The Nineteenth-Century Science of Fashion

What colors best suit your complexion, scientifically speaking? As historian Charlotte Nicklas writes, that’s something that women in England and America started asking in the 1850s, thanks largely to magazines that encouraged them to learn about a newly developed color theory.

Nicklas writes that the modern science of color goes back to the seventeenth century, when Isaac Newton created the first color wheel, modeled on the musical octave. In the same era, Robert Boyle developed the idea of primary and secondary colors.