Hello! My name is Karina, I’m 31 and my friend Marina is 37. We are almost identical in height and we weigh the same, we have a similar style in clothing and our age difference is not very noticeable. But I have 2 problems: 1: Sometimes, I notice that I look more overweight and older than my friend. 2: Recently, I’ve realized that I have a boring wardrobe and I think that people treat me differently from how I see myself and my vibe.
Especially for Bright Side readers, we did an experiment involving a stylist and we have proven an interesting hypothesis: there are no unattractive women, there are just women who don’t know what body type they are. There will be many photos and a bonus that even made the sales associates laugh.
Marina on the left and me on the right
I’m not very interested in fashion but like any woman, I want to look great. Sometimes, you like something and you put it on and it makes you look like a country girl. Hair... is a whole different thing. I have straight thick hair — any girl’s dream, but I always thought that it was boring and I wanted something extraordinary. So, clothes are only half of the problem, and about 90% of my hair experiments were a complete disaster.
There is a body type system that was developed by Kibbe that was upgraded and improved by Dwyn Larson. I was really interested in finding out my type — Dramatic, Romantic, Natural, or Gamine. This is what neither your age, not your weight can change. Depending on what your type is, you should choose your makeup, your hairstyles, and your clothes according to it. Every little thing matters and it affects how your face looks: if it looks slim or full, tired or fresh.
Exact types are very rare and there are 16 possible combinations that are hard to wrap your head around. I’ve done a lot of express tests, I compared myself to the already-typed stars, I’ve read a lot of descriptions and explanations, but I had no success. My appearance has so many contradictions that cause different results every time.
It was important for me to find out what my type was and never again buy clothes that make me look bad. And, as a Bright Side writer, I just had to do this experiment and check to see if the same clothes can really look different on different people.
In general, you need to learn to see the difference in clothes in points 2 and 3. Half of the clothes I have are things that I like, but they don’t suit me.
Basically, anyone can try and figure out their type, read the recommendations (all of them are easily accessible via text, video, and tests), and check to see if they work.
I did all that, but in order to make sure the results were right, I decided to consult an expert. I found Christina on Instagram and asked her to determine my type and Marina’s type, to see if we got our outfits right.
Please note: Christina gave us no individual recommendations, we only used the things that are accessible to anyone online.
This is what we wore in the beginning — it’s what we wear every day.
So, quickly about our types: I am a Gamine and Dramatic, and Marina is a Dramatic and Natural. The type that goes first is dominant. It means that there are many similar features in our appearances, but there are differences, too. Before going shopping, I read that neither of us benefits from:
However, we can wear bright colors, geometric prints, and multi-layered clothing.
For the experiment, we chose one store with a lot of different clothes. But there was a problem — there were no shoes. We hope that you can forget about that and see the difference anyway.
One more thing: neither of us wants to be a fashion icon, so we were not going to wear ultra-trendy clothes. Our intention was to show how the same clothes look on 2 similar girls that are still different types.
In our experiment, I was the stylist and chose our looks. Marina was acting instinctively. When she chose this white sweater, I knew it was a bad idea. But we fixed the situation by tucking it into this high-rise skirt.
This is my favorite “country girl” look — small flowers on dresses. Marina and I failed to find out what exactly was wrong — it just felt wrong, but we couldn’t tell what it was.
I try not to buy T-shirts with round necklines: a long time ago, I noticed that they don’t look good on me. But it was a big revelation to me that I could look good in a short, striped T-shirt. It turned out that Marina looks great in saturated dark colors.
The outfit we would never even notice looked surprisingly good on both of us. But my friend looked and felt uncomfortable in the “Gamine” dress.
Marina thought that bright colors and bold color combinations were not good for her age. But after we tried colors on, we were shocked by the results. And the jeans — we realized that both of us looked good in simple solid-color skinny jeans if we didn’t want to look more overweight.
I actually liked choosing clothes, not based on what I liked, but based on the types, and I especially liked getting the “Don’t like but suits” category. This is the case when I had to convince my friend to try on the red top, even though she didn’t like the model or the color. But it made her look so fresh!
Now, this is where I failed. I liked these overalls and I might’ve bought them before even though they made me look much shorter than I am. On the right, Marina is wearing clothes according to her type and I look ridiculous.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in this store and I saw this pleated skirt and liked it. During the experiment, I already knew that it wouldn’t flatter me, but I wanted to make sure. And Marina is wearing the clothes that she both likes and that suit her.
My entire look consists of the clothes I like and the clothes that suit me. Marina said that she would never even consider this green dress. I always thought that the color black made me look too rough, but the contrast is actually good for me.
We found a dress that made both of us look terrible. And this is more proof that color types play a huge rule. Ideally, you also need to know which colors look good on you and which don’t.
We didn’t ask the stylist to give us tips about our types on purpose: we wanted to find out how much we could believe the information online and how easy it was to understand. Christina looked through our photos and made these conclusions:
So, we still have a lot to learn. There is a lot of information and I’m curious about how my style will change now that I know things that I didn’t know before.
We were tired, but we were in a great mood, so we decided to put on things that were really far from our types. And we got it right. We were laughing so hard that the entire store could hear us.
Are you satisfied with your style? How do you choose your clothes?
So Marina is the one with black hair while Karina with brown hair?
What I can conclude here is Marina suitable with earthy color (beigetone) like brown, orange, red while Karina suitable more in magic color like deep green, blue, black.
Karina have long neck as I see so she need to stop wearing U or V shaped neck line. She can but maybe need to add scarf or choker so it won't show much neck skin (well except you wanna go sexy concept)
I think both of them look pretty cool!
