What color analysis is
Most people meet color analysis as four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Yours is more specific than that. We read three qualities in your coloring, and the way each one leans, to place you in one of sixteen palettes.
The four seasons
The starting point. Each is a particular blend of the three qualities below.
- Spring
- Warm, light, and bright.
- Summer
- Cool, light, and soft.
- Autumn
- Warm, deep, and soft.
- Winter
- Cool, deep, and bright.
The three qualities
Each quality runs between two ends. A session finds where your coloring sits on all three.
- Undertone
- Whether your coloring is warm or cool: gold and peach on one side, blue and rose on the other.
- Value
- How light or deep your coloring is, from fair and delicate to dark and strong.
- Chroma
- How soft or clear your coloring is, from muted and greyed to bright and sharp.
Warm ↔ Cool
Light ↔ Deep
Soft ↔ Bright
True seasons
When your coloring sits squarely in one season, we call it a true season: True Spring, True Summer, True Autumn, or True Winter. Many people sit between two, and the 16-palette framework is what lets us describe that nuance, borrowing from a neighboring season wherever it flatters.
The sixteen palettes
Here is the whole framework in one window. Each quarter is a season, and each petal is one of its four palettes: the true palette set in gold, with the three that lean beside it. Follow any petal and you will find the same colors, turned a little warmer or cooler, lighter or deeper, softer or brighter.
Our own illustrative rendering of the framework. The palettes we drape with in a session are the real thing.
A short history
Color analysis grew out of older work in color theory, textiles, and cosmetics, and took shape across several countries over the last century.
- 1800s
The European foundations
It starts with European color theory. Goethe, Chevreul, Munsell, and Itten worked out the language of hue, value, and chroma, and studied how nearby colors change one another, including how a color held near the face changes its look.
- 1940s
Post-war America
In the 1940s, the American designer Suzanne Caygill built individual color palettes for her clients by watching each person's natural coloring closely.
- 1980
The 1980s
Carole Jackson's 1980 book Color Me Beautiful made the four-season model popular, sorting people into Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter. It was simple enough to spread widely, though plenty of people did not fit one of four boxes.
- Late 1980s
The United Kingdom
British consultancies like Colour Me Beautiful and House of Colour turned color analysis into a profession. By the late 1980s they had moved to a tonal approach: light and deep, warm and cool, soft and clear.
- 1990s to 2010s
Japan and Korea
East Asia took it further. Japanese analysts introduced 16-type systems with a primary and secondary season, and from the 2010s color analysis spread widely in South Korea, tied closely to cosmetics and social media.
- Now
Today
Today most analysts drape fabric and read undertone, value, and chroma together, across four-, twelve-, and sixteen-palette systems.
In your colors, you look unmistakably like yourself.