When I was young, an eye doctor sat me in his chair, leaned in to look at my face to help me pick out frames, and then told me I was striking.
I took offense.
At that age, I didn’t want to be striking. Striking sounded like the consolation prize – the thing people say when “pretty” isn’t available. I wanted to be pretty in the way the 1980s told me to be: the low-contrast, blue-eyed, sun-tanned look that felt like the mandatory currency of being a teenager. Instead, I hated my pale canvas. I spent years trying to run soft, cool-toned software on hardware built for high-contrast intensity.
I was fighting my own physics.
Decades later, the lesson finally came full circle: when you misread your own reality and force a look that doesn’t belong to you, you create friction. You get stuck.
Human pigmentation isn’t a lottery where features are picked out of a hat one at a time. It turns out a single biochemical pathway – the hidden ratio of pigments – sets your skin’s undertone, the warmth in your hair, and the melanin density of your irises all at once. One recipe, three expressions.
That golden-peach depth in skin, the rich amber flecks resting in warm, dark eyes (even if you’ve never noticed it before), the natural reddish-brown heat in hair – they aren’t three coincidences that happened to land near each other. They are expressions of the exact same instruction.
Your features are in harmony because they were never separate to begin with.
Which means fighting one of them means fighting all three. When I spent years trying to erase my fair skin, I wasn’t just editing the one feature I disliked. I was picking a fight with the very system that created the eyes I loved. You can’t remove half of a ratio without losing the magic of the whole.
And I didn’t understand this for the longest time: every summer, as my skin picked up color, I’d get restless and want to deepen my hair. For years, I dismissed it as vanity or boredom, just the restless impulse of a new season.
It wasn’t. When my skin darkened, the gap between my lightest values and my darkest values narrowed, and my face lost its definition. Reaching for a richer, deeper base was simply me instinctively restoring the contrast. My eye knew what the system needed long before I had the words for it. I had been reading the blueprint accurately for years, all while believing the blueprint itself was a mistake.
Understanding your baseline doesn’t lock you in a box, though. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It hands you the keys.
Knowing your collective undertones isn’t about trapping yourself in a rigid palette or letting a color analysis label sit over you like a jail sentence.
The truth runs much deeper. When you don’t know your substrate, every shift is a coin flip. You try blonde, it clashes, and you decide I can’t do blonde, when what actually happened is that you chose a temperature or a level (going too light, too dark, or too cool) that wasn’t yours. That’s how we get genuinely stuck: ruling out whole categories of who we can be based on one execution that fought our foundation.
When you understand the warmth and chemistry you’re actually working with, changing your look stops being an argument with your canvas. Instead, it becomes an exploration of it.
For most of my life, the question was what’s in this season? Now, the question is what is actually mine?
Over the years, I’ve had red hair, brown hair, and blonde hair. For a long time, I was convinced my foundation was light and cool blue – a perspective that kept me constantly trying to soften what was actually built for warmth and depth. The breakthrough came when I realized I was actually warm neutral, and it wasn’t about settling on a single shade at all. It was really about zeroing in on the tone. Once I stopped fighting my undertone and worked with the warmth instead of against it, every color suddenly made sense. It wasn’t about picking a swatch; it was about honoring the underlying temperature.
There is immense relief in that kind of seeing. It strips away the pressure of what you were taught to want, taking authority out of the marketplace and placing it gently back in the mirror.
When you stop editing your own architecture – your coloring, your depth, your particular way of moving through the world – you stop leaking energy into friction. You stop trying to acquire presence and simply start radiating it.
Striking was never the consolation prize. It was an accurate reading of a rich, high-contrast system by a man who spent his life looking closely at human faces, delivered to a young woman who had already decided her own canvas was the problem.
He wasn’t telling me what I had failed to be. He was telling me what I was. It just took me thirty years to finally see it.
If you’re wondering why I’m taking the time to write about color seasons and undertones, it’s because it all ties back to a single, essential principle: the more deeply you understand yourself and accept what actually makes you tick, the better prepared you are to see clearly. And once you can see clearly, you can finally shine.