Improvability Blog

And not what suits the world and his mother!

Several hundred years ago, I attended a full day’s presentation by one of the top health celebrities in the UK. Marvellous day, excellent lunch, and some great talks – except for one.

For some inexplicable reason, the celebrity concerned decided to enlighten us all as to grooming (or some such title). 

Maybe one of the guest speakers didn’t turn up and she had to fill in for them? Who knows?

Can’t remember much of what she talked about but I do remember two items that she mentioned that made my blood boil.

Now, this lady might have been an expert in her own field but colour analysis was clearly not one of her skills.

She took the time to name the make and shade of tights she was wearing, saying that these should suit everyone. "A bit of an outrageous thing to suggest," I thought, but I concluded, "What the heck! I suppose you could get away with it – at a stretch."

But when she named the make and shade of her lipstick and said that it would suit virtually everyone, I was absolutely horrified and, for once, I was struck speechless.

Let me tell you, that particular lipstick would NOT have suited me one bit.

In fact, I would probably have looked extremely gangrenous wearing it and you would have been carting me off to hospital!

And, looking around the room full of women desperately scribbling down these pearls of idiotic wisdom, I could see that it most definitely would not have suited about half of them either.

What amazed me more than anything was the way the women in the room devoured everything this celebrity was saying, as though it was gospel.  Utterly frightening!

Please don’t listen to rubbish

So, why would that lipstick NOT have suited half of the women in the room?

• Because the celebrity had warm skin tones and around half of the room had cool skin
• People with warm skin need make-up and clothes with golden or honey undertones
• People with cool skin need make-up and clothes with undertones of blue or rose pink
• This warm lipstick would have made the cool-toned ladies (like me) look yellow and ill

Find out what suits YOU, not blindly follow some generalised recipe for the world and his mother!

Please, please, please! Find out what suits YOU. Not what some daft celebrity with an over-inflated ego or an out-of-date image consultant suggests.

These generalities only add to the current recipe of mediocrity that fashion magazines and the media propound on an almost daily basis.

• You are not general
• You are not average
• You are special and unique and you deserve the very best

And don’t you dare settle for anything less!

How many times have you been given flowers, clothes, jewellery, scarves, candles, etc. in the WRONG colours for you?

You smile brightly (because you were brought up to be polite even when you’d rather just stamp your foot like Violet Elizabeth) but you really wish that sometime someone somewhere would stop for just a moment and actually take YOU into account, instead of buying you the colours that THEY like.

Sometimes miracles do happen

My little (!) brother brought his boys round today to wish me a Happy Birthday.

Here’s a photo of the beautiful flowers that they brought me for my birthday.

What really stunned me was that, on this occasion, he managed to get the colours just right – pink and white, with a touch of purple.

I was genuinely over the moon with them.

Perfick!