How to Perform a Seasonal Color Analysis at Home: A Step-by-Step Guide based on the 12 Seasons Model

Understanding your seasonal color type is a game-changer when it comes to choosing outfits and makeup that enhance your natural beauty. While professional color analyses can be expensive, you can do a basic analysis at home by evaluating your position on three color dimensions: hue, value, and chroma. This guide will walk you through the steps to determine your seasonal color type, helping you make more informed fashion and beauty choices.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Hue (Warm, Neutral, Cool)

Hue refers to the warmth or coolness of your overall coloring. To assess your hue, try these simple tricks:

• Vein Test: Look at the veins on your wrist in natural light. If they appear greenish, you likely have a warm hue. If they look more blue or purple, you have a cool hue. If you see a mix of green and blue, you might be neutral.

• Jewelry Test: If you already know whether silver or gold jewelry suits you better, this can be a clue. Silver usually complements cool tones, while gold suits warm tones. If both work well, you may have a neutral hue.

• Paper Test: Hold a piece of white paper next to your face in natural light. If your skin appears more yellow against the paper, you likely have a warm hue; if it looks more pink, you have a cool hue.

Remember, you might not fall neatly into a warm, neutral, or cool category. Some people find themselves between two, especially if they have a neutral hue.

Step 2: Determine Your Value (Light, Medium, Dark)

Value refers to how light or dark your overall coloring is, including your natural hair, skin, and eye color. Here’s a straightforward way to figure it out:

• Greyscale Method: Take a selfie in natural light and convert it to greyscale (black and white). Then, compare your image to a standard greyscale slider to see where your coloring falls on the spectrum from light to dark.

• Assessing Contrast: While doing the greyscale test, you can also evaluate your contrast level (low, medium, or high). High contrast typically means fair skin with dark hair and eyes, while low contrast might be more uniform coloring, like light skin with light hair and eyes. High contrast often correlates with higher value, but this can vary based on your features.

Understanding your contrast is also helpful for evaluating your visual weight, which we’ll explore in a future post.

Step 3: Assess Your Chroma (Muted, Medium, Bright)

Chroma measures the intensity or saturation of your natural coloring. This step can be tricky, but here’s a simple method to get a sense of your chroma:

• Selfie Analysis: Take a selfie in natural light and look at the colors of your skin, eyes, and hair. Are they bright and striking, or more soft and muted? If your features stand out vividly, you likely have a bright chroma. If they blend together more subtly, you might have a muted chroma.

Chroma can be the hardest dimension to assess accurately, but with practice, you’ll start to see the differences more clearly.

Step 4: Identify Your Primary and Secondary Color Aspects

Once you’ve evaluated yourself on the three dimensions, it’s time to determine your primary and secondary color aspects. These aspects will guide you to your seasonal color type.

• Primary Aspect: This is the dimension that stands out the most in your coloring. It’s usually the easiest to evaluate and places you at one of the extreme ends of a color dimension. Your primary aspect could be warm, cool, light, dark, bright, or muted.

• Secondary Aspect: This dimension also significantly influences your coloring but is not as dominant as your primary aspect. Your secondary aspect could be on the hue (warm, cool, or neutral) or chroma (muted or bright) dimension and usually falls between an extreme and the midpoint.

• Third Aspect: The remaining dimension will be your third aspect, which has the least impact on your overall coloring. Your coloring in this dimension will be closer to the neutral or medium midpoint. Note that this third aspect can be value or chroma, but not hue.

Step 5: Match Yourself to a Seasonal Subtype

Now that you’ve defined your primary and secondary aspects, you can match yourself to one of the twelve seasonal subtypes. Here’s a quick overview:

• Spring: Generally light, warm, and bright.

  • Bright Spring: Bright + warm

  • True Spring: Warm + bright

  • Light Spring: Light + warm

• Summer: Typically light, cool, and muted.

  • Light Summer: Light + cool

  • True Summer: Cool + muted

  • Soft Summer: Muted + cool

• Autumn: Usually warm, dark, and muted.

  • Soft Autumn: Muted + warm

  • True Autumn: Warm + muted

  • Dark Autumn: Dark + warm

• Winter: Characterized by dark, cool, and bright tones.

  • Dark Winter: Dark + cool

  • True Winter: Cool + bright

  • Bright Winter: Bright + cool

With your primary and secondary aspects in mind, find the sub-season that best matches your coloring. For example, if you’re primarily cool and secondarily bright, you might belong to the Bright Winter category.

While the "true" subseasons represent the pure archetypes of the seasons as they are in the 4 seasons model, the additional ones introduced by the 12 seasons one border another season, like the following diagram illustrates.

Furthermore, everyone is unique, so while there will likely be a season that fits you the best, some people most accurate color description might actually fall between two neighboring ones, mainly due to the influence of the third aspect, that this model doesn't take into account.

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By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into your seasonal color type, allowing you to choose clothing and makeup that complement your natural beauty. Stay tuned for future posts where I'll dive deeper into the best makeup for each season, visual weight analysis, and more methods for evaluating your color dimensions. Happy analyzing!