Choosing the Right Hat For Your Face,Body, and Individual Style
Almost every woman can look great in a hat. It just has to be the right hat. The trick is paying attention to a few important principles. The right hat can make a whole outfit really pop. The wrong hat can ruin everything.
Here are a few simple rules, laid down by fashionable women of past generations, when hats and gloves were part of every woman’s wardrobe. They work for today’s young women who are re-discovering hats, just as well as they did for their mothers and grandmothers back in the day. Hope you find them useful too.
Choose the Right Hat for Your Body Type
Generally speaking, the shorter the woman, the narrower her hat brim should be. A wide brimmed dramatic garden party hat that looks great on a tall woman, will overwhelm a short one. Tall women look better in hats with flatter crowns. A short woman in a flat crowned, broad brimmed hat can end up looking like a mushroom, or maybe even a toadstool. A tall, slim woman risks looking like a pinhead in narrow brimmed high crowned styles.
Whether you are tall, short, fat, thin, old or young, it is important when selecting a hat to look at yourself in a full length mirror to gauge how the hat goes with your outfit, your body type, and the overall you. A hat that looks fabulous when you look at it in a small, vanity mirror, may miss the mark entirelywhen you view it full length and see it integrated with the rest of your body and the outfit you are wearing with it.
Choose the Right Hat for Your Face Shape
imagesource PinterestFirst, ascertain your face shape. If you don’t know it, look in a mirror or ask your friends. They’ll tell you. The cardinal rule to remember when selecting a hat is to pick one with a crown that is the opposite of your jawlline and that balances out your face and makes it look as close to a perfect oval as possible.
For example: If your face is square and you choose a hat with a square crown, you will look like a box. Choose a round crown that balances out your square jaw.
Look at your features closely in a mirror. Are your face planes soft or sharp and angular? If you have soft features choose a hat with sharp, defined lines to balance your soft features out.
If your face has lots of angles or you are ( ahem) more mature, choose a hat with softer, rounder lines.
Short hair is rarely a problem when choosing hats, but if you have long hair, decide how to wear it when wearing hats. Usually it is best to pull your hair back or wear in in an upsweep or even braided. It varies with the person and the hat but one thing is for sure. Long hair hanging down from certain hats can be a disaster. Other hats perched on top of an elaborate upsweep can be equally bad. Think ahead about your hair as well as your face shape when choosing a hat.
So that’s it. Those are the rules and I hope they help. But the most important rule of all for hat success is to buy and wear a hat that you love and feel comfortable in and that reflects your personal style. One of the wonderful things about hats is that they are a shortcut to fashion and that they make a very individual fashion statement. Whatever your age, body shape or face type, wear a hat that shows off the real you.