MyBestColors.com is a system designed to provide users with a personalized color palette.  You choose your skin tone from an available 33 (warm, neutral, or cool), and the system generates a palette of 380 colors to correlate with that skin tone.  The palette is sent to you as a series of images which you can print off yourself or have printed as 4×6 “photos” to go in a small brag book-style photo album.

Having tried it out, I have mixed feelings about the system and the results.  I love the simplicity of the system: you choose your number, your palette is chosen, it’s simple as that.  I love the accessibility of the system: because you print your own, it’s inexpensive.  There are a lot of color options (380 is plenty!)  Thirty-three different combinations, and a computer-generated palette should, in theory, be able to provide highly-accurate results.  I didn’t quite find that to be the case, though.

The hue (that is, what most of us know as colors – blue, green, aqua, red, etc.) was, for the most part, correct.  (There were some browns, and I can’t do any brown at all.)  However, there’s a very broad range of saturation levels (that is, how bright or dull/muted a color is) in my palette.  Having not seen any of the other palettes, I don’t know if that’s inherent to these palettes – that is, if they all have a broad saturation range – or if it’s inherent to the one I received, and I didn’t choose well.

See, the biggest weakness of this system is the process of actually selecting which skin tone is yours.  You match the patches of color on the skin tone card to your own skin.  This is quite tricky, as skin tones can appear very similar!  I even had a hard time ruling out cool vs. warm, which one would think would be distinctly different.  I’m not positive I chose the right one in the end.  An easier way of more precisely matching the skin tone would help a lot in helping people end up with the proper palette.  (I wonder about printing the skin tone swatches on transparency.  Then the transparency could be held over the skin and, like makeup, the user could see which one “disappears” into the skin. In theory.  I’ve not tried it, so I don’t know for sure if it would work.)  Below, you can see a series of photos demonstrating my attempts to match the swatches to my skin.

Once the proper skin tone is selected so the palette can be chosen, I love the way the palette is laid out.  Each page of the palette displays 20 colors – four across, five down – of a specific hue.  So the reds are on a page (or two), the greens are one a page (or two), etc.  At the top of each page is a segmented circle, highlighting the portion of the color wheel that particular page pertains to.  This makes it very easy to design color combinations, because you can create a color scheme based on which segments of the color wheel you want to draw from.  In fact, the first portion of the “palette” is actually several pages showing how to create different types of color schemes.  (I think this is all available on the website, but it’s handy to have it printed to carry with the palette, as well.)

Here you can get a little bit of an idea of the breadth of the N2 palette:

I’d love to see how the various palettes differ, because I see such a broad range here already.  I’d also love to see this computer-based technology employed to generate palettes based on specific user-submitted parameters (saturation within a certain range, value within a certain range, temperature/hue within a certain range).  There is tremendous potential here!

To be honest, I don’t think I would want this to be my primary (or only) palette.  I think the ranges of color elements are simply too wide for that.  But as a supplemental palette, it serves as a wonderful tool for expanding your range of color-combining.

Disclosure: I was provided with a palette by MyBestColors.com to try out the system and facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.