Pinterest Boards FAQ
How are celebrities grouped on the Celebrity Style Essences boards?
Celebrities are grouped on the same board if they share all the same top significant style essences. For example, every celebrity on the Dramatic Gamine Ingenue board has a significant amount of those 3 essences. An essence is “significant” if a person looks harmonious in clothing styles containing that essence.
Are the essences for each board listed in order of most to least (meaning, are all the celebrities on the Dramatic Natural Gamine board dominantly Dramatic, with smaller amounts of Natural and even smaller amounts of Gamine)?
No—a celebrity on the Dramatic Natural Gamine board might be dominantly Dramatic, but they might actually have mostly Gamine, with smaller amounts of Dramatic and Natural, or any other combination of those three essences.
The same is true for all the boards—a given celebrity on the Romantic Dramatic board might have more Romantic than Dramatic, and another celebrity on that same board might have more Dramatic than Romantic. The order of the essences in the board names doesn’t reflect the degree that those essences are present in the faces on the boards.
I use the naming system I use because it’s what I’m familiar with and what I’m guessing many others are, too. Specifically, this is the way that Rachel from truth-is-beauty.com named the types.
Are the boards meant to imply that all celebrities on a given board look alike?
No—the boards are meant to imply that all the celebrities on that board share the same significant essences. Many of the celebrities on the same boards look really different from one another, because people can have the same essences but look very literally different from one another.
Are the boards meant to imply that all celebrities on a given board are visually harmonious with one another?
This may be true to a degree, but not necessarily to a strong degree.
The premise of style analysis is that people look harmonious when they wear clothes that match their faces. If that’s true, then a person’s face of a given type may also look harmonious when adjacent to other faces of the same type.
Meaning, if Ethereal Gamines look harmonious in Ethereal Gamine fashion, then a given Ethereal Gamine face may look harmonious when viewed next to other Ethereal Gamine faces.
However, arguably even two Ethereal Gamines won’t necessarily look extremely harmonious with one another if, for example, the first is very high in Gamine and very low in Ethereal, and the second is very low in Gamine but very high in Ethereal.
This is where the idea of “continuums” comes in. A continuum is defined as “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.”
So, temperature is a continuum. It’s hard to tell the difference between 70.5 degrees and 70.6 degrees, and easier to tell the difference between temperatures that are farther apart—say, 65 degrees and 75 degrees.
What does this have to do with style analysis? Some Ethereal Gamines may look really alike, because they’re very close to one another on the Ethereal Gamine continuum (just as two temperatures, like 70.5 and 70.6, can feel really similar because they’re very close on the temperature continuum). But some Ethereal Gamines will look very different from one another, despite being on the same continuum (65 degrees and 75 degrees are on the same continuum, but the difference for many people is marked).
So, not all the celebrities on the same board are necessarily highly harmonious with all other celebrities on that board.
But in theory, if a board has a large enough number of people on it, then every person on the board may be highly harmonious with someone on the board and could be considered indirectly harmonious with others by association. (For example, maybe Kate isn’t that harmonious with Jen, but Kate is harmonious with Laurie, and Laurie is harmonious with Carrie, and Carrie is harmonious with Casey, and Casey is harmonious with Jen. So, Kate is on a continuum of harmony with Jen despite not being directly highly harmonious with her.)
Are the typings on the boards accurate?
I believe they’re largely accurate, at least based on the way I conceptualize the types. I use Kitchener’s seven essence system, and I type people based on the shapes in their faces, rather than the shapes in their bodies. I type celebrities myself, so my typings may sometimes differ from Kitchener’s.
I’m of course human and make mistakes, so I can’t claim perfect accuracy. To increase accuracy, I typically double- or triple-check my typing before posting each celebrity. I also use a systematic typing approach, carefully comparing each face to different styles of clothing. I do this with every single celebrity I post.
The boards themselves also help minimize inaccurate typings, because I’ll always compare a celebrity directly to other celebrities of their potential type before posting them.
For example, I originally typed Ethereal Dramatic Gamine Sarah Hyland as an Ethereal Gamine Ingenue. Before posting her, I compared her to the celebrities on the Ethereal Gamine Ingenue board, realized she didn’t harmonize with them, retyped her as an Ethereal Dramatic Gamine, and confirmed that she did harmonize with Ethereal Dramatic Gamine celebrities (and that she was more harmonious with those celebrities than with Ethereal Dramatic, Ethereal Gamine, or Dramatic Gamine celebrities).
Can I use the boards to find my own type?
The boards could potentially help you to type yourself. For example, if you’re pretty sure you have Romantic, you could compare yourself to different boards with the Romantic essence to see which boards look more and less harmonious, potentially figuring out which other essences you do and don’t have.
But importantly, looking similar to someone doesn’t guarantee that you have the same type, and looking dissimilar to someone doesn’t guarantee that you have different types. They key is to make sure you look harmonious rather than just similar.
If you want to use an approach designed to produce accurate results, you may want to use the self-assessment tool, which allows you to compare your face systematically to all the pure types to determine your dominant essence, and then all of your dominant essence’s blends to determine your additional essences.
Why aren’t there many boards for the pure types?
I haven’t yet found many celebrities who I think are pure types. I’m not sure why, but it may come down to probability.
As described previously, we inherit our essences from our biological parents. There’s seven different essences, and many people have two or three, so the odds of two people procreating and both only passing the same essence (say, Ethereal) onto their child, and then that child eventually procreating with another highly Ethereal person and both only passing the Ethereal essence onto their child, and this happening over and over again throughout human history so as to create a lot of people who only have the Ethereal essence—
The above seems statistically improbable, like you’re rolling two dice with seven sides and you keep rolling the same number on both over and over and over. Just as it’s more likely to roll two different vs. the same numbers simultaneously, it’s more likely to have parents pass on two (or more) distinct vs. the same essences to their children.
But we can imagine a scenario like the above where two people who both only have Ethereal have a child, and then their child is likely to only have Ethereal as well. Or a scenario where an Ethereal Natural mates with an Ethereal Gamine and for some reason Ethereal is the only significant essence that their child inherits.
So, other pure types probably exist, but they seem rare and hard to find.
Why are some blended types of 2 and 3 essences missing?
I’m not sure why I haven’t yet found celebrities of certain blended types. It’s possible that something about the nature of human faces, like the nature of human bone structure, makes it rarer to have a purely curving face type, like Romantic Ethereal, Ethereal Ingenue, and Romantic Ingenue. I’d guess that there are people with all these types, but again that it’s quite rare.
What if a celebrity has 4 essences?
This is where it gets complicated.
Traditionally, I only grouped celebrities with 4 essences by their top 3 essences. For example, Jennifer Connelly has Romantic Ethereal Dramatic Classic, in that order, and I put her on the Romantic Ethereal Dramatic board.
I made this choice first because most people only have 2 or 3 significant essences, and second because even if people have a 4th essence, it’s almost always small enough that they’ll still be harmonious in styles with only their top 3 essences. I still think this is true.
However, for the sake of being comprehensive, I recently decided to start creating separate boards for celebrities with 4 significant essences.
Two confusing things: first, if a celebrity has 4 significant essences, I’ll put them both on the board with their top 3 significant essences AND on the board specifying their 4 essences. (So Jennifer Connelly is on the Romantic Ethereal Dramatic board AND the Romantic Ethereal Dramatic Classic board.) Again, this is because people with 4 essences still look harmonious in styles of only their top 3 essences.
The other confusing thing is that some of the celebrities who are only on the 3 essences boards may also have 4th essences that I haven’t yet acknowledged. I’m in the process of determining celebrities’ 4th essences, but it will take a while. The good news is that again, I think it’s generally accurate to classify people based only on their top 3 essences, even if they have a significant 4th, because often the 4th is so small that they don’t need it in their styling to look their best.
That said, it can be fun to learn your 4th essence, so in my virtual analyses, I’ll always let people know if they have a 4th essence, and the ratios of their essences.
Why are the celebrities on the boards mostly facing straight on without smiling?
I think this position makes it easiest to accurately perceive people’s essences.
If a person is angling their head significantly up or down, or from one side to the other, it can change the proportions of the face and make it harder to discern the face’s true shapes. It’s definitely possible to accurately type people from an angle, but in some cases it may change the face too much to make it a reliable method.
Similarly, it’s definitely possible to accurately type a smiling face, but smiles can change the shapes of our faces fairly significantly (obviously really changing the lips/jaw and sometimes the nose and eyes as well) and this can make it harder to see what a person’s features actually look like—like how full their lips actually are or how round their eyes actually are.
I think with some people it’s not too hard to type them with a smile, and others it changes their face so much that it makes it challenging. For example, to me Alexandra Daddario’s face really changes when she smiles. She has a beautiful smile, but it’s easier to type her as a Romantic Ethereal Gamine with a straight face.
Are the celebrities’ hair, makeup, and outfits on the boards harmonious with their style essences?
Not necessarily, but I do try to pin photos where celebrities are styled in harmonious ways. Sometimes it’s hard to find a photo with all the elements I want—decent quality, straight on, straight face, and harmonious hair, makeup, outfit, and jewelry—so I end up compromising and not pinning an ideally harmonious image.
I’ve also started to make separate boards explicitly stating that celebrities’ clothes, hair, and/or makeup harmonize with their essences. But unless explicitly stated, the boards don’t necessarily display celebrities in ideally harmonious styles.
Feel free to message me here, Pinterest, or via email if you have comments or questions! :)
