Seasonal color analysis

The four base seasons split by undertone and depth: Springs are warm and light to clear, Autumns warm and muted to deep, Summers cool and light to soft, Winters cool and clear to deep. Each splits into three by the quality that leads: a Bright Spring is a Spring whose contrast leads, a Soft Autumn an Autumn muted toward gray, a Deep Winter a Winter whose darkness leads, and a True season one whose warmth or coolness leads. This tool can land on any of the 12, and it names your close second, the season your reading sits nearest to; when you sit between two, both palettes will work.

What a season gives you is a filter, not a rulebook: a palette of colors that share your undertone and sit at your depth and contrast. Shopping inside it means pieces go with your face and with each other. Your result links the full palette for your season.

Your cheek tap gives two readings. Its ITA angle, the angle skin color research uses for depth, places your skin in one of Chardon’s six bands, which count as the answers to the quiz’s sun question below. Its hue angle gives your undertone: over 58° warm, under 44° cool, in between neutral, and a low-chroma skin (under 17) over 52°, which the undertone test calls olive, also neutral.

Your hair tap gives its level from 1 (black) to 10 (lightest blonde) on the hair color changer’s scale, which was set on 342 reference photos whose level was called by eye. Levels 1 to 3 count as dark brown or black, 4 and 5 as brown, 6 and up as blonde, each warm or ash by whether it is more or less yellow than that level’s usual color on the same photos; hair 8 or more points redder (a* in Lab) than usual for its level reads red, which 1% of the reference photos reached. Your iris tap, with pupil and catch light left out and the cast of the room taken out using the white of your eye, is matched to the eye color detector’s eight reference colors: blue or gray, green or hazel, light brown or amber, or brown.

Those four inputs, plus your veins counted as neither, go through exactly the rule the color analysis quiz uses. After the quiz, the photo check shows which inputs it read differently from your answers.

No ground truth exists for color seasons: no study has assigned seasons to a set of faces by an agreed method, so this tool’s seasons, like every other tool’s and analyst’s, cannot be scored right or wrong. What we measured instead, on the site’s reference photos of well-known people: of 795 photos, 317 faced the camera with open eyes and 268 had hair and an iris to read. The three taps were stood in by face landmarks and the hair model, the way scripts/color-season in the site’s code does it.

All 12 seasons came up. The most common were Deep Winter (38%), Bright Winter (18%) and Deep Autumn (14%), which follows from these photos: 53% read dark brown or black hair, 76% dark brown eyes, and the skin’s hue read cool for 38% and warm for 13%. The rarest was Bright Spring (1%). Reference photos of famous people are not a sample of anyone in particular, so these shares say nothing about how common a season is.

How steady the reading is: moving the cheek tap to the other cheek kept the season for 65% of faces, reading the iris as a whole ring instead of a tap for 89%, and reading the hair over the whole crown instead of one tap for 81%; an iris tap 3 pixels off center, on an iris about 14 pixels across, kept it for 89%. The light across your face is the biggest source of change, which is why the tool asks for daylight from the front.

How the inputs compare with other judgments: the hair read the same depth band (dark, brown or blonde) as a person calling the level by eye in 61% of 134 photos; the iris read the same color group as Wikidata lists for the person in 61% of 54 people, where calling every eye brown would score 57%. Wikidata gives a person’s usual coloring, not this photo’s, so that is a floor rather than an accuracy, and these photos are small: the iris is about 14 pixels across.

In-person analysts drape dozens of fabrics under controlled light and read how your face responds: shadows, brightness, evenness. That reads something a photo cannot, and a good analyst also weighs your eye pattern and what you like wearing. A photo is free, quick and repeatable on the same picture, but it is only as good as the light it was taken in: a warm lamp or a colored wall shifts the colors the camera records, your skin’s hue included. Measure here first in daylight; if you land between two seasons and care about the difference, that is where a good in-person analyst earns their fee.