Purple is one of the fashion colours of the moment, look hard enough in the shops and you can spot tops, skirts, coats, even handbags and shoes in purple. It's also a colour with many different associations. Possibly because there's a purple for everyone, it's a universal colour. There are the light lavenders for the pale and interesting among us, the violets for the warm skinned red heads, aubergine for the olive skinned brunette and plum for the cool grey haired.
It's the connections we make when we wear purple or see purple I'm particularly interested in - And it's ever since I rang one of my colleagues to see what to wear for a corporate event and asked her if she thought I should wear my purple suit. Being an image consultant like myself she had an opinion - "oh yes" she said "leadership colour but after all that's why you're there". After that I was fascinated - why had she said that - and if it was true I was definitely going to wear it - and did everybody else know?
Since then I've learnt that purple is a big ecclesiastical colour and used by the Church for Lent when the Church will be decorated with purple and the priest will wear it. And it's heavily associated with funerals and mourning probably from the Victorian days when women had to wear mourning dress for so long after members of their family died and made the switch from black to purple after a year or so in black. It's probably for this reason also, that purple can sometimes make the wearer depressed.
Wearing purple can send the message to others that you are sensitive and intuitive, however on the negative side it can also suggest that you are inward looking and superior.
Packaging items in purple gives the impression of quality and richness -think of a well-know chocolate bar, the suggestion of richness is probably a throw-back to the past when the dye was so expensive that only royalty were rich enough to afford to have items coloured purple.
"When I am old I shall wear purple............." by Jenny Joseph is one of my favourite poems and when I am doing colour analysis is often mentioned by myself or the client - most people seem to have heard of it. I particularly like the first line because it seems so right - purples, lavenders, and violets suit older people in particular and the reason for this is because peoples colouring can change as they age and usually what happens is that they lose melanin - we all get the natural highlights (varying shades of grey) and the skin softens and loses warmth and guess what? Because we lose warmth we tend to look better and better in purple. So if you're feeling your age, the next time you're looking for a new top or shirt check out the purples.
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Cindy Rossiter has been a Nottinghamshire award winning consultant with Colour Me Beautiful in the U.K. since 1991.
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