Featured in the Boston Globe
I’m thrilled to share that Splash of Color ACK has been featured in the Boston Globe! 🎉 It’s an incredible honor to be recognized for my new venture, and I couldn’t be more excited about the momentum this brings to my business.
A huge special thank you to Julie Cassetina, the most talented and best Boston PR strategist and communicator. Without her, this article would never have happened. Thank you, Julie!
Thank you to everyone who has supported me along the way—I’m so grateful for this opportunity to help more people in the Boston area discover their true colors. Come book with me now!
Full article below, read on Boston Globe
WELLESLEY — Two years ago, on a visit to Toyko, Atsuko Chaput watched a personal color analyst drape fabrics over her torso. She deduced which shades of blues and reds looked best against Chaput’s skin and eyes, switching between swatches for hours on end.
“Eventually, I found out that I’m a bright winter, meaning I should wear bold colors, like this,” Chaput recalled recently, while holding up a dragon fruit-colored tote from the online brand Rothy’s.
The trip inspired Chaput to leave behind her decadeslong corporate career and pursue a new venture: a personal color analysis studio of her own, named Splash of Color ACK. (It’s partly a tribute to Nantucket, where Chaput and her husband got married.) She opened the one-woman business in July in a shoebox-sized space across the street from the Wellesley Hills commuter rail station. There, Chaput pores over personalized color palettes and makeup choices for $375 and up per session.
It may all seem unnecessary, she said. But Chaput sees color analysis as a worthy self-investment, with the power to boost people’s confidence and save them money. A smart shopper, she said, only buys pieces that are “right” for them. Among her prospective customers are corporate executives with shareholders to impress, brides deciding their wedding colors, and everyday locals simply upgrading their closets.
“This is not a mandate of what you have to wear or a restriction that you cannot wear a certain thing you may already like,” said Chaput, who grew up in Okinawa, Japan. “It’s an exercise to figure out how to look like your best self. I want everybody to have the eyes to see the things I’m seeing.”
She is far from the first person to have this idea: The art of personal color analysis began with Swiss painter Johannes Itten in the 20th century. He determined that certain colors worked in harmony, while others did not. Then in the 1980s, Carole Jackson took matters a step further in her book, “Color Me Beautiful,” in which she first categorized people into the four seasons: autumn, winter, spring, and summer. A decade later, color analysis evolved again when the artist Kathryn Kalisz expanded its wheel from four to 12 seasonal types in the Sci/ART method.
Chaput now leans on that approach to determine which hues (the colors themselves), values (how light or dark a color is), and chromas (how bright or dull a color is) match each customer. She starts most sessions by asking bare-faced clients to make an educated guess on where they fall on the color spectrum, from bright autumn to dark summer, and then leads them to the chair.
“Sometimes we’re both totally wrong at the beginning,” she joked.
There, in front of bright lighting and a horizontal mirror, Chaput dresses clients in a gray hairnet and apron. “Your eyes see colors based on the colors around it,” she explained. “This neutralizes everything.” She spends the next hour or so rifling through fabrics to see how they change against a face. A warmer terracotta, for example, may soften features and wash them out, while a lighter orange blends imperfections together and makes a customer’s skin glow. (I, according to her analysis, am a true winter, cool-toned and suited best for blacks and highly saturated colors, such as emerald green and true red.)
In the end, customers walk away with a wallet-sized palette, a package of recommendations with outfits, hair colors, nail polish, and even jewelry styles that suit them. The premium package also includes a Japanese-style cosmetic consultation, during which Chaput offers suggestions on the contents of a client’s makeup bag and a full-face application.
The business capitalizes on the online obsession with personal color analysis, which has garnered millions of views on TikTok and Instagram after becoming a mainstay in East Asia. It’s also a delightful change of pace for Chaput, who lives in Wellesley with her husband, their 9-year-old daughter, and an English bulldog named Sumo. She previously worked for Needham-based SharkNinja, but talks often about the months she once spent behind the makeup counter in between jobs. Splash of Color ACK feels like an extension of that time, she said.
“Leaving a corporate job can be scary because it’s all I have known, like a security blanket, but my dream is my responsibility, and no one is coming,” Chaput said. “It’s up to me.”
350 Washington St. Suite 314, Wellesley; www.splashofcolorack.com; splashofcolorack@gmail.com