Colour analysis, and what a season actually tells you

Seasonal colour analysis sorts people into palettes that flatter them. It came out of colour theory taught at the Bauhaus, was turned into four seasons for a general audience in the 1980s, and has since been split into twelve. It is having a second life because it is a genuinely useful way to stop buying clothes and makeup that fight your face.

It is worth being clear about what it is. It is not a measurement and there is no correct answer waiting to be discovered. It is a filing system built on three real observations about colour, and its usefulness comes from those three.

The three axes

• Hue — whether your colouring leans warm (gold, peach) or cool (blue, pink). This is undertone.
• Value — how light or deep your colouring is overall, taken across skin, hair and eyes together.
• Chroma — whether the colours in your face are bright and clear, or soft and muted.

Every season is a position on those three. Nothing else is going on.

The four, and then the twelve

Spring is warm and bright. Summer is cool and muted. Autumn is warm and muted. Winter is cool and bright. Each then splits three ways depending on which axis dominates — Light Summer leans light, True Summer leans cool, Soft Summer leans muted — which is where the twelve come from.

The split matters because most people sit near a border. Being told “summer” when you are a Soft Summer will send you towards colours that are correctly cool and far too clear.

Reading yours at home

Do it in daylight, with bare skin and your hair covered, and change one thing at a time.

• Hue: hold gold, then silver, against your jaw. One lifts the face; one drains it.
• Value: photograph yourself and convert the picture to black and white. If your hair, skin and eyes collapse into one grey, your value is even and light or even and deep. If they separate sharply, you are high contrast.
• Chroma: hold a clear, saturated colour against your face, then the dusty version of the same colour. Bright colouring holds the saturated one. Muted colouring is overpowered by it and settles under the dusty one.

Where the framework stops

Draping in person, with proper cloths and a trained eye, is more reliable than anything you can do with a phone, and considerably more reliable than a filter. Lighting moves the answer. Hair dye moves the answer. Two analysts will sometimes disagree by one sub-season, and both will be defensible.

It is also not a rule. A colour outside your palette that you love is not a mistake; it just has to work harder. The palette tells you which colours do the work for you.

Undertone is one axis, not the whole thing

Undertone answers hue and nothing else. It is the axis that stays put — it does not move when you tan, dye your hair or age — which is why it is the one worth knowing first and the one everything else is built on top of.

If you know your undertone, you have narrowed twelve seasons to six, and you have the piece that decides whether a foundation reads orange or grey.

What Boirelle does with it

Boirelle does not assign you a season. It reads the axis that a photograph can honestly carry — undertone — along with hydration, oil, texture, redness, face shape and eye colour, and orders the shades in the try-on studio so the ones your undertone supports come first.

Value and chroma need hair and eyes judged against skin under controlled light, which is a draping appointment rather than a selfie. Where the app cannot read something confidently, it prints a dash instead of guessing.

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