Choosing Your Wedding Colors

Having specific wedding colors can help provide your big day with a sense of visual unity. Choosing your wedding colors may seem a bit daunting, especially if you aren’t particularly visually oriented or your partner is color-blind and absolutely no help. Never fear! It’s really quite easy.

Most people base their wedding colors on a favorite shade or favorite flower. You’ll want to choose one primary and one or two accents. Start off by seeing if there are any predetermining factors.

• Does either the reception or ceremony site have strong colors?
• Are you set on having a particular flower?
• Have you already chosen your bridesmaid dresses?

If so, you’re halfway to finding your wedding colors! If not, start by thinking about the season when your ceremony will take place. Spring and summer affairs usually include pastels or bright colors. Winter suggests deep purples, burgundies, grey-greens, and silvers. Fall brings harvest tones - oranges, reds, and yellows- to the table. 

What to avoid:

• Too much black: While sophisticated, it can end up looking like a funeral, rather than a celebration. If you love black, balance it out with a bright color, or lots of crisp white.

•  Losing your personality: Don’t just do pastels because I've suggested it above. Think about what you wear normally in your clothing and the shades you've used to decorate your home. These are probably colors you are comfortable around already.

•  Picking too many wedding colors: Two are perfect, and three will still work, but any more than three wedding colors will end up looking hectic and strange. The purposes of wedding colors are to tie everything together, and the best way to do this is to have everything in one or two shades.

If you have a favorite shade, but don’t know what else will go with it, try consulting a simple color wheel. Artists and designers have used this tool for years as a design principle… they’re also pretty fun to look at!

•  Consider going monochromatic (aka many shades of one color). A bride I worked with used blue for her ceremony by the sea. Each bridesmaid had a different shade of blue for her dress, and the bouquets include irises, lilies, and delphinium, along with several white varieties of flowers.

• Consider having related tones, ones adjacent to each other on the color wheel. A bride I’m assisting now has green bridesmaid dresses with blue sashes. You might also consider green and yellow, or red, purple and blue.

•  Consider having complementary shades, located opposite each other on the color wheel. For example, lavender and pale yellow, or forest green and burgundy.

•  If you really love one hue in particular, you might want to highlight it among neutrals. So, bridesmaid dresses might be cream with purple sashes, groomsmen might wear off-white tuxedos with purple boutonnieres, and bouquets might be stephanotis, white roses, and lavender sweet pea.

Once you have some idea of your wedding colors, everything starts to really fall in place.

Happy color choosing!

Xoxo

Katherine