We can team our purple blouse with a tan skirt (tan being a form of yellow) and dress it down for a business meeting. We'll want our jewelry to be a little more subtle. In this case, rather than yellow, let's use the triad colors to purple -- orange or green. These may seem like bold choices, but remember you want your jewelry to be seen, not to blend into the woodwork.

How about an amber pendant? This would be sophisticated and would be set off wonderfully by the purple background without being garish.

Or an emerald brooch and earrings, or a green frog pin. The possibilities are endless within your basic color choices. If you stick with these color constraints, you will not go wrong.

Now let's consider the classic grey business suit. You may be thinking that your grey suit is neutral so you can choose any color at all. This is rarely the case and can be the cause of that ensemble that doesn't quite work.

Most greys tend towards blue (cool) or red/yellow (warm). So first determine if your suit is cool grey or warm grey. If you're having trouble with this (and it can be tough at first), try holding it up to other grey items in your house. You'll start to notice that it looks a bit redder (or yellower) or a bit more blue. This will help you determine the color bias of your grey suit.

Most warm grey used in clothing is a reddish grey. This is because red complements the complexion. But you will find some yellowish greys, particularly in garments with very sophisticated color.

Let's say our suit is a cool grey, so for the purposes of our color choice we'll consider it blue. The complement of blue is orange.

We want to keep this a business suit, so we'll pick the triad to each side of the orange to start with. Red and yellow. This tells us that gold will be a perfect choice for our grey suit. Silver is too blue and would wash out the outfit.

You may have noticed that gold tends towards red or yellow. If you are using more than one accessory with the gold, determine whether the primary gold jewelry you will be wearing is reddish gold or yellow gold.

This is done just as we did with the suit itself, by comparing it with other colors.

If the gold is reddish, then keep your other accessories in the red and yellow range. If the gold is yellow, keep the other colors in the yellow orange range.

Note, the description "yellow gold" is for any gold that is not white (silvery). Yellow golds range from a deep red to a very pale yellow, so be sure to check each piece of jewelry when putting together your outfit. A red gold and a yellow gold next to each other will look subtly wrong, unless they are carefully combined in a single piece by a master jeweler. A lack of understanding about the tendencies of gold to be manifested as different colors results in fashion mistakes are that are hard to pin down.

So, let's say we've chosen a beautiful golden horse pin as our primary jewelry piece. We look at it and realize that it tends, ever so slightly, towards red. This makes the rest of our accessorizing easy.

We'll go for red and even towards the cooler reds (those tending towards purple, rather than towards the yellows and oranges). With our golden horse brooch and a deep slightly purplish red scarf our grey business suit stays business-like but acquires a powerful feminine appeal.

If you want more color, choose red's triads, blue or yellow.