Adding an Orange Beauty Bundle to Summer Outfits with Color

Today is my last post in this short series about accessorizing summer outfits with beauty bundles/accessory sets, and we will be discussing how to wear pieces from an orange bundle in outfits with other colors. I picked orange because I have been surprised at how often I turn to this color to add interest to my outfits, but the same principles would apply to a beauty bundle in any color!

Previous posts in the series:

Styling Idea: Adding Beauty Bundles to Rainbow Striped Print Top Outfits

Adding an Orange Beauty Bundle to Summer Outfits with Prints

Adding an Orange Beauty Bundle to Summer Outfits with Neutrals

Here's a quick review of items in my orange/coral bundle. Since I am focusing on colorful outfits that don't already include orange, I have only accessories (no clothing) in this post's orange bundle. One thing to note is that some of these accessories lean more toward a true Orange on the color wheel while others are more coral, which is a mixture of orange and pink that fits into the Red-Orange section of the color wheel. And that's OK! Your bundle doesn't have to be all a single matching color! It actually provides some depth and interest when your items fall into the same general color family but have some differences among them.

I think analogous/monochromatic and complementary color schemes are the easiest of the color wheel combinations to get right...probably because you are dealing with 1-2 colors (with or without neutrals) rather than the 3+ colors of the split complementary, triad, tetrad, etc. combos. So those are the combinations I'm going to address today with my orange bundle.

Orange + Neutrals + Analogous Color

My first outfit features a dark rusty-coral tank ("coral glaze"), which is probably a Red-Orange color, along with the neutral pants and topper. Since Red-Orange is adjacent to Orange on the color wheel, I put these two colors together in an analogous color scheme that was very easy to wear. You could also read the tank and accessories as all falling into the Orange/Red-Orange regions of the color wheel and treat it as a monochromatic color scheme. It makes no difference what you call it! The idea is that the colors are similar. I like that in this particular outfit, the orange accessories from my beauty bundle provide small pops of color to the more subdued outfit in a top-n-tails/bookended manner. (The white rabbits in the print also pop against the muted dark blue and "coral glaze" as an extra bonus.) Count of orange items = 2: earrings and shoes.

OOTD #1: 8/19/22

Orange + Neutrals + Complementary Color

For the purpose of this part of the post, I am treating these orange/coral items as Red-Orange on the color wheel with Blue-Green as the complementary color opposite it. But since Orange's complementary color is Blue, and navy is a dark version of Blue, it works in that direction as well...which is probably why navy is my favorite dark neutral with orange, now that I think about it. But the main idea is that these reddish-orangey tones are opposite the bluish-blue-green tones. You don't have to get too specific about it for the complementary color scheme to work its magic!

In Outfit #2, I put my newish navy-and-white striped linen top (that I also shared in the orange + neutrals post) with a teal skirt but wanted to add some extra energy and oomph to the combination. Enter the coral scarf in a complementary color scheme to the teal that generates a lot of excitement due to the high color contrast. The navy, white, and teal is a really nice color combination all on its own (and one I absolutely do wear frequently), but adding the complementary coral color changes the vibe.

OOTD #2: 8/21/23

I added a long DIY seed bead/tassel necklace in dark blue to provide a vertical element to the look, which I like against the horizontal stripes of the top.

I added the orange leather leaf earrings with the scarf to continue the orange/coral color rather than compete with it. I like how the orange in my portrait area really frames my face. Even though orange is not my best color, I think that the scarf (with its extra bit of pink/red in the color) actually works quite well here! The reddish-coral lipstick probably helps sell it.

I like the teal + orange combination well enough that I had made a DIY paper bead bracelet set in the teal/orange/gold colorway (details in this SIA post). I added the dark blue lapis lazuli bead bracelet to my daily stack so that color would be represented; even though there is no blue/navy in the paper beads, it worked well fitted into the middle of the stack.

In a lot of these orange accessory set outfits, you've seen me wear the orange ballet flats, but in this case, I kept the orange to the top of the outfit. I thought that adding orange shoes along with everything else would be too much in this particular case so I used navy shoes that matched the stripes in my top. Count of orange items = 3: earrings, bracelets, and shoes.

And by "too much" orange...that was an idiosyncratic judgment for that particular outfit/situation/day/mood; on another day, in a different mood, in a different situation, and/or in a different outfit, I might have found the additional orange just right! Another person might find this much orange always too much, and yet another person might find it too little - it's all subjective and variable...which is actually what makes the beauty bundle concept so great! It's like a nicely curated buffet table that you can pick from based on what you're feeling at that particular time. There are no strict rules.

Orange + Color + Complementary Color

My third outfit illustrates that the Red-Orange/Blue-Green complementary color scheme can also when you add it to another color. In this case, it's a peacock blue (that is somewhere in the Blue to Blue-Green area of the color wheel and which is itself arguably another variant on a complementary color to the orange/coral bundle). I thought this print mix was pretty successful considering that the only shared color between the striped top and floral scarf is the white (usually I like for the pieces to share two colors). Count of orange items = 4: necklaces, scarf (print), bracelets, and shoes.

OOTD #3: 10/10/21

Do you like to wear monochromatic/analogous colors in your outfits? Complementary colors? Do you think about color properties when putting outfits together or do you go by instinct (or some combination of the two)?

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