Personal Color
Find your seasonal tone in six questions and discover the colors and style that suit you.
Personal Color sorts the color families that suit your natural skin, hair, and eye tone into four seasons (Spring Warm, Summer Cool, Autumn Warm, Winter Cool). Find your tone with a few simple questions and get tips on the colors, style, and makeup that suit you. Sorting people by season begins with Johannes Itten, who early in the twentieth century observed that different colours suit different people, and spread in its present four-season form through American colour consulting in the 1980s. An actual assessment is made by holding fabrics against the face in good daylight, so a result from a questionnaire cannot stand in for a professional consultation. A colour that does not suit you is not forbidden either — it is enough to keep it away from your face.
How it works
Answer six questions and we find the season closest to you among spring, summer, autumn, and winter. It is a simple self-check built on the impression of your skin and eyes and the clothing colors that have suited you.
What you'll get
You see the character of your season tone, the colors that suit you and the ones to avoid, how to use them in clothing and makeup, and the mood the tone gives off. It carries on into the love style your colours suggest, the impression you leave at work, how you spend, what your complexion says about your condition, and the year ahead.
What warm and cool actually mean
Warm and cool describe not the colour itself but the cast running through it. A hint of yellow in the mix makes it warm; a hint of blue makes it cool. So the same red is warm when it leans orange and cool when it leans toward purple. What is being weighed is not which colours you like but which cast sits well against your complexion, which is why a colour you love and a colour that suits you can easily be two different things.
There are finer systems than four seasons
Spring, summer, autumn and winter is the most widely used division, but in practice consultants often split each season again into lighter and deeper, clearer and softer, arriving at anywhere from eight to twelve. This page works with four, so it sees at that coarseness. If the result seems broadly right while the details miss, finding your place within one of the finer systems is a reasonable next step.
How to check at home
Stand by a window in natural light, take off any makeup, and hold a sheet of white paper beside your face. Then hold gold and silver jewellery against your skin in turn: if one of them makes your face look brighter, gold points warm and silver points cool. Pull out a few garments you have often been told you look well in and compare their colours, and you have something to weigh the questionnaire result against.
Lightness and clarity weigh more than hue
A good share of the clothes that feel wrong are wrong not in hue but in being too light, too dark or too muted. The same blue behaves entirely differently on the face as a pale sky blue and as a deep navy. Get warm or cool right while missing lightness and clarity, and it still looks awkward. When you call to mind the clothes that suited you, look not only at the name of the colour but at how light and how clear that colour was.
Do not clear out your wardrobe over this
Once people learn their palette, the urge to get rid of everything that came out unsuitable is strong, and we would not recommend it. Start by finding the colours that do suit you among what you already own and putting them where they sit near the face, in tops and scarves, and use the palette as a reference only when buying something new. A colour that suits you lifts the complexion a little; it is not a rule that makes a person look like someone else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the same as a professional consultation?
No. It is a short self-check from six questions and does not replace a professional draping session under controlled lighting.
I feel like I am between two seasons.
That is common. Read the two neighboring tones together and think back to the clothing colors that have suited you.
Can I answer with dyed hair or makeup on?
Answering from your natural tone is more accurate. Dye and heavy makeup change the impression, so think back to what people said when you were younger, or to your complexion with makeup removed.
Must I never wear the colors that do not suit me?
Not at all. Use the suiting colors for what sits near your face — a top, a scarf — and wear whatever you like elsewhere. Even a color to avoid only means your complexion looks a little less lively in it.