The Theory of the Color Wheel

The color wheel is something that I am sure a ton of people have seen. It is used by basically anyone who uses color. A few examples would be a painter, graphic designer and even interior decorators. Someone who dyes hairs would also be very familiar with the color wheel. Hello, Ombre!

Well you may be wondering why am I bringing this up since this is a beauty blog?!

These same principals would be applied to makeup as a basic guideline as to what the "complimentary" colors are. Most of you know that I do not abide by these rules exclusively.

Here is a quick breakdown of how this works.

The colors that are directly across from each other are the colors that make the others stand out. These are called complimentary colors.

For example, I have green eyes so a color that I could wear that would really make my green eyes stand our is Red, this then translates to anything in the red family, so that covers pink and purple. This range would be called Monochromatic.

If you have blue eyes, Orange would be the color. That sounds really scary to people, but rest assured knowing that browns would be in that color family. 

Brown eyes is an awesome thing to have when it comes to makeup. If you have brown eyes, you can consider that like having a neutral paint color. You can pair it with any color for accent and it will look awesome. See I would love to wear blue eye shadows - tastefully that is, but it looks really odd wearing blue shadow with green eyes.

Once again I don't believe that there are specific rules and guidelines in makeup but this is just a good way to look at it. 

There are many more detailed color wheels available to look at that cover all of the different colors and mixtures of colors. The Primary colors as you know are Red, Yellow and Blue. The Secondary colors are what you get when you mix the primary colors together. The fun part is the Tertiary colors, this is what you get when you mix different Secondary colors together, like Blue-Green or Red-Orange.

What are your thoughts on the color wheel? Is this something that you have had to use in the past?