The advent of colour photography on a commercial scale around 1930 presented Madame Yevonde with just the sort of challenge she wanted, and an opportunity which she seized on with her customary zeal and enthusiasm. VIVEX was a subtractive process using three glass quarter-plates for the cyan, magenta and yellow separations, which were processed separately and then brought together at the printing stage to produce an image with the full colour range. The process was highly sophisticated and allowed for almost infinite retouching during processing to remove unsightly blemishes, and to correct minor errors in registration.

The VIVEX process proved to be a godsend, and Madame Yevonde set about mastering its complexities, experimenting and testing its limits at every turn and working closely with the inventor to develop its full potential. The rich colour resolution obtained with the process, with strong luminous reds and yellows and vibrant highlights, ideally matched her own extrovert personality. By underexposing her negatives, which were always very sharp, she obtained quality and reflection in the shadows, and a luminous glow to flesh tones which was otherwise difficult to achieve. At the same time, the pastel shades the process was capable of producing were exquisitely beautiful, and have never been bettered by any other photographic process.

By 1932, Madame Yevonde felt sufficiently confident of her mastery of the new medium to rent a gallery and hold her first full-scale exhibition of her work consisting of no fewer than 70 images, half of them in colour. In addition to portraits and advertising images, the exhibition also contained a number of 'still-life fantasies', as she liked to call the mildly surreal images born of her own fertile imagination which in some ways anticipated the rather more outlandish creations of the Surrealist Movement.