Color Me Beautiful Book

Recently a thread of Clever Cool Types on Goodreads were dissing this, which made me think about it some more.

This book is of the recent past period that people always spurn the most viciously. In this case, awful, AWFUL pictures of middle American women wearing hideous clothes, hideous hair and makeup. I didn't say hideous makeup because it would be redundant. Not only that, it has become a capitalist industry propagating via the Internet, a rather ironic development since part of the original message was to spend less.

But one of the commentators on the dissing thread caught my attention for his rather patronising attitude that it was a cheap con to get the gullible. That really jarred with me. I don't know many dumb women. The women I know who wear makeup, get their bodies changed, spend fortunes on perfume (and a gadzillion other things I disapprove of) are scientists and doctors and teachers and lawyers and politicians and diplomats and options traders and world champions of this or that. They couldn't be a less gullible group. None of them are conned into the stuff they do.

I was introduced to this book by an artist, as it happens, a strong-willed person, if ever there was one, who has always led her own life. You go to her house and she will show you things of glory she has made, the glory of which is embedded in the colours. She understands colour. I didn't (and probably still don't). You have to read this book, she said. Know your colours. I love the open-mindedness of Mary-Anne. If she judged this book by its cover, or by the photos in it, she would have put it back on the shelf and wiped her hands afterwards. But she judged the book by what it said. If it wasn't the first book to talk about this, it was at least the first to make the ideas accessible to the world at large. These days you'd say it went viral, I guess. Mary-Anne used to buy ever copy she could find to give all her friends: it is how I got my copy.

Colour affects my mood and needless to say, the colour I carry around on me all day is going to have that effect. Colour is an extension of me. Without knowing the science of it, I am aware that some colours make me feel good and some colours make me feel bad. To have some explanation of this was a liberating experience, as knowledge so often is.

The book may have been a simplistic generalisation, but gee it was good, the core of it. Nothing brings that home to me like thinking of Genia. Every now and then I knit something in a colour I shouldn't wear. I know when I'm knitting it that I shouldn't be. But I finish it and put it on. Genia is a Siberian who has never heard of Colour Me Beautiful. Every time, however, she sees me in something I shouldn't be wearing, something that breaks my season colours, she scolds me. The correlation is 100% and that is for the obvious, simple reason that the book works.

and from my original thoughts:
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Changed my life? Only a teensy bit, really......