How to Choose Accessories for your Prom Dress

Linda Hahn: I am Linda Hahn. I am the owner and buyer for L H boutique in Laguna Beach and I am showing you how to pick out the perfect prom dress. Right now, we are talking about accessorizing. There are a lot of things you can do to accessorize a prom dress, but you always want to take into consideration the fact that many prom dresses already have a lot going on. If you are wearing something that has a lot of lace you might want to keep the jewelry very simply and delicate. You don't want to contrast with what you are wearing. You want to keep it all a cohesive unit and you don't want to overpower this dress that you have gone to so much trouble to find.Let's look at a couple of examples. Rebecca is wearing this beautiful dress and decided that in the midst of it she should put a small, delicate, little necklace. It works fine. There's really nothing terribly wrong with it, but let's take it off and see how much better it looks.The necklace isn't really necessary. The dress already has a beautiful gold chain on it and the actual - the addiction of the necklace actually detracted from the simple, elegant styling of the dress. Rebecca has also chosen to accessorize this dress with a simple gold bangle and a bright gold purse. This is a lovely look because you have a basic, solid color dress and a couple bright splashes of metal and you are done.Katelin (ph) is wearing a very busy dress that is very bright and flashy all on its own, completely covered in sequence, you don't need much with this dress. If you were to go with a big piece of gold jewelry, it would look very costumy (ph). You want to keep it simple and elegant. We have chosen to go with a simple Lucite necklace that makes it more youthful and more fun.Now let's take a look at a couple of other accessory options. Nikki has a very bright dress that has contrast of black. What you want to do with the dress like this is you want to bring out that contrast color which she has done very nicely with a very simple, black beaded necklace and a matching black beaded purse.When you have a dress like this you already have bright color and you already have two colors going on. You really don't want to bring in a bright metallic so you are not going to want to go with a gold or a silver. You want to keep it simple and elegant and this is accomplished by staying the basic black.Kelly's dress has a small degree of speckling on it in gold so she has opted to bring out that gold by adding a pale champagne gold clutch and a very simple necklace that is just gold with a facet in crystal. One thing you have to be careful of when you have a figure like Kelly's if you want to make sure that your necklace is not so long that it drops down into the cleavage behind the dress, you want to make sure that the length of any necklace you select compliments the neckline of your dress. If your neckline is very deep you can have a slightly longer necklace, but if the neckline is shallow you want to make sure that the necklace is either well above that neckline or in a pendant form dropping down the front or in a long chain.Next, I have got some final words of advice on finding the perfect prom dress.