore over and over again—literally until it was threadbare. I remember a print dress of multiple shades of purple. Warned that purple was difficult to wear, still I wore that dress until it fell apart. Why had the wool coat failed while the purple dress had won? I didn’t know.

In a nutshell, I was confused about me. I wanted to know not only how to look good, but also how to decorate our home and choose distinct clothing for our family members. I wanted a system—a workable plan that I could simply apply to get fulfilling results in these areas of my daily responsibilities. I also wanted to stretch my mind, my interests. I wanted to grow, to expand—me.

I appreciated the tasks my life brought me. I was a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, a homemaker, a breadwinner, a bread maker, a chauffeur, a friend, a sister, a daughter, and community volunteer.  I played these roles willingly and lovingly. But . . .

I wanted knowledge . . . knowledge about me. Who was Marilyn? Was I anything other than my roles? Separated from those I loved, was I, myself, lovable? Capable? Creative? I believe that I already was this person. I just didn’t look like this person.

I decided, as part of my becoming, to work on a prettier facade. So I enrolled in a regional finishing school. I wanted to appear lovely and poised, but I lacked the necessary skills.

I had never thought of myself as a beautiful person. While my parents taught me to achieve in school and work, they also told me that makeup was unnecessary, even vain. They did not reinforce natural beauty as part of self worth. In fact, both my parents often told me I’d be “a wall flower like my mother.” So I, like many others, saw myself as unattractive, therefore unpopular.

Finishing school was fun. I learned how to order meals in French, how to stand and sit like a lady, even how to reduce my thighs and increase the size of my calves.

But when I finished the course, I still couldn’t go into a department store and confidently buy clothes and makeup that I knew complimented me. I knew how to act but not how to look. This frustrated me.

Beauty commands so much importance in our society. I was trying to understand how to better present myself, but all the tricks and gimmicks—the half answers—irritated me. When someone told me I looked lovely, I genuinely appreciated the compliment but I wasn’t certain why I looked good or how or if I could accomplish the same appearance again.

I wanted more than pretty. I wanted confident. I wanted capable. I didn’t want to rely on the opinions of others. What became a significant commitment for me—the search to understand color and beauty—began as a simple quest to improve my appearance. I wanted my look to accurately represent me.  I wanted a simple, direct plan to look good—one to make shopping and planning easy. It did not exist.

The Research Begins

I began by collecting bits and pieces of information that interested me. Eventually, and over 15 years, I compiled several volumes of data as my research drew me deeper into the knowledge of style and health.

At that time, I didn’t understand the role color plays in beauty but that soon changed with experience.

Analyzing Color

Since those days, I have been told that I am an “Autumn” or a perfect “Winter.” I’ve been analyzed both Color Key One and Color Key Two. I’ve been told I should be able to define my color by thinking in terms of a month or a time of day. I’ve been told I can wear any color If I change my makeup. (I’d already done that and didn’t like the results.) I wanted answers that were reliable, predictable, and simple.

Many systems of color analysis exist. Over the years, I investigated each new wave of color “discovery” that hit the beauty market. But the story was always incomplete. Nowhere did anyone explain the science of why or how one color looked better than another. How could I make intelligent suggestions for my client’s use of color when the existing theories lacked predictable results?

I needed a precise understanding of color law. I believed in color as a true principle for creating a beautiful appearance because I had seen it at work.

I realized at this time that while we get teased a lot about our shopping, women have to shop. Their role as home and family manager requires it. Besides our own clothing and makeup, we buy clothing and makeup for our family and friends. We have to choose bedding, kitchen and bath linens, furniture, carpet, drapes and more. We buy most of the gifts. Usually we pick and coordinate the flowers in our yard. We also choose vehicle colors.

It can be fun to make all these choices. But think about how much more accomplished we’d be and feel with a system that connects us to our instincts in making all these choices.

My studies of existing color systems took more than 42 months as I traveled across the United States seeking out recognized color experts or reading their materials. Disappointed, I found these systems poorly founded, scientifically incomplete and arbitrary. I found myself left with many unanswered questions. I wanted information that would give me solutions.

At this point, I put all my existing knowledge of color systems aside. I decided that rather than try to work around or reform an existing system, I needed to understand color itself scientifically. I didn’t know what I would find. I just knew that no one else had answers. I believed that color law would provide those answers.

In the midst of this investigation, I began to formulate a logical argument—an incomplete syllogism.

First, your correct colors begin with the science of how all things are colored.

Second, the one constant color in each of us, regardless of race, is the color of our skin—more specifically, the proportion of colors that make up our individual skin. These colors are defined by the physical composition of our bodies, which remains the same from birth to death.

Third, if color interacts with other color (and it does), then that interaction is based on physical laws. If I understand those principles, then I will know why one skin color is complimented by one shade of make-up or clothing and made to look unattractive by another.

I knew natural laws govern color. I believed that by understanding those laws, I could purchase and coordinate my wardrobe with confidence. I could base my color decisions on scientific principles.

Most people, if they think about it at all, consider their color choices as strictly personal preference (like preferring strawberry ice cream to pistachio) or cultural habit (“pink is a more feminine color than red or blue,” “Mother always dressed my sister in blue and me in green so we could tell our things apart, and I’ve just stuck with it”), or a reliance on an outside expert (“the clerk says I look good in this color and she must know”).

I was seeking something more substantial—a method in which people could bring out the best in their natural features. I discovered. I learned.

I think my four greatest discoveries from my research are these:

Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with light. His work gave me a scientific constant; he was the first known to accurately name the primary colors and the first to form the color spectrum into a color wheel.

The discovery that the color law of light is the same color law by which our bodies are colored. This color law also correlates with pigment colors with which we color everything we design, manufacture, create, and paint.

The Impressionists’ use of color. My research in this area explained the reaction that happens to us when we place color on us in cosmetics, clothes, and hair color.

Leonardo da Vinci’s meticulous studies fueled the idea of how to use design in clothing, makeup patterns, and hair styles to give people the appearance of being ideally proportioned.

With these four discoveries, I created The Beauty Code™, a system that discovers your best colors and styles.