One Customer's Meticulous Validation of the Style ID Calculator

I love this, because this is how granular I get with something I care about.

​And I'm so proud that the Style ID Calculator stood up to this scrutiny!  :-)

​This customer writes:


"I used your wonderful Style ID Calculator yesterday (with my driver's license picture in my hand -- an excellent suggestion!).  I'm very impressed with the amount of detail and all the work that went into this tool, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I believe with this I have finally gotten to the bottom line of my style identity.

"I looked for the items that looked like they "went with" my face, regardless of my preferences, and used your suggested scoring method of 3, 2, or 1..  When I plugged in my values for the Style Boards, the Style ID Calculator came up as 30% each for Romantic, Ethereal, and Natural.  Dramatic, Ingenue, Gamine, and Classic all came out as negligible.  That felt like the right direction, for the first time in my life!

"Then, being the geek that I am, I went back through the Style Boards.  For each one, I wrote out a brief description of each item's picture that I felt "fit" with my face.  For each Style Board, I counted up the number of items that fit, and divided that number by the number of total items shown for that Style Board (by my count), giving me a percentage that "fit" my face for each style board.  I then went through the Style ID Calculator again and plugged in values based on my percentages.  You will be pleased to know that it came out the same as my initial rough cut did, REN with the same percentages.

"Lastly, in an effort to see if I could fine-tune my results, I went through the list of "fit" items again, for each Style Board, and counted only the ones that really, really spoke to me, the ones that made my heart lift.  If, for instance, I found 6 items in the RE Style Board that I would absolutely love to have right now, I counted 3 for R and 3 for E.  If I found 4 "I love this" items in DNC, I counted 1/3 for each of those three basic identities, and added up all fractions at the end.

"After I totaled each of these "love to have" choices for each of the 7 basic style identities, I then divided each of those 7 totals by the grand total of my"love to have" items for all 63 Style Boards. This gave me a percentage on each of the 7 style identities based solely on my "love to have" list.   My results were:

R = 29%
E = 28%
N = 14%
I = 9%
C = 9%
D = 8%
G = 3%

"As you can see, the basic result still supports what your Style ID Calculator indicated, for an REN identity.  Most of the lowest four, the I,C, D, and G points, were from fractional entries that had readily identifiable R, E, or N elements, so I readily justified tossing those lowest 4 out.  In fact I had zero items at all for both pure G, and for DG in spite of the wealth of pictures your Style Boards provided.

"This is probably way more than you wanted to know, I apologize for taking your time if it is not useful to you; but I thought if you ever ran across a difficult client, you might enjoy trying this approach if you had not thought of it before, (although you probably have).

"Thanks again for all your hard work.  The product is wonderful and well worth what you are asking, and has helped clarify my thinking after all these years of groping.  I'm very grateful for your effort and generosity."