Why I Got Into Colour Analysis After a Layoff

I did not wake up one day and decide “you know what the world needs? Another woman with a fan deck of fabric swatches.” This started somewhere a lot less glamorous, and if I’m honest, somewhere I have avoided writing about publicly for a while because it felt too raw to turn into content.

I got laid off. The kind of layoff where one day you have a calendar full of meetings and a sense of who you are professionally, and the next day you have neither - just a severance letter, an away message you forgot to take down, and a lot of unscheduled time to sit with your own thoughts. Not my favourite season of life, if we’re using that word loosely. There’s a very specific kind of disorientation that comes with a layoff that nobody quite prepares you for. It’s not just the loss of income, though that’s real and immediate and worth naming honestly. It’s the loss of structure. The loss of a built-in answer to “so what do you do?” The loss of the small, constant feedback loop of being useful to other people in a defined, measurable way.

Here’s the thing about a layoff nobody warns you about: it doesn’t just take your job, it takes your certainty. For weeks I felt like I was standing in front of my own closet - the actual one, with clothes in it - and not recognising anything. Not because the clothes had changed. Because I had. I didn’t know what I wanted to look like, what I wanted to feel like, what “put together” even meant for the next version of me. I’d get dressed for nothing in particular - a grocery run, a coffee with a friend who was trying to be kind about my situation without saying the word “situation” - and stand there for ten minutes feeling like I was choosing a costume for a person I wasn’t sure I was anymore.

So I did what I always do when I’m spiralling: I researched my way out of it. This is a deeply ingrained habit of mine, for better or worse. Give me an emotional problem and I will, within about 48 hours, have a small army of browser tabs open and a half-formed system for solving it. I’d known about colour analysis for years, mostly as a fun party-trick kind of thing, the sort of content you scroll past on social media - “find out if you’re a winter” quizzes, that sort of thing. Fun, low-stakes, not something I’d ever taken seriously. But this time I went deep. I started reading about undertones and seasons and contrast levels and why some colours make people look like they slept eight hours and others make them look like they’re coming down with something. And somewhere in that rabbit hole, a switch flipped.

This wasn’t just “what colours suit me.” This was about control. About having one small, concrete thing I could understand and act on when so much else felt like it was happening to me instead of because of me. Job hunting, at least in those early weeks, felt like shouting into a void - applications going out, silence coming back, no clear cause and effect I could learn from. Colour, by contrast, was immediate. I could test a theory in the mirror in under a minute. I could be wrong, adjust, and be right ten minutes later. After months of a job search that offered no such feedback loop, that immediacy felt like oxygen.

I started applying it to my own wardrobe and noticed something almost embarrassing: people commented. Not “nice top,” but “you look so well,” “you seem really good lately.” I hadn’t changed anything else. My sleep was still inconsistent, my stress levels were still doing whatever stress levels do during a layoff, my skincare routine hadn’t suddenly transformed. Just the colours. That gap between how little I’d actually changed and how much people noticed was the thing that really got me. It felt almost unfair, in a good way, like I’d found a cheat code that had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

That’s when Glow Theory started taking shape, properly, back in May. Not as a pivot I talked myself into out of desperation, though I want to be honest that the timeline actually does trace back to a hard professional season - there’s no use pretending otherwise. But it became, fairly quickly, the first thing in months that felt like me again. The part of me that loves music theory and pattern and systems, applied to something visual and personal instead of spreadsheets and org charts. I spent years building operational systems for other people’s businesses. It turns out the instinct to find the underlying structure in something that looks chaotic on the surface translates surprisingly well from “fixing a hiring pipeline” to “figuring out why one shade of blue makes you glow and the next shade over makes you look faintly unwell.”

I’m currently finishing my certification training in Toronto next month, and I’ll be honest, I’m the kind of person who wants the credential done properly before I call myself an expert out loud. I’ve seen enough “self-taught overnight expert” energy online to know I don’t want to be that. I want to know the theory cold, I want to have done the supervised practice hours, and I want my first real client session to be built on training, not just enthusiasm and a colour wheel I bought on a whim. But I’m already taking bookings for after I’m certified, and I’ve got over five clients on the books already, which is the kind of thing that makes me grin at my phone in public like a weirdo. Five people, trusting me with this before I’ve technically finished the course - that’s not nothing, and I don’t take it lightly.

So that’s the origin story. Not a tidy “I always knew I’d do this” narrative, the kind you see in a lot of founder bios that make the whole thing sound inevitable in hindsight. A “I lost the thing I thought defined me and found something better while looking for my keys” narrative. Messier, slower, with a lot more research tabs involved. I suspect a lot of you know exactly what that feels like - the season where nothing makes sense yet, where you’re testing things just to feel like you have agency over something, anything, while the bigger picture sorts itself out in its own time.

If you’re in a season like that right now - unscheduled, uncertain, closet full of clothes that don’t feel like you anymore, maybe your own version of a layoff or just a quieter kind of in-between - you’re going to fit in well around here. This newsletter isn’t just going to be palette guides and styling tips, although there will be plenty of that. It’s going to be honest about the fact that getting your colours analysed is sometimes about a lot more than the colours.

Thanks for being here for the start of it. There’s a lot more coming.

A bit more on what “starting over” actually looked like, practically. I think it’s worth being specific rather than just gesturing vaguely at “researching colour theory,” because the in-between period was longer and clumsier than that makes it sound. There were weeks where Glow Theory was a notes app document with half-formed ideas and no name. There was a period where I considered three or four different business names before landing on something that actually felt true to the slightly cheeky, warm tone I wanted this to have. I read more about colour theory in those first two months than I’d read about anything, academically, since university, and I was a music major who really loved being a student. That tells you something about how thoroughly I fell into this.

I also want to be honest that the layoff itself wasn’t a clean, single moment of clarity followed by a triumphant pivot. There have been weeks in between where I apply to roles that look a lot like my old one, because that felt like the responsible, sensible thing to do, and a part of me hasn’t been ready yet to trust that a colour analysis business built from a personal obsession could be a real, sustainable thing rather than a hobby I was using to avoid the harder work of job hunting. It has taken time, and a fair number of conversations with people who know me well, to get to a place where I believe this could be both the thing that helps me personally and a legitimate business with paying clients.

What ultimately tipped it for me wasn’t a single dramatic realisation. It was the accumulation of small data points: the unprompted compliments, the way I felt energised every single time I worked on this versus the low hum of dread I’d associate with some job applications, the fact that I kept coming back to it on weekends without anyone asking me to. Eventually that pattern has become too consistent to ignore, and I’ve stopped treating it as a side project and started treating it as a thing I am actually building.

I share all of this not to dramatise an ordinary career pivot, but because I think there’s a version of “founder origin story” content that smooths over the uncertainty in a way that isn’t honest, and isn’t useful to anyone else going through their own uncertain middle. If you’re in your own messy middle right now, I’d rather tell you the truth about mine than a tidier version of it.

Are there still days where I wake up in a panic because I remember that I have zero income coming in whereas there used to be a relatively sizeable one allowing me my mortgage payments, HomeSense runs, and the ability to pay for something without feeling like I want to vomit? Absolutely. More than I can count. But, I am thankful to have a husband who is willing to support me through this crazy transition, an Airbnb that hopefully will help cover a part of our mortgage so that we can keep a roof over our heads, and enough disdain for the corporate world to fuel myself forward.

So, hi. Welcome to the party - it’s going to be colourful over here (both in word choice and fabric swatches). ◡̈