Jul 12, 2024 4 min read

In 1974, I was an autumn. Or maybe a spring, I don’t remember. But that summer we all were talking about our colors.

Some marketing genius came up with a way to make money by telling people what color is best for them, based on hair and eye color as well as skin undertones. I don’t know whether we actually paid for the consultation, but the women in my family submitted to someone putting bibs under our chins to decide which colors were most flattering.

“Yellows and purples work with green eyes,” I recall someone telling me, and I believed it. This is why when my classmates were having their high school senior photos taken in lovely blue blouses, I wore a yellow T-shirt. Not a blouse or sweater – a T-shirt. Why did nobody stop me on the way out of the house?

A decade after that color consultation I started my television career, and with that came the necessary questions about aesthetics. My first anchoring job in Dayton brought meetings with an image consultant whose advice still rings in my ears: relax your hands, lighten your hair, and wear beige.

Beige, that least assertive and authoritative of hues. (You know what they say about mothers of the groom: wear beige and keep your mouth shut). And so a-shopping I went, scanning the racks for all the members of the beige family: oatmeal and tan and fawn and buff and sand. But never white, of course, because white was too much for the studio cameras.

Within a month of shopping and hair lightening, I emerged as pale and probably fairly invisible. Meanwhile, Diane Sawyer and the other snazzy anchor women were wearing bright red and navy blue and, oh, no, white! My ambition for bigger things sent me shopping again, and this time for color. I’ve eschewed beige ever since.

Forty years after its first go-round, color consultation is back. Social media threads are filled with videos showing how the right color will perk up a woman’s skin tone – and how the wrong color will turn her into a Mr. Yuk sticker. Apparently, everyone can wear red, but it has to be the correct red. Again, I’m not sure I buy into this. I’ll watch and try to guess which is the right color, and I’m usually wrong.

I can’t remember anyone ever telling me I look great in a particular color, but there was that time while anchoring the news in Pittsburgh when a snarky viewer wrote to me to say my hair looked terrible. That was around the same time a co-worker told me that my rust-colored jacket was wrong for me. I ignored the nasty letter about my hair, but not the comment about the rust. I never wore that jacket again.

Like many of us, my hair color and skin color change over time. I’ve had darker hair, and when I’m out in the sun a lot, a bit darker and freckled skin. I have no idea if my skin undertones are blue or pink. Green, maybe? Does sunburn count?

The new color consultants are charging lots of dollars for their services, and I will not be signing up. I have a lot of black in my wardrobe (apparently a definite no-no for women my age) and a lot of white shirts. My luck, the consultant would tell me those colors are all wrong for me and to start over and go shopping.

But since I’m thinking about this, what season looks good in black and white? Winter, maybe? Let’s just go with that.