Jewellery and Your Features – Getting the Balance Right

How do your features impact on your jewellery choices?

In this chat with YouTube video creator and 7 Steps to Style sister Carol Karl we talk about how to find balance with your features using the concepts of Yin and Yang. If you missed our first chat all about personality and choosing clothes and jewellery check it out here.

Watch it here now

Yin and Yang = Balance

I've talked about the concepts of Yin and Yang before a few times (you can find them here), but to quickly recap, when you think about Yin and Yang it's all about balance.

Balance between:

Soft and strong
Feminine and masculine
Approachability and authority
Light and dark
Smoky and bright

So when you think about Yin and Yang with regard to clothing and accessories, there are different elements related to each.

Yin Elements of Clothing and Design include

Curved lines
Thin lines
Horizontal Lines
Curved shapes
Small shapes
Low contrast
Muted/smoky/soft colours
Soft textures
Lightweight fabrics and details
Think fabrics
Matt fabrics
Sheer fabrics
Natural flowing patterns

Yang Elements of Clothing and Design include:

Straight lines
Solid lines
Thick/bold lines
Vertical lines
Angled shapes
Large scale
Bright colours
High contrast
Crisp fabrics
Heavyweight fabrics
Thick fabrics
Shiny Fabrics

Communicating with Your Clothing and Jewellery

When you think about these design elements and what you want to communicate with your clothes, you can use these design elements to craft an outfit and make jewellery selection that speaks in the way that you choose.

Want to be seen as more professional? Then add more Yang details to your outfits.

Want to be seen as more approachable? Then add more Yin elements to your outfits.

You can always balance both of these by combining Yin and Yang in any outfit.

Use these elements of design in a thoughtful and considered way to give you a subconscious advantage in the workplace. Understanding that men are more naturally Yang (so seen as more authoritative) because of their height, deep voices and solid, heavyweight, vertical clothing styles means that as a woman it's important to be able to choose what you wear in a way that gives you some additional power, and so knowing this subconscious, silent language is a fantastic tool to use when deciding what to wear.

What are Your Features?

Are you taller or shorter?
Are you dark haired or fair?
Do you have a high value contrast or a low one?

Each of these elements of your own design will impact how others treat you. Just as I discovered when I went from being dark value and high value contrast, to light value and lower value contrast, I was told I seemed "friendlier" yet I hadn't changed, it was just my colouring.

Choosing Jewellery to Match or Balance Your Features

Thinking about the concepts of Yin and Yang, and the rest of the outfit you're choosing, you can choose to make your outfits appear:

More Yang

Larger scale jewellery
Higher contrast jewellery
More angled shapes in your jewellery

More Yin

Smaller scale jewellery
Lower contrast colours
Curved shapes in your jewellery

Or you can go for a combination of the two, and look for jewellery that is naturally balanced.

The choice is yours and you can change up how an outfit appears just by changing the jewellery to being more Yin or more Yang.

Have fun playing with this concept.

And if you want to dive deep into Yin and Yang, it's covered in depth in my 7 Steps to Style program so that you can fully utilise this powerful form of non-verbal communication to enhance your life (and outfits too)!