Style POV
We are here to examine our relationships with style and aesthetics. The goal is to learn to trust our fashion instincts, develop a unique style POV, and find strength through style.
Style POV
Style Essences with Rachel from Truth is Beauty
Exploring the System of Essences with Rachel from Truth is Beauty
In this episode, I chat with Rachel, a fashion, style, and color consultant known for her website Truth is Beauty. We dive into the concept of Essences and how Rachel's unique system was developed. She shares her journey of studying style analysis, the creation of her essence hybrids, and the making of her popular style calculator. We also discuss the complexities of self-perception, style adaptability, and finding harmony in one's personal beauty through a blend of essences and styles. Tune in for an insightful conversation on embracing and enhancing your natural beauty.
Where to find Rachel:
Her Website: Truth-is-beauty.com
00:00 Welcome and Introduction
00:33 The Inception of the Essence System
02:00 Exploring Core Types and Hybrids
05:26 Creating the Essence Calculator
07:39 The Impact of Color and Style Analysis
19:31 Balancing Essences in Outfits
29:21 Personal Style Analysis Process
32:21 Exploring Medium Values in Style
33:01 Mature vs. Youthful: Age and Perception
34:12 Celebrity Examples and Style Evolution
34:59 Analyzing Youthful and Mature Essences
36:38 Guiding the Next Generation in Style
37:52 Embracing Individual Beauty
41:16 Masculine vs. Feminine Beauty
43:30 Navigating Style Analysis and Personal Growth
48:05 Practical Tips for Style Exploration
57:25 Final Thoughts on Personal Style
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Disclaimer: The Style POV Podcast content is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The views expressed by hosts and guests are their own. Gabrielle Arruda is not liable for any errors or omissions, and listeners use the information at their own risk.
Gabrielle: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. I am so excited to welcome this week's guest on the podcast. Her name is Rachel. She is a fashion and style and color consultant and you all know her from her wonderful website. Truth is Beauty, that is truth-is-beauty.com and we are gonna have a lovely discussion all about Essences today.
Gabrielle: So thank you so much Rachel, for coming on. I'm so excited.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Thank you. So thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Gabrielle: I know your system is a big hit in my Facebook group and everyone resonates with your essence system. So let's start at the beginning. What was the inception of your system?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: So I think probably like a lot of women who are into style analysis, I started many years ago with the question of is there a logical way to predict what would look good on me besides just my gut or what the magazines tell me? Maybe about 16 years ago, I started digging into that [00:01:00] question, and probably like everybody, I discovered David Kibbe and John Kitchener, and then working backward from them, I really dove deeply into it, reading Harriet Mc trying to figure out, okay, what's really going on here?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: It made sense to me that there would be these core types.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And some of the types I thought, that's definitely a thing. And then others I thought, I feel like there's something missing here. For example, I think McJimsey had an Ingenue and I think David Kibbe dropped the Ingenue. Yes. And I felt to me it seemed, Ingenue belongs in there.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: It seemed unusual to me that we had natural and dramatic as Mature, masculine beauty on one side, but on the feminine side, we just had romantic. That was a big sticking point for me because I thought, I know a lot of women have mature feminine beauty, but I don't think romantic is all there is.[00:02:00]
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And then a lot of people, I discovered John Kitchener and I said, that's it. That's, this is the feminine corollary of dramatic is this angelic.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah.
I felt we have an earthbound masculine and feminine which is natural and romantic, the physical earthly masculine beauty and feminine beauty.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And then we have the childlike masculine and feminine, which is gamine and ingenue, and I love the symmetry that's going on. And then we have these kind of abstracted or extreme or idealized feminine and masculine, which is how I understand ethereal and dramatic. And then classic is this balanced space in between all of the mature types of beauty.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And then I thought I like that Kibbe tried to get methodical and categorical about subtypes.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: But my idea was we need to do that completely. We need to make every dramatic combination, every ethereal combination, every natural [00:03:00] combination and after I had come up with every two essence hybrid,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: my best effort to define them and identify what I thought were their core traits, then I thought, What about three essence hybrids?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think those exist. . Why don't I try to identify all those and elaborate all of their traits at that point, just numerically? Yeah. I thought, I feel like 63 types is about the limit. of what I can extend, and maybe three Essences is about the limit of what a woman can express visually. Yeah, there does come a point I think where you're running out of different things to say with what you're wearing
Gabrielle: Yeah, and it can get difficult to mesh Opposing elements as well and in one outfit seamlessly if you're trying to pull from opposing essences So you started off with two and you worked through [00:04:00] that whole process, you got your kind of prime examples and your descriptions.
Gabrielle: So you were expanding Kibbe's idea of, image identities, playing off some of what Kitchener had, but you really started to focus in on these hybrids then. Yeah. Then it was all about, what do these three things All do together. So 63 was your number. Now, when you say 63, does that mean that someone has equal amounts of each essence?
Gabrielle: Or just that all three essences are present?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I don't think if a woman is a two way blend or a three way blend that she necessarily has equal amounts. In my experience, it's rarely the case that she does. I have an analytical mind, I became determined to try to assign a mathematical value to how much of each essence a woman has.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: John Kitchener does this too. And it's been it's been so long since I started on this journey. It's possible that John Kitchener [00:05:00] inspired me to try to do that. And I don't totally remember what it was like the day that I decided. I'll try to assign percentages to these, but I think, for me, assigning percentages makes sense.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Because a woman who is 80 classic and 20 percent natural looks different than a woman who is 80 percent natural and 20 percent classic. Her best clothes are similar, but not identical.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah.
Gabrielle: And that's where you created your calculator, correct?
Gabrielle: As
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: well? So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Gabrielle: Oh,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I love that calculator. Yeah. It took a really long time to make. I really like spreadsheets. They just appeal to the organized analytical side of me. Yeah. And I was convinced that in style analysis, like in color analysis, The ultimate decider has to be not, let me back up and say, in sci art, in color analysis, we know that you're [00:06:00] not a bright spring because of your eye color, your hair color, or your skin tone.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: You're a bright spring because those are the colors that bring you to life and make you beautiful. Yeah. And so I thought. The same must be true with style. It must be the case that if a woman is strongly ingenue, it's not because of her forehead or her lips or her hair, it's because ingenue clothes are the clothes that bring her to life.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And you don't have to be able to point to anything. So then I started thinking, how could I create a tool that a woman could use in her own living room where she could figure out what proportion of each of these essences she has. So I made all these Pinterest boards, and I made this big spreadsheet where she enters values and scores herself, or has a friend score her, because I think sometimes friends are more objective.
After fussing around with it for a long time, and testing it on different famous people, and on myself, and on my friends, I came up with a tool that I think is pretty decent at Finding [00:07:00] what are the proportions of these different essences.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: So And I was really happy.
Gabrielle: I know. It's a labor of love, right?
Gabrielle: Yeah. You have this vision, and it's like you have to, 63 is a lot and you have to include all these different elements to each of the seven essences and how they work together. I want to ask you about something you just said. You mentioned that you don't look at individual features, like you're not looking at a large forehead or big lips or so. Do you look at the entire face? Do you look at the body? How do you parse through it? Is it coloring? Is it what are the elements that you find most?
Gabrielle: impactful for determining, let's say, those essences.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think, again, color analysis is a really good analogy. Before I even got into style analysis, I had bought a set of sci\art drapes. I hadn't been formally trained by Christine Scaman, but we had communicated a lot back in 2009, 2010, 2011 by email.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I had gone really deeply in color [00:08:00] analysis. I came to understand that when a woman had the right drapes, it wasn't necessarily that you could articulate what it was doing to her face. It was just apparent, the gestalt of everything. The eyes, the skin. It's just, comes to life.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: The
Gabrielle: picture comes to life. Yeah. I really feel like it's like a light bulb is turned on. And it's not that other colors are terrible, but in my own journey I had people who, when I thought I was a summer, was like, oh, this is such a beautiful color on you. And now when I wear spring, it's whoa, I just see you in a whole new light.
Gabrielle: Like I just, it's, I see you differently now. There's a different energy. There's like your face looks different. It's just like the picture wasn't. Fully painted or finished. Yeah, and with that color underneath it. It's like the right support system
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: It's an emotional reaction or maybe a physical reaction in the body [00:09:00] I think I visited Zion National Park for the first time several years ago, and there's a famous Drive into the park where you go through a tunnel and you're not really sure what to expect and then you come out of the tunnel and suddenly You emerge from the darkness and before you is the most glorious landscape you've ever seen.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And just this feeling comes over your whole body like, Oh my gosh, what is this unbeholding? And I think when you see a woman suddenly in the right colors it's a feeling in your body. All of this is to say that, When I analyze a woman and I'm trying to determine her style type, I will have a hunch, maybe, I might think to myself, those look like dramatic eyes, or I think those are romantic lips.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: But I resist the urge to let that hunch push me in one direction or another because I know that when I see the right clothes, I'm gonna have that same Zion National Park feeling. It's just gonna suddenly, and a [00:10:00] lot of times it's a surprise, a lot of times I look at the clothes, they're incredible, and then I check what type this is, and I think, I had no idea she had dramatic.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: It didn't even occur to me. But there it is in front of me. My eyes aren't lying. The physical reaction in my body isn't lying. This is beautiful for her.
Gabrielle: Yeah. It's I have that same experience when I've started doing color analysis. Sometimes you have a hunch and people always have thoughts I think I'm a warm spring and you're like, okay let's see, or you think in your head, maybe you could do this, but then you put that I don't know, bright winter drape on her and you're like, oh no, this is it.
Gabrielle: It's like a megaphone, like shining, like this is what you can look like. It's amazing. Isn't
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: that funny? Sometimes I think, and I think this is true in color analysis too, a woman looks beautiful. But you don't know yet, is this the most beautiful she can look? So you keep going and keep going until you've tried everything and then you have found at that point just how beautiful she can be.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And sometimes it's more [00:11:00] than you expected.
Gabrielle: Absolutely. And I think it's complicated though because when people get invested in essences and they try to determine it themselves. How do you think that personal bias, or style aesthetics, or trends end up playing into this? Because it's hard, sometimes people get so attached to something like, they have this idea, and they're like, I want to be Angelina Jolie in this movie, and they're like it's a different vibe on you.
Gabrielle: Can you wear it? Maybe, but it's just not going to be Angelina Jolie, who I think, You have as romantic, dramatic, classic? I think she's romantic,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: dramatic, classic, yeah. Oh, this is a tough issue because I feel so much for women who want to be one thing and a style or color analyst tells them there's something else.
Gabrielle: Yeah. It's
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: not what they want to hear but integrity is a really important idea to me and I feel that What I owe women, more than anything, is my honest judgment. I try as [00:12:00] much as I can not even to find out ahead of time what a woman hopes that I will tell her.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Nonetheless, sometimes I can infer it, or sometimes she'll just come right out and say it.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I have to really discipline myself not to let myself be drawn in the direction that I know she'd like me to go in, and instead just to go in the direction that My aesthetic judgment tells me it's correct
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: most of the time The reaction that women have to the answer that I give them is very positive yeah, over the years there have been a couple women who it just wasn't what they were hoping for felt So when I first got color analyzed many years ago I wanted to be a soft summer and I sent off my pictures to this woman and I said I think I'm a soft summer.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And she wrote back, after much analysis I've determined you're a soft autumn. And so I wrote to her, okay, are you sure though? Maybe you should take another look. And her response was on second thought, I think you're a soft [00:13:00] summer. And I was so thrilled to hear that, but I didn't believe it.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Because I felt I had talked her into it. And then I went to another color analyst, had the same back and forth with her. I said, are you sure I'm a soft autumn? Maybe I'm a soft summer. And she said, you're not. You're not I know you're not and here's how I know it and I went through about two days of grieving and then Yeah, right and then at the end I came out of it with an enormous respect for this woman because I had tried to nudge her and Toward what I wanted to hear and she wouldn't let me do it She told me what she believed was true and she was right
Gabrielle: And that's the thing is I had this similar experience because I Went to Christine Scaman to get my training And we did my analysis as part of my training and you know I was sitting there and we were doing the drapes and we ended up with bright spring to bright winter and like literally I thought bright spring was the last one I would ever be and like I'm sitting there being like please not bright spring just anything but bright spring like I don't know what to do with bright spring and she was like no you're bright spring [00:14:00] and it took me like a little while to understand how this could work with my style and this leads me to my next question is like how malleable do you think that is?
Gabrielle: Is there a sexy outfit for every kind of essence blend, or an intense outfit for every different hybrid?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: If I were, like, a beauty writer for a magazine, I would write an article that said, Every woman has a sexy look. Every woman has a business look. Cause I know that's what we all want to hear that would make us really happy.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: To be really faithful to what I believe is true, I think that there are some very natural women who are never going to look their best in traditionally sexy clothes. And I think there are some very ingenue women who are never going to look their best in clothes you would wear to your corporate job.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I [00:15:00] think this is just the truth of beauty and the truth of clothing. Having said that, it's nice to know how to cheat a little bit. I'm never gonna be my most beautiful in a suit that I would wear in a boardroom, but if I need to wear a suit in a boardroom, there are ways that I could make it the best it can be for me.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Which would still not be my most beautiful, but would be possibly as good as I can look in that context. If I can bring in just a little ethereal natural in some of the texture or some of the color or maybe just a single detail somewhere close to my face.
Gabrielle: Yeah, do you think that's people in general struggle with certain style and trends and like that kind of like hamster wheel and style transitions like they have a new corporate job and they just can't find anything that works for them or they are they're always appearing too young in the office or And this is where the style issues come from and maybe [00:16:00] learning their essence blend can be that like Unlocking at least the information like I know why this is now not working for me
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think yeah, that's absolutely true and Although I think it's very difficult for us as women to do this, I think we have to try to decouple what we see is true about our own beauty from our value judgments of good and bad.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: For example, I want to be able to say about myself, I understand that a blazer and a tucked in shirt and a knee length skirt are never going to be my best, but I'm saying that to myself without Feeling bad about it without it being a judgment on me. And if I have to go work in the corporate world and that's my uniform, I'm going to radically accept that it's not gonna be my most beautiful look, but I can tweak it to make it pretty good.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I can leave the house in the morning understanding that if I were, running through a field on a Saturday [00:17:00] afternoon, I'd probably look a little more beautiful, but it's okay. It doesn't have to be about whether I'm a beautiful human being.
Gabrielle: Yeah. We all have those like shining outfits, and they don't work for every part of our lifestyle.
Gabrielle: Now, what would you say are those little details someone could integrate to cheat a little bit?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: So depending on how flexible a person's work environment is, for example, most of us, I think today, as time has gone by and just everything everywhere has gotten more casual and laid back and less strict.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think women in almost any work environment have a lot more flexibility than they did say, 50 years ago. If she must dress in a way that she knows isn't really the best context for her beauty, if she can bring in just a little something close to the face that can make a huge difference.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: For example, a woman who's strongly romantic and has to wear an ensemble that is absolutely not romantic in the least, If she could just have one pair of [00:18:00] ornate, jeweled, beautiful, dangly chandelier earrings.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Even if the whole rest of it has to be shorts and a t shirt because she works at an amusement park.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Who knows? I think just that. Because this is where her eyes are going to the face.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: That's going to help her romantic beauty shine out.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Even
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: if the rest of her isn't. exactly what could be, what would set off her beauty most perfectly in an ideal situation.
Gabrielle: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to talk about like base pieces too because in fashion design, we do this thing called croquis, which is we like start with one design and we take that design and we tweak it a little bit, just a little bit, each changing like one design element as we go, and we do them really fast, like one, two, three, four, five, you're just changing things ever so slightly, but the base piece is the same thing, so I like to put that into the fashion realm too, because I think if you took let's say a t shirt and jeans, But the romantic wears [00:19:00] those chandelier earrings and a red lipstick and then the ingenue does like a dainty ballet flat and a cute headband.
Gabrielle: So it's like you're taking these pieces and you're just tweaking the overall essence of the outfit, and I think that's a really interesting way to cheat what our lifestyles need. Because we would all love to, if we're natural ethereal, to be running through forest in like a beautiful flowy gown or something, but like maybe your lifestyle doesn't incorporate that every day.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. A hundred percent.
Gabrielle: So I totally understand that, everyone has these three main essences. Now, how do people work through once they find out their three main essences, the balance in an outfit. So let's say, Like you can give an example of a celebrity or someone you think does this really well or even just three essences and how you might build an outfit.
Gabrielle: I'd love to hear your kind of take on.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I will say that sometimes I, I find a woman who I think just has two and on a few [00:20:00] occasions I found a woman who I thought was a pure type. That's pretty rare but a couple times I saw it. When I do a personal style analysis, I give women a lot of pretty detailed information.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I wonder if it's more detailed than every woman would want. Maybe the women who come to me are women who are really into detail like I am. And that includes information like, what would be your ideal ratio of straight lines to curving lines? What would be your ideal ratio of Perfect fit to roomy fit to snug fit.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I determine this based on what percentage of each essence I believe they have.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I think each of those aspects, so like fit and line length and line shape. Shape, size, structure versus lack of structure is maybe a different lens through which to view your ensemble when you're looking in the mirror in the [00:21:00] morning.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. So for myself, for example, I'm about an equal balance of natural and ethereal. And so natural is going to call for natural fabrics, which probably everybody in your audience could name because I know they're very versed in all this stuff. Like things that are rough or natural, like leather and raw edged hens and stuff like that.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And then ethereal is going to call for things that are more light and floaty and delicate.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Ideally I would have a roughly equal balance,
Speaker 3: but
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: if I see that my ensemble is leaning really strongly, let's say ethereal in my fabric.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Then I want to balance that by having it lean more strongly, natural, in maybe my palette
In order to maintain a roughly equal balance, if I have like head to toe ethereal fabric, I might try to do a really earth toned palate to give [00:22:00] this sort of 50 50 percent. And I give women , in my reports, very specific advice about you should have most of your outfit, for example, be roomy and then maybe just a little bit fit you properly.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And if a lot of it is fitting you properly, you should bring in more of a certain type of detail or a certain type of fabric in order to bring back, let's say, the dramatic or the natural that you need to bring in to achieve the balance that works for you. So
Gabrielle: are we always shooting for individual pieces to have both?
Gabrielle: Let's see, in your case, you're looking for a shirt that has a natural touch and an ethereal touch, or is it sometimes you go for an ethereal top with a natural bottom
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think both of them work. I think both of those are good ways to approach it. It may be. And I talk about both of these with my clients that.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: One approach which is really easy, so to use [00:23:00] myself as an example, is to find something on the rack that is both ethereal and natural. That's easy peasy and then I can fill my whole wardrobe up with pieces that are part ethereal and part natural. But I can also have a bunch of separates that are almost totally ethereal or almost totally natural and pair them together in different combinations and yeah that's another way to go.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think depending on the style type for example, if a woman is Dramatic Gamine Ingenue, which is a really unusual style type those are some weird combinations to have together. Yeah. It would be hard to find a lot of individual pieces or accessories that combined all three of those.
Gabrielle: Yeah. In
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: that, in that woman's case, she's probably going to want to have individual Dramatic items, individual Gamine items, individual Ingenue items. And
Gabrielle: it's going to be a little bit more mix and match to understand, okay, I went too dramatic here, or the outfit rhythm was off, or the [00:24:00] balance points are just getting confused.
Gabrielle: That makes sense that if you can fill your closet with natural angelic mixed in, you already have the easy answer. This works for both of my essences, so it's going to work, but the dramatic Gamine Ingenue, they probably have a little bit more exploration to do once they get that blend.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, and this goes back for me to the desire to make people happy and wanting to give women an answer that's easy for them to work with versus wanting them to give the answer that I think is correct.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: When I discover a woman is, for example, dramatic, ingenue, there's a little voice in me that's like, all right, I'm going to have to tell her.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: This isn't an easy one. It's an extremely special beauty. It's a rare beauty. I think it's an honor to have that kind of beauty. But it's gonna be harder to shop for than, say, natural classic. There's no way around it. I just invite women to lean into it and embrace it and enjoy the fact that their beauty is so [00:25:00] unusual, even though it's probably gonna take more work to create that look.
Gabrielle: But sometimes that's good. I know, like, when I got my Bright Spring I was terrified of it. And Christine was like, this is common. People either love it or hate it. But, once I sat with it, once I worked through it, once I saw the vision, it was still scary, but much more doable, and I saw the transformation that could happen.
Gabrielle: So I'm sure the same is true with the Essences. When you get something that seems, like, how am I gonna build an outfit for this? You get a lot of introspection time to understand how you connect with these pieces. How do you like to imbue that ingenue? How do you like dramatic to show up? And with time it's a really gratifying process I can imagine because you see yourself in this new light.
Gabrielle: You're like, I get it now. I see who I'm meant to be, right?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. Yeah. And then hopefully going out in the world and getting the reactions from the people around you. Who suddenly say, my gosh, you look incredible [00:26:00] today.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, hopefully that, that positive feedback just starts happening and then when they look in the mirror, getting that feeling that's what you hope happened. But it can be difficult for women to take those first steps. And then on the other hand, there are a lot of women who say You know, I sensed it.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I felt it. I had a hunch and you confirmed it, which is easy.
Gabrielle: But so I know you offer style analysis packages and I definitely want to talk about that. But basically you give people a guidebook of all the elements that they need to consider and interpret. And, but at the end of the day, two people could have the same essence blend, correct, but still get.
Gabrielle: Different suggestions or their own personalized iteration that also involves them being like I like ingenue to be this, I resonate with this side of the ingenue and not that side
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, so two women with the same style type and really similar percentages I'll still give each of those women 40 or 50 photos of outfits that to use dramatic [00:27:00] ingenue again as an example that aren't DGI clothes, they're clothes just for this woman.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And it could be a dress that I also thought was beautiful for another woman, and it could be a dress that I've never thought was beautiful for anybody before this woman came into my life. And hopefully the women can use the portfolio pictures that I send them as their really individualized inspiration for their precise beauty, even if their percentages are really close to that.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: To another woman that I came across two years before and you know them and we also make our own Decisions, we make our own compromises with our daily life and our own decisions about well, how much of my style type am I going to manifest on any given day. There's an evolution I think a lot of us go through where we start out being lost and then we're searching for the answers and then We feel that we found the answers, and then there's this period of trying so faithfully to, to live [00:28:00] according to those answers.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I think that even beyond that, sometimes you get to a point where you give yourself permission to break the rules, just because it makes you happy.
Gabrielle: Definitely. I try to look at it like, these are all tools, not rules, and essentially we're like, essence and color. We're like, I like to think of it as like we're building like a platform, a pillar to support us and you get to step onto the pillar and be in the spotlight and all of these tools help support you to be in the spotlight and be your truest self, and you may lean one way in one lifestyle event, you may lean another way in another lifestyle event, but ultimately it's about making you shine and we need to get in touch with the journey process of this because I think a lot of people think that once they get like an essence blend or a color analysis or even a style analysis, that's they're like, okay, it's all figured out.
Gabrielle: I got the answer. It's done. And but the next steps are where you actually [00:29:00] bring this to life. Like you've got the recipe now you can follow it, but you know where you go from here, what you add, what you take out, what those are all personal tastes. Let's talk a little bit about your analysis package, and how you guide people from that kind of like messy middle, or unsure of my essence blend, to really having that strong foundation and style.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Women for whom I do a personal analysis, , it's a process that I think is probably unusual compared to a lot of analysts. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I think I read a few years ago that David Kibbe, for example, We'll spend maybe a whole weekend with a woman and go shopping with her and take her to lots of different stores.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And that's an experience that sounds amazing and I think a lot of women would want. I want to give a woman the most accurate feedback I can on her beauty without being influenced by who she thinks she is and how she holds herself out in the world. So I want pictures. I [00:30:00] want, 10, pictures. But I don't want to see a video of her.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I don't want to hear her voice. I don't want to see her posture or watch how she moves. I don't want any of that. Because I think, once I have a hunch about what kind of person she is, this is going to nudge me in a direction that maybe isn't toward the truth of her visual beauty. It's going to nudge me toward something else.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I want my answer to be 100 percent accurate for what she looks like. And when I'm able to give that to her, that may transform how she presents herself in the world, how she carries herself, and how she walks and how she talks. Or, it might just be an unusual addition to all of those things.
There are plenty of analysts who are helping women express not just what they look like, but also what they feel like inside, and I think that's totally a legit thing for women to want and go after. But It's not my mission. I wanna find what I think is [00:31:00] the truth of a woman's physical self.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And then she can take that information and do with it what she will. So I spend like about 15, sometimes like more like 20 hours over the course of seven days. Wow. Just looking and looking, just like hundreds of different photos and outfits and details. Next to all different versions of this face.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Waiting to have that Zion National Park feeling where I see it working. And then once I get the feeling that it's working, then I start chasing that. Oh, I feel like detail is working. What kind of detail? How about this kind of detail? How about that kind of detail? And then slowly, I can narrow in.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: After, usually about four or five hours in, I think. I have found I think I have the answer.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And then
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I start looking for clothes, but then sometimes when I'm looking for clothes, I get the feeling it's not working and then I have to rewind and reconsider.
Gabrielle: So it's a [00:32:00] very analytical, slow brewing process where you're trying certain details and you're seeing, is this the hybrid that works?
Gabrielle: No, I have to remove this one. Yeah. I know in color analysis sometimes when we're doing the draping We get to a point where people are like, but you said you didn't like any of these colors. And I was like, but there was something within that color properties, those color characteristics, that was right.
Gabrielle: You aren't a bright spring, but you do have that medium value. Let's try a different medium value. So it's like you pull things until all the levers
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: work. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, and I'm making notes to myself the whole time. Don't really love this, but something is working. Or, I like it, but it feels too mature.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Or I like the youthfulness of this, but it feels a little unconstructed and with those notes in my thinking and going back over things I looked at before and trying new combinations, I feel like I slowly am able to narrow in , on what is the truth of this woman's beauty.
Gabrielle: I love your, the name is just so great.
Gabrielle: Truth is beauty. It's [00:33:00] wonderful. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit, we've talked a lot about verbiage lately I want to start off by talking about terms like mature and youthful and how that affects in terms of age, like your age and maybe how that affects like your perception of yourself.
Gabrielle: Cause for me when I was like 17, I was very mature looking for my age, but it's I'm 20 years later and I still look like the same. I'm not trying to say I look like 17 year old, but I haven't, my features. Look very similar. So what I once thought of myself as mature looking, I now think of myself as youthful.
Gabrielle: So is there an age range that you recommend people assess things or that it might change with time or it might be misleading at a certain age
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: question. I don't think I've looked at enough women like 10, 20, 30 years apart say looked at a woman in her 30s and then looked at her 10 years later.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: To be able to give a [00:34:00] confident answer about how much these things do change over time. I think they, looking at celebrities that I think we all do, I think it can change a little. I'm not sure it changes a lot. When you look at a celebrity the first thing that comes into my mind, even though it's a guy, is Leonardo DiCaprio.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: When he was young, we could see he had a boyish handsomeness. And now he's older than me and he still has boyish handsomeness, he can definitely wear a bowtie He still has that sort of impish mischievous quality
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: So it could be if I analyzed a woman 20 years apart it could be that her percentages would change a little but I would be surprised if her overall style type changed
Gabrielle: Now what if they had a mature and a youthful essence combined with that kind of balance
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: might yeah Maybe or maybe change a little
Gabrielle: or maybe that one is just being more pronounced because of the clothes too.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I'm thinking [00:35:00] about my own chill I'm thinking about my daughter actually right now because she's interested in this stuff She's a young teenager and she asked me You know, Mommy, what do you think I am?
Gabrielle: Yeah, you have to give her the full package.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think, and I have thought for a while, that she has both a lot of gamine and a lot of ingenue.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: But I also suspect that some of that is because she's a child. Yeah. And that when she's 35 or 40, she maybe is going to have less of that. I don't know if it's going to go away altogether, but I think maybe as she grows into her adult woman phase. The part of her that's gamine Ingenue is gonna draw back a little and I suspect the rest of her is natural.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I'm not positive, but that's my hunch. And maybe her natural is gonna emerge more.
Gabrielle: So do you suggest there's like a certain age where people, you know, because I know McJimsey threw out like, oh, at 25 is a good age for you to hone in and that you could maybe mistake yourself for one of those [00:36:00] youthful Essences, if you do it before 25.
Gabrielle: I know it's not a hard rule, is there an age where just proceed with caution?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, I would be reluctant to take the money of any woman who wanted to analyze me who was, say, under 20. Okay. I would just, I would be concerned that maybe 15 years later.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: She's going to lose some roundness in her face or some fullness in her lips that are things that might have been signaling a certain essence to me, and that what I had initially told her may not be as true anymore.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Gabrielle: I could see that, absolutely. Now, I know a lot of younger people have been drawn to analysis and, essences, and I think that it's really interesting because I think As a society, we get so much stimuli with social media and so much access to trends and trends move so quickly that it becomes even more apparent to them that Hey, this trend [00:37:00] really doesn't work for me and I need to know why do you think that in a certain way, even if the essence is in 100 percent correct for let's say your daughter, that finding that beauty of where she stands now can still help her kind of see herself.
Gabrielle: In a version of truth. What's true for her at a young age.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, and maybe just in the case of my daughter, maybe just accustom her to the idea that what is going to be beautiful for her isn't the same as what is going to be beautiful for other girls. Yeah. That's a conversation we have a lot. I think any mom of a daughter probably has had this conversation.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Mom, does this look good on me?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And the
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: conversation I've had with my daughter a lot is I know this is really popular right now, but I don't super duper think it works for you. Or, I know a lot of girls aren't wearing this, but I think for you it really brings your beauty to life. Yeah. My hope for her is that as she enters adulthood, that she will be used to that way of thinking.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: That there are [00:38:00] things that are cool or popular that aren't necessarily the things that make her shine. Yeah, and that there are things that'll make her shine that won't necessarily be what everybody else is wearing.
Gabrielle: It's an individualization. It's like an internalization. It's an ownership. You get to decide I know this is popular, but I can also see that this doesn't make me feel my best.
Gabrielle: So I'm okay with leaving it on the shelf and I'm gonna hold something that I feel ownership of. I feel beautiful in and I feel connected to In a way that's more grounded and more real than just chasing every trend, which I know is difficult nowadays. There's so many trends. It's hard to keep up.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think it's hard for women, too. Looking at my daughter and her friends makes me think about and remember what it was like to be an adolescent. And how very much we wanted to look like the other girls. That need was so deep, and I think it, as women, it maybe [00:39:00] takes us a long time to find the courage to start to dress for our own beauty instead of dressing for what the magazines tell us the other women are wearing.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. I think that's really It is. I to be able to get away from that.
Gabrielle: And I think sometimes people discount like we put so much emphasis on youth in our like culture But I think like when I hit my 30s, I was like, this is awesome Like I finally see myself in a much happier light like I feel good in the clothes I wear like I don't feel like I need to pretend to be someone or keep up with someone So there's a freedom and kind of being like I can say no to this like I don't have to follow The biggest trends and I think that's like what essence is just allow you to see yourself in a new light They shine your beauty in a new way and you can appreciate it and you can say I get why I don't look like Angelina Jolie, Angelina Jolie doesn't look like me either and I can rock this, Puff sleeve frilly dress like no other on to do could or [00:40:00] whatever it is,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, that's the part of style analysis that I get a little emotional about honestly because I can remember being a young girl and wondering if I was pretty if I didn't look like other girls.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I think probably almost every woman on earth has had that fear as well. And the idea that every one of us could figure out what the truth is of our own beauty,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: and have
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: it be something separate from having to look like other people. I think there's something really just beautiful and fantastic about women being able to find the truth of, Beauty for themselves.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. Separate from what society tells them is beautiful.
Gabrielle: It's honestly honoring yourself, and honoring your place in the world.
Gabrielle: Because,
Gabrielle: If you copy so and so's outfit and their look and buy everything that they wear and you wear it in the exact same way, in essence you're losing a little bit of yourself.
Gabrielle: And we're all such individual, beautiful people. We deserve to take up our own space. We deserve to let [00:41:00] ourselves shine. And our style is a great way to do that and I just love the essence system for that. Now I want to talk a little bit about more about verbiage because you've used a lot of terms.
Gabrielle: I know that it's popular to talk about like mature and youthful and most people know what that means. Now you prefer to use masculine and feminine. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah that was a decision I made many years ago because I could see that that a lot of style analysts said yin and yang, or some people say yang.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I always just say yang. I've said both. I
Gabrielle: seem to get criticized each way I say it. I know, right? So you just gotta
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: pick one and stick with it.
Gabrielle: I know. Oops.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: To me, I'm just, I guess I'm a person who, if I feel like I'm saying something other than what I really mean, it makes me uncomfortable. And in my head, I was translating yin and yang as feminine and masculine, and I thought to myself If that's what I mean, why aren't I just saying that?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I suspected [00:42:00] that analysts wanted to say yang instead of masculine because they didn't want to say to a woman, you have masculine beauty. Because the feeling is, what woman would want to hear that? And I thought, if this is true though, if we are gonna say that we have a dimension and there are two poles and one of them, let's be honest, is a feminine pole and one is a masculine pole, let's just say it and destigmatize it and celebrate it.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Let's say, yes, some women have masculine beauty and that's okay. It's fantastic because this is the beauty that supermodels have and goddesses have. This is the beauty that is striking and unusual and makes people stop and stare. And I felt I think as women, we all want to be very, maybe not all of us, but I think a lot of us feel that we need to look and be very feminine.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I thought. We don't all have feminine beauty. I have a lot of natural. And I felt like the best way I can help women embrace the [00:43:00] masculine aspects of their beauty is to start by just radically accepting it and calling it exactly what it is. That was my feeling about it.
Gabrielle: Yeah, I can understand that.
Gabrielle: Most of the original text It's to use masculine and feminine. I think that where it's gotten like confusing for people is these topics have taken off, right? Like they are all over. I don't know about you, but like the past five, six, seven years, it's like style systems has just blown up and everyone is looking for the answer.
Gabrielle: And what happened was, is there was like a. Dissent of opinions about well being masculine as a female is bad if you're you know a natural or you're flamboyant natural and you have masculine energy Then you're not going to be seen as beautiful to the opposite sex and I think that's where it's become very triggering for people is that like they want to be considered a beautiful sexy woman And they don't like being compared To [00:44:00] a masculine so is there and it creates type resistance because they're like I don't want to be natural, romantic.
Gabrielle: I wanna be something more yin, something more feminine. That's a great to say
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: it. Type resistance. I love that. Yeah.
Gabrielle: And I think that's where everyone started to get whoa, pump the brakes because you can be beautiful as this blend. Look at this amazing supermodel. Look at someone like Julia Roberts, or I don't know how you've typed her, but someone that has that Oh yeah.
Gabrielle: She has that
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: really like horsy natural beauty. A hundred percent.
Gabrielle: Yeah. And she's stunning, and she looks amazing in practically anything, she looks effortless. And I think that, that's where that kind of leaning onto these words became such a prevalent thing for people because it made people resist what they were.
Gabrielle: And I think that maybe having an analyst like you walk them through it and show them that being striking doesn't mean That you wouldn't be considered beautiful in today's standards. It just means this is a new type of beauty. This is your beauty and [00:45:00] you should own it. And everyone's beauty is unique to them.
Gabrielle: Do you feel like you have to walk people through some of those terms or?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, I feel a little trepidation still about. If I'm bringing to a woman you have a mostly masculine beauty you're mostly natural and gamine and then maybe a little bit of ingenue. I feel like I need to do a little bit of explaining.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. I try to just trust that if I'm straightforward and I give her the truth that she's gonna respect that. But I do often add a little explanation for example a woman like me who has a lot of natural, If I put too much feminine detail around my face, the effect is I look more man ish.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And having less feminine detail actually results in me looking more feminine. This is one way I can present it to women that I hope. helps them be more comfortable with if they have a strongly [00:46:00] masculine beauty is the feminine quality of your beauty shines forth more strongly When you give it the appropriately masculine context So if you give it the minimalism or the straight lines That's what actually allows the feminine parts of your beauty to really stand out like with a gamine woman for example I think I read once that Winona Ryder, who's an archetypal, strongly gamine woman.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think I read once that as a child she was constantly mistaken for a boy. When you put a gamine woman in a boyish context, suddenly what jumps out is all of the sweetness of her beauty.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Whereas
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: if you put her in a very feminine context. She does start to look a little boyish, the irony of having these masculine beauties is, in a masculine context, the feminine parts of us, I think, shine more strongly.
Gabrielle: Yeah, I feel like sometimes at the end of the day, some of these words we use [00:47:00] don't we all assign meaning to them but at the end of the day, What we have to realize is how they work on our own figures. What is our truth to our beauty? What, is it straight lines? Is it dainty details? And what is that hybrid of your essence blend that makes all these unique words come together?
Gabrielle: So someone with, strong gammon essence or gamine essence, however you would like to pronounce it. That's another
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: one that there's like never, I know, I
Gabrielle: know, I know. They're both French words, so we just got to pick one, but I didn't end that moment. So now I regret it. Okay. Gamine, I'm going to go with gamine.
Gabrielle: Something, someone with gamine essence, maybe it's that it's short lines and crop silhouettes or perky details, whatever it is. It's not about saying you're this or that it's. It's combining all of these elements to really hone in on your individual line, your individual beauty. Because as you said, someone with the same essence blend, you're creating a package for them, two people, [00:48:00] that are customized to exactly their uniqueness, and I think that's wonderful.
Gabrielle: What is your advice to someone who is on a style essence journey?
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: So my first recommendation to a woman is never actually get a personal style analysis from me.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think for a lot of women that's a big expense. I believe it's an investment that pays off. But I think the simplest, easiest way to start is with the style ID calculator. Yeah. And to do it with a friend, not by themselves.
Gabrielle: Right? We should ask our kids, honestly. They're the most honest. My son, even before I was a bright spring, I walked out once in this like bright spring green dress with a puff sleeve and emperor waist.
Gabrielle: And he was like, wow. And I was like, Oh maybe do it with your kids. They're the ones who are brutally honest.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I have a teenage son and he's fantastic for that. He'll walk past my room and look in and go. You look like a man. And I'm like, oh, thank you. I [00:49:00] really appreciate you saying that.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Because I was not seeing it. Thank you for the feedback. I think with a, like a really honest friend, maybe a sister, or a friend that you know is going to tell you the truth, to sit there with you and watch your face next to all these clothes, and try to notice What really lights up the beauty and similar to, how in color analysis you can flip back and forth quickly between two drapes and suddenly the difference between them becomes really apparent.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Flipping back and forth quickly between, say, a very romantic ingenue ruffly collar versus a deep, severe, plunging, dramatic neckline. Just back forth, back and forth super quick. It often becomes very easy to see which one is better. Yeah. There's just this feeling in your chest of lightness and ease with one of them, and the other gives you a feeling of tension and dis ease.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. And I think slowly going through the pictures and [00:50:00] narrowing it down, you can start to circle in on what you think is right for you.
Gabrielle: And I think when you start there, too, you start with something and then you test it out and put it in practice and see is this coming to life the way I thought it was?
Gabrielle: And you really have to have that, exploration phase where you're like, okay, I think I'm DGI, what does that look like? Maybe I'm playing around with it, and then, and maybe you go back and redo it at some point, too, where you're like, okay, D& G working fantastic, but I isn't quite right.
Gabrielle: It's what you do in your analysis, just with your, without your trained eye, of course probably a little bit more of a messy middle.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think when we're analyzing ourselves, also, I can't overstate How important it is to use photos and not a mirror. I don't know why this is true, but when we see ourselves in the mirror, there's something we're not seeing.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I made a mistake the other day that later I was just like shaking my head. I bought this skirt that I loved it. It had a, it was gorgeous, like rough, [00:51:00] natural leather. I just, it was a beautiful brown for my soft autumn and I was thrilled about it. Now, it was an A line skirt, it hit a little below the knee, neither of those things is really great for me, and I knew that, but I put it on and I looked in the mirror and I thought, you know what, I think this is working, I don't know why, but it is, and I'm gonna wear it.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I wore it to an event and later I saw a photo of myself and I was like It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And you knew it wouldn't work. Yeah. But I had to see the picture for it to really be obvious to me. Oh
Gabrielle: yeah. I tell everyone, take daily outfit photos because all of a sudden you see it in a new light.
Gabrielle: The one thing I love about style is it's low stakes. You try an outfit, it doesn't work. The next day, it's fine. But then you have that data to be like, you know what? I think that those earrings were too much. They're drawing focus. Let me try it, croquis method, with smaller earrings.
Gabrielle: Let me try it with different shoes and let me see if I can take the base of what I felt was a good outfit and tweak it. And, we all have such emotional [00:52:00] attachments to clothes, too. So we have to slowly walk ourselves from okay, I thought I was natural. Now I'm finding out I don't have any natural.
Gabrielle: How am I going to get rid of my super wooly sweaters and heavy leather pieces? And switch those out to something more playful, or more whatever it is. It's a process. Now, how should people who are exploring essences treat shopping and wardrobe building?
Gabrielle: People want to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe.
Gabrielle: And I'm like, please don't. Please don't.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Oh, yeah. I remember very early in my journey, in like 2010, I dropped a lot of money on dramatic separates because I thought probably I have a lot of dramatic and it turned out I was wrong.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: It was a mistake, whatever, it's a learning experience. But, if women are comfortable doing it, I really think thrift stores are a good idea.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I really do. Very low stakes. That skirt that I bought I got it at the thrift store. I think I paid 10 for it. So I'm gonna re home it [00:53:00] and I'm not gonna feel too bad about that. Yeah. It's not a big deal.
Gabrielle: It's treasure hunting too, yeah. You never know what you're gonna find and then you just see it and you're like, Oh my god, I couldn't even have dreamed this up, but this is perfect.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Or women can use websites like Poshmark or ThredUP or eBay if they want the same kind of thrift store experience, but they don't actually want to go dig them. Through a whole rack of clothes. I think that's a great place to start. Also accessories and especially things that are right by your face. Like a very romantic scarf is a low stakes thing to invest in.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: If you want to experiment with, do I really have a lot of romantic or not?
Gabrielle: And that's what I tell people about color too, choose one color within your palette. There must be one color you're naturally drawn to in this palette, choose that, just focus on integrating that one color. In one top that you regularly wear, everything else can stay the same, there's no like massive wardrobe closet purge, go slowly.
Gabrielle: And all of a sudden, you're just going to see yourself slowly reaching for that one piece a little bit more [00:54:00] often. Or you're going to start seeing how you shine in those cropped pieces or straighter lines. And you slowly learn about yourself, and you can then go out into the world and actually buy things a lot easier, too.
Gabrielle: Because you're like, I understand this. I get it.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: You used the word data a minute ago, and I just, I thought that is exactly the right word. I think part of the journey. really needs to be women making an effort to hold on to the part of themselves that is discriminating and making judgments, but remove from the judgment the feeling that things are good or bad morally.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Taking positive or negative, pretty or ugly and try to, as much as they can, Look at themselves dispassionately and be open to whatever. New data. Yeah, be open to new data. Be open, follow the data where they lead you. Be a scientist about it. Yeah. And commit to not having it be a kind of indictment of you or a [00:55:00] personal judgment of you if you end up having an essence that you didn't initially think that.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: You wanted to have
Gabrielle: it's finding your own beauty like you put it beautifully in your in the title of your website. Truth is beauty because it's yours and it's really about understanding that it's okay to be your beauty and it's okay to present that to the world and there's incredible power in that authenticity.
Gabrielle: But that authenticity also doesn't come overnight. Any big transition you have in life, seeing yourself in a new way can be scary, can be empowering, can be like, both in one day you start the day being like, I love this outfit, and you end the day being like, that wasn't right, it's a learning process, so you gotta collect that data, you gotta start parsing through it, and understand that it's, a journey. When you started off, did you think your essence blend was naturally angelic or did you have a couple phases,
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: I think like a lot of women I started this would have been like 2009 or 2000.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah, [00:56:00] 2010. Maybe I got a lot of feedback from other women online. A lot of the women were really convinced that I had a lot of dramatic and it. And I was swayed by that. I wasn't convinced by it, but I thought it was probably correct. And I was surprised to discover, I was analyzed myself by John Kitchener more than ten years ago.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And I was, when he said, you don't have any dramatic, I was pretty surprised. Yeah, I didn't expect natural. But it took me like with the color palette, it took me a day or two to shift my thinking about myself to accept this idea of ethereal natural instead of maybe ethereal dramatic or romantic dramatic that a lot of women had thought I was.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: But once I shifted it, I thought, yeah, I can see it. And then once I tried it and saw photos of myself and [00:57:00] saw the reaction that I got from other people. I knew this is correct. This is my beauty.
Gabrielle: Yeah, and there's just like a wonderful feeling of seeing yourself in that new light.
Gabrielle: So yeah, it's like everyone is surprised even if it's an amazing result or the result they didn't want. You come to see yourself in such new light. So we're going to make sure that everyone has all of your wonderful packages and links to your website in the show notes. Is there any advice you would like to give people about personal style and Just words of wisdom.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah I would say that I think I touched on this before. I think we talked about it a little. You said it beautifully. You said, tools, not rules. The approach that I have to beauty, the idea that you want to surround yourself with a context that's harmonious with what you already look like, that's one aesthetic.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: And it doesn't have to Be the only aesthetic. Maybe a woman wants to Create [00:58:00] like a goth look, maybe that's her deal. In order to create that you have to defy Your color and style because it's supposed to look shocking and unusual, right? I think women when they get deep into color and style analysis can almost become tyrannized in their own heads by the journey.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: They need the
Gabrielle: answer.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: Yeah. And I just urge women to just to hold all the possibilities lightly and also to maintain a little perspective. When you find your answer, it's going to feel great and it's going to feel fun. But also, you can break the rules sometimes and everything's still gonna be okay.
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: You don't have to perfectly manifest. What your stylist said you're supposed to be wearing every single day of your life.
Gabrielle: That's wonderful advice I think that we get so into a style system as the answer that we forget that we're the painters of these portraits like we get a great way to put it, yeah.
Gabrielle: We get to put our own touch on it. Everyone draws the same still life, [00:59:00] but you're still imbuing yourself and your art deserves to, hang up on that wall. Sorry I couldn't run with 50 analogies at one point. No, but it's ownership. Yeah, you said it
Speaker 4: beautifully.
Gabrielle: I just want to thank you again for coming on.
Gabrielle: It was an honor to talk to you and I just adore your hybrids and I know everyone in the Facebook group loves them as well. So thank you so much. Thank
Rachel, Truth is Beauty: you so much for having me. It's really been a pleasure.
Gabrielle: Okay, guys, until next time.