Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [10]
We will discuss clothing choices for both men and women in greater detail later in this chapter.
Visual Vibrancy
Certain colors and patterns of fabrics, shiny metal found in jewelry or eyeglasses, and harsh colors found in makeup produce what could be called an undesirable visual vibrancy. It is especially important to be aware of visual vibrancy when you are appearing on TV. Some examples are discussed below that relate to all personal appearances in general but should be especially noted when TV cameras are present.
When you look at your wardrobe and try to decide what you should wear, it is important always to view the article from the standpoint of the vibrancy of its color and pattern. If you are choosing earrings or jewelry, ask yourself if they will sparkle and glitter or dangle or otherwise outshine your eyes. Your eyes assist you in the transmission of your message. Your face is expressive, and we must see it first. Therefore, anything that outshines or outsparkles your eyes and face should not be your first choice.
Visualize, if you will, a young woman with frizzled hair down over the eyes, a scarlet line of shiny lipstick, glittery tinted glasses, long dangling earrings, multiple necklaces over a red sequined dress, and an arm full of quivering bracelets. This may be fine for the Academy Awards, but do you see or care who is really under there? Take the same woman, smooth the hair back so it does not obscure eye contact, remove the glasses, subdue the makeup, remove most of the jewelry, make the dress a soft raspberry color—and you will find a naturally beautiful person whose message you can pay attention to. The above is true for public appearances with or without TV cameras present.
If you are appearing on TV, you are dealing with high-powered lenses, and it is difficult for those camera lenses to balance certain colors—in particular, the color extremes of black, white, and red. Red, especially, contains the maximum amount of what you could call visual vibrancy; you see it long before you see the person. Clothes designers who wish their clothes to dominate, love for their clients to wear red. But red is an unstable color that “bleeds” around the edges and defies camera focus. In a group of four panelists, you will pick out the red dress or tie, and not the person. Alternative, middle-spectrum colors will be discussed in detail in the next sections.
Fabric patterns that might shimmer and vibrate on TV cameras include: striped, polka-dotted, iridescent, checked, or multicolored. As a TV viewer, you have probably noticed that strange shimmer effect (called a moiré pattern) when a reporter wears a striped shirt, a plaid tie, and/or a chevron-patterned jacket.
Also to avoid wearing are sequins, which are meant to reflect and dance in the light. On TV, sequins and other sparkling fabrics can be blinding.
It takes courage and discipline to wear plain colors and patterns that don’t “do anything.” They just photograph beautifully. (Note this short paragraph well; it may make all the difference in the world to your choosing fabrics as a public person.)
A quick trick: Just before you go on for a TV or other public appearance, shut your eyes halfway and look at yourself in the mirror. If some accessory you are wearing outshines you, take it off. Again, what the public must see first is you, plain and simple.
The Color Spectrum
When you see a beam of light dispersed through a prism, all of the colors are displayed. They are arranged in the order of their wavelengths. You also see these colors in a rainbow, in an artist’s or scientist’s chart of colors of the spectrum, and even in the “color bars” of the camera test pattern on your TV set. The two extremes of the color spectrum are black and white.
It is difficult for the eye or the camera to bridge the distance between the two. That explains why a still or TV camera can have trouble with a white face with a black dress, or a black face with a white