COLOUR ANALYSIS

Which Colour
Season Are You?

Your colour season determines

which kind of colours harmonise
with you. This knowledge is
therefore of great benefit when
creating your personal colour palette.
But finding out which colour season
you are can be tricky.
This comprehensive guide is
designed to help you determine
which of the twelve colour seasons
you fall into.

Contents

I. Characteristics

II. The Colour Palette

III. Styling

! Shop Bright Spring

Before we dive into the analysis, it's a good

idea to understand exactly how seasonal
colour analysis works. If you are interested in
the theory behind colour analysis, please refer
to this article.

Each seasonal colour palette mimics the

colour aspects of an individual falling into that
colour season. What does that mean? You have
a natural colour palette, which is manifested in
your skin, eyes and hair. The aim of colour
analysis is to identify this natural colour palette
and to match it to one of the twelve colour
seasons.

We do this by evaluating your natural colouring

along three colour dimensions:

I. Hue

The hue (or temperature) scale tells us how

warm or cool a colour is. The more yellow is
added to a colour, the warmer it becomes. The
more blue is added to it, the cooler it
becomes.

In other words, we need to ask: do you suit

warm, neutral or cool colours? The answer will
depend on whether your features have warm
or cool undertones.

II. Value & Contrast

The value scale tells us how light or dark a

colour is. The more black is added to a colour,
the darker it becomes. The more white is
added to it, the lighter it becomes.

Here we need to ask: do you suit light, medium

or dark colours? The answer will depend on
how high the contrast between your features is
as well as how light or dark your individual
features are.

* Your contrast level is not one of the three

colour aspects, but it is closely related to value
and is a helpful additional metric.

III. Chroma

The chroma scale depicts how

bright/saturated/clear or muted/soft a colour
is. Clear colours are pure colours. The more
grey is added to a pure colour, the more muted
it becomes.

The question here is: do you suit highly

saturated colours or greyed-out ones? The
answer will depend on how high the natural
grey content of your colouring is.​

The six colour aspects​

We need to find the setting of your natural
colouring on each colour dimension - these
are your three colour aspects.

One of the three aspects will turn out to be

your primary colour aspect - the most
important factor of your colouring. That means
your colouring will sit at one of the extreme
ends of that colour dimension.

Based on three colour dimensions, your

primary aspect will be one of the following six:

warm or cool (hue)

light or dark (value)

muted or bright (chroma)

On this colour dimension, you will need the

most extreme version of a colour. Even the
medium/neutral level won’t look good on you.
For example, if your primary aspect is warm,
neutral and even neutral-warm colours won’t
do anything for you. Only the warmest colours
will flatter your appearance.

Your secondary colour aspect significantly

influences your colouring. On this dimension,
your colouring will sit between one of the
extreme ends and the midpoint of the
spectrum.

Your secondary aspect can only be one of the

following:

neutral-warm or neutral-cool (hue)

medium-muted or medium-bright
(chroma)

On this dimension, you will clearly lean more

towards one of the extreme ends of the
spectrum, but the most extreme version of a
colour will be too much for you. For instance, if
your secondary aspect is medium-bright, the
most saturated and vibrant colours will
swallow you up. Your best colours will be
saturated (rather than muted), but they won’t
be extremely bright and vibrant.

The third aspect doesn’t have much impact on

your colouring. On this dimension, your
colouring will be close to the neutral/medium
midpoint of the spectrum.

Your third aspect will be either value or

chroma, but it cannot be hue.

To sum up, what we are going to do is twofold:

(1) Identify the colour settings of your natural

colouring

(2) Match these settings to a colour season

with similar settings

This colour season will contain those kinds of

colours which are most similar to your own
colouring and will therefore harmonise with
you.

Note

Bear in mind that although we will analyse

each colour dimension separately, in reality,
they are interconnected.

Warm colours are inherently light, whereas cool

colours are naturally dark. So if your natural
colouring is warmer and lighter, it will also be
brighter. But when you darken a warm colour, it
becomes more muted. So if you are warmer
and darker, you are also automatically more
muted.

Similarly, if your natural colouring is cooler and

darker, it will also be brighter. Whereas if you
lighten a cool colour, it becomes more muted.
So if you are cooler and lighter, you will
automatically be more muted.

Keep this in mind when you are going through

the analysis to avoid confusion.​

SPRING
warm + light → bright

​SUMMER
cool + light → muted

AUTUMN
warm + dark → muted​

WINTER
cool + dark → bright

The Wardrobe Guide

Want to understand colour analysis in
more detail and with lots of examples?
Check out the wardrobe guide.

LEARN MORE

I. Hue
A hue is a colour family (orange, green, purple
etc), and any hue can appear as a warm or a
cool colour (for instance, a warm mossy green
vs a cool grass green). What we are really
concerned with here is the hue’s undertones.
The more yellow you add to a colour, the
warmer it becomes. The more blue you add to
it, the cooler it gets.

That’s why colours with yellow undertones are

warm colours, while colours with blue
undertones are deemed cool colours. So a
mossy green will contain a lot of yellow,
whereas a grass green will contain a big portion
of blue. More neutral colours have
predominantly red undertones.

In other words, this aspect of your colouring

determines whether you look better in warm,
neutral or cool colours. And that will depend
on whether your features have warm (yellow)
undertones, cool (blue) undertones, or neutral
(red) undertones.

The full undertone spectrum looks like this:

All of your facial features have the same

undertones. But your skin may be the most
di"cult feature to analyse because the
undertone is not freely visible. So we will
discuss skin tones first.

Determine your skin

undertone
Human skin comes in all kinds of shades
ranging from fair to deep and all shades in-
between. But whether your skin is light or dark
is not relevant here. What is essential is
whether it is warm or cool.

And that is because clothing colours in the

wrong hue will visually highlight imperfections,
emphasise shadows on your face and make
your skin tone appear uneven.

Determining your skin undertone is thus a

crucial exercise that will positively impact your
wardrobe and your appearance. But how do
you know whether you have warm or cool
undertones?

The di"erence between undertone and

overtone

You might have been struggling to determine

your skin tone in the past. And the reason for
that may be that you were paying too much
attention to your overtone.

What exactly is an overtone? It’s the colouring

of your outward appearance: the colour of your
skin, hair and eyes are all the result of the
unique combination of melanin (black, blue,
brown) and carotene (yellow, orange, red)
levels.

You may have thought that you were warm

because of the yellowness in your skin only to
find out that warm colours make you look
even more yellow. But with skin, what you see
is not always what you get. And that is due to
skin undertones.

Undertone refers to the underlying colour of

your skin tone. It can sit anywhere on the
spectrum of cool (blue) through neutral (red) to
warm (yellow).

You can imagine your skin tone like this:

undertone + overtone = skin tone. The mixing
of the undertone with the overtone can
produce confusion. We need to therefore
understand how undertones appear when
mixed with di#erent overtones. Let’s break this
down.

The undertone of your skin sits somewhere on

the hue scale. Warm undertones are yellow,
cool ones are blue and neutral ones are red.
Although green is also a neutral colour, it is not
one of the three primary colours. And no one
has a green undertone - not to be confused
with olive skin.

Skin overtone is the overlaying colour of your

skin or what it looks like outwardly. Overtones
range from fair to deep and are mostly
determined by your ethnicity. And if you are
familiar with makeup foundations, you will
know that manufacturers also like to split their
product ranges into di#erent overtones. Below
are six overtones ranging from light to dark on
the value scale.

Now if we combine skin undertones and

overtones, we get actual skin tones. In other
words, this is how the skin actually looks:

As you can see, the warmer skin tones look

more yellow, the neutral ones more pink or
reddish, and the cool ones appear more
blueish.

The Wardrobe Guide

See real examples for each skin tone in
the wardrobe guide.

LEARN MORE

To find your undertone, you can simply

compare your skin to this chart. If you are not
be able to spot your skin tone straight away,
don’t worry. There is a well-known test you can
use to help you find your undertones.

Metal test
This test is the popular metal test. It’s simple:
Do you look better in gold or silver? If gold
suits you, you have warm undertones. If silver
looks good on you, your undertones are cool.
And if both metals look fine on you, you have
neutral undertones. This is a great way to
determine your skin undertone - as long as
you know what to look for.

How does the test work?

If you have very warm or very cool undertones,

you will see a strongly negative reaction to
either silver or gold.

If there is no strong reaction against either

metal, your skin tone has neutral undertones. If
one of the metals looks slightly better than the
other one, your skin has either neutral-warm or
neutral-cool undertones.

A reaction to gold or silver is caused by a clash

of two undertones. Warm skin has clear yellow
undertones. If you put something silver near it,
the blue undertone of the silver will turn the
skin a sickly green (because yellow + blue =
green).

Similarly, if you put something gold near cool

skin, the yellow gold will clash with the blue
undertones of the skin. The result is again a
sickly, greenish tinge.

A neutral skin tone will not have such a strong

reaction because its undertone is red. In this
case, yellow gold will mix with red to produce
orange, and blue silver will mix with red to
create purple. Both orange and purple form
part of the hue scale and occur as natural skin
undertones. Green, however, is not a skin
undertone, which is why a green tinge causes
the skin to look o#.

You can see the e#ects in the following

graphic, in which the three pure undertone
hues were mixed with gold on the left and
silver on the right:

The resulting colours all appear ‘healthy’

except for the third one in the first row and the
first one in the third row. In these spots, yellow
was mixed with silver and blue mixed with
gold. In both cases, the result is a ‘sickly’
greenish colour. That is why it is so important
to wear colours with the right undertones.

I. Warm undertones
Warm skin has clear yellow undertones.
Depending on the overtone, warm skin tones
may look di#erently. But the yellow undertone
is always visible:

How to spot warm undertones

Skin with very warm undertones does not

tolerate silver and will have a strong reaction
against the metal. Silver makes warm skin
appear pale, ‘muddy’ and greenish (because
yellow undertones + blue silver = green). But
gold draws out the naturally present yellow
undertones and creates a glowing skin tone.

! More examples in The Wardrobe Guide

II. Cool undertones

Cool skin has clear blue undertones.
Depending on the overtone, cool skin tones
may look di#erently. But the blue undertone is
always visible:

How to spot cool undertones

Skin with cool undertones does not tolerate

gold and will have a strong reaction against the
metal. Gold makes cool skin appear weirdly
yellowish or greenish (because blue
undertones + yellow gold = green). But silver
draws out the naturally present blue
undertones and creates an even skin tone.