Imagine walking into your favorite boutique. Everything in the store harmonizes with everything else. There’s a consistent message, and it feels like home.

Now imagine walking into a flea market. It’s a graveyard of passing fads. There’s neon over there, Gothic lace over here, and does that blazer have orange shag-carpet elbow patches?

Which one does your closet look like?

Tell Your Own Story

A color story is a tool that designers use to plan their color choices. A personal color story acts like a visual style statement, helping you make decisions when you’re faced with a sale rack. It’s a palette, but it also speaks to the emotional tenor of your colors.

Your relationship to color is emotional and intensely personal. There’s no rhyme or reason to why paint chip #4259 looks like springtime to you and vomit to me. (And yes, a professional color consultant once told me I was a “spring” and that I should be wearing the vomit color. No, thank you.) In short, no one can do this for you except yourself.

Here’s how to find your color story…

Get Inspired About Color

Talking about color is like writing down dance steps: beside the point. When you set out to find your colors, use the proper tools–your eyes. You have to look at colors. Closing your eyes and daydreaming might point you in a general direction, and remembering the color that everyone says you look great in is a boost, but you have to see color to feel color.

You can look at colors in any number of places, like the paint store or the mall. You can get wild with some art supplies or rip pictures out of magazines. But since you’re sitting at your computer reading this right now, hop on over to polyvore.com.

Start a new set, and get going with a tab. Tops is as good a place to start as any. Don’t look for shape or fit or even any particular item of clothing. Instead, take a look at the random pile of teensy pictures over there on the right. (On a PC, press Ctrl and the “+” key a few times to make those teensy pictures bigger. On a mac, the Apple key and “+” make the text bigger but leave the pictures tiny.) Let your eyes go into soft focus—you can see color more clearly when you’re not looking at detail. Does anything pop out at you? Anything hit you in the gut? Anything call out to you and sing the song of your soul? No? OK. Click next, and keep on browsing.

Dig Deep

If you hear a little hum, drag that thing over to the left. Drag a bunch of stuff. Don’t question it–just drag. When you’ve got a pile of goodies in your set, take a look. Do you see any themes? Dusty Sunday in the country colors? Pop-art fizz? Neutrals and more neutrals? Keep blurring your eyes! Delete anything that seems out of place. Notice that the big ugly buttons ruin the cute pink cardigan. Notice that the color you think you ought to like doesn’t go with the colors you actually like.

Compare coral to pumpkin to tangerine: is one saying “yes!” while another says “meh”? Do you want to explore a particular color more deeply? Wonderful Polyvore lets you filter by color. Look at all those turquoises! Who knew there were so many variations on turquoise? Which one is your turquoise?

Look at what the colors are doing together. Does sage give rose a little pop? Does brown balance your sky blue but bring your teal down? Does a tiny bit of yellow go a long way?

Keep going–blurring, pulling, assessing, editing, and noticing until your set starts to sing a little song. Say your style statement out loud. Are you seeing it?

My Own Color Story

Here’s what I found out when I did this exercise: my colors are red and blue, petal pink to ripe strawberry, men’s dress-shirt blue to soft cobalt to indigo. I’m a color fanatic. I’ve taken courses; I’ve read books …but until the other day, I could not have said with conviction, “My colors are red and blue.” (But it does explain why I get so giddy for the Fourth of July!)

I also discovered that while a little black has a lot of oomph, a lot of it is too harsh with my reds. Midnight blue—now there’s my neutral. True white makes my other colors pop, while off-white takes the energy down several notches. And though you’d think that purple would be the best of both worlds, I feel pretty “meh” about it.

Get Busy!

So what can you do with your colors once you’ve found them?

* Paint a wall
* Buy ink or stationary to write your dreams in your colors
* Knit a sweater (and don’t be surprised if it becomes your favorite!)
* Go whole hog: wear nothing but your colors

My next step is turning my closet into the red-and-blue boutique and resisting teal, even when it’s on super-sale.

Now go find your own colors!