How to Find Your Colour Season at Home

Before you start: light, a bare face and pairs of colours

Finding your season at home is a comparison exercise. You hold two colours under your face, one after the other, and watch what each does to your skin. For that to mean anything, three things have to be right.

The light. Sit facing a window so that daylight falls evenly on your face, out of direct sun. Late morning to mid-afternoon works best, and a bright overcast day is better than a sunny one. Switch off the lamps: a warm bulb mixed with daylight tints everything gold. Coloured walls and curtains reflect onto your skin too, so a white or pale grey background is the one to choose.

A bare face. No foundation, blush, bronzer or tinted moisturiser, and no self-tan if you can manage it. Pull your hair back. If it is dyed, or you are not sure how close it is to your natural shade, cover it with a white or light grey towel, and drape a second one over your shoulders so the top you are wearing does not join in.

Colours in pairs. Gather scarves, T-shirts, towels, even sheets of coloured paper. Each pair should differ in one quality only, so you can tell what you are reacting to:

• for warmth, a coral and a raspberry pink of similar depth, or a camel and a cool grey-beige;
• for depth, a pale and a dark version of one colour, such as powder blue and navy, or sand and chocolate;
• for clarity, a vivid and a dusty version of one hue: a clear turquoise and a greyed teal, a pure red and a brick red.

A phone camera helps, as long as the flash is off and any beauty filter is disabled. Take one photo per colour in the same spot and compare them side by side on the same screen. Your eyes adjust to colour as you look; the photos do not.

Step one: warmth

Warmth is your undertone, the steady cast beneath the surface of your skin: golden or peachy if warm, pink or bluish if cool. Hold each warm and cool colour under your chin for a few seconds and look at your skin, not at the fabric.

The colour that suits you makes your skin look even and clear. Shadows under the eyes soften, and your eyes look brighter. The colour that works against you does the opposite: the skin looks sallow or slightly grey, shadows deepen, and the colour seems to arrive a moment before you do.

• Warm points to Spring or Autumn.
• Cool points to Summer or Winter.

If the difference is hard to see, do not force an answer. Write down "unclear" and carry on; it is a clue in its own right, which step five uses. Our guide to warm or cool undertone explains the vein, jewellery and white-versus-cream tests, and why none of them is reliable on its own.

Step two: depth

Depth is how light or deep your natural colouring is overall, taking hair, skin and eyes together. The quickest way to see it is to take a photo of your face with your natural hair visible and switch it to black and white. Without hue, only lightness is left.

Light hair, light skin and light eyes read as light. Dark hair with deep brown eyes reads as deep, whatever your skin. Many people land in the middle, which is fine: the question is only which way you lean.

Then check with the pairs. On light colouring, dark shades look heavy, and your face seems to recede behind the colour. On deep colouring, pastels look chalky and thin, and the face loses definition.

• Light to medium points to Spring or Summer.
• Medium to deep points to Autumn or Winter.

Step three: clarity

Clarity is how clear or soft your colouring is, and it includes contrast: how sharply your hair, skin and eyes stand apart. Look at the black-and-white photo again. Dark hair against light skin, bright whites of the eyes and a sharp, sparkling iris all mean clear. Features that blend into one another, with light and dark close together, mean soft.

With the vivid and dusty pairs, clear colouring makes muted shades look drab: the face goes flat. Soft colouring makes vivid shades look loud, so people notice the colour before they notice you.

• Clear points to Spring or Winter.
• Soft points to Summer or Autumn.

Step four: from three answers to a season

Each season combines all three qualities:

Season	Warmth	Depth	Clarity
Spring	warm	light to medium	clear
Summer	cool	light to medium	soft
Autumn	warm	medium to deep	soft
Winter	cool	medium to deep	clear

Warmth gives you two candidates, and depth and clarity choose between them. Warm and light, or warm and clear, is Spring; warm and deep, or warm and soft, is Autumn. On the cool side, light or soft is Summer, and deep or clear is Winter.

Sometimes the answers do not line up. You might come out warm, light and soft, which matches no season exactly. That is not a failed test. It tells you that one quality outweighs the others in your colouring, and that quality is what the next step is about.

Step five: from season to subtype

Every season divides into three subtypes, each named after the quality that dominates. Look back at your notes and ask which of your answers was the most obvious, the one you did not have to think about.

• Warmth or coolness was obvious, and depth and clarity were middling: Warm Spring or Warm Autumn if warm, Cool Summer or Cool Winter if cool.
• Lightness stood out: Light Spring or Light Summer.
• Depth stood out: Deep Autumn or Deep Winter.
• Clarity stood out: Bright Spring or Bright Winter.
• Softness stood out: Soft Summer or Soft Autumn.

Within each of the last four pairs, the two subtypes share their dominant quality and differ in warmth, so a gentle lean one way decides. This is also where "unclear" from step one belongs: when warmth is hard to read, it is usually because another quality is doing most of the work. The warm and cool pairs split the other way. Warm Spring and Warm Autumn are equally warm and differ in depth and clarity, as do Cool Summer and Cool Winter.

Take one example. Ash-brown hair, grey-green eyes, skin that is neither obviously pink nor golden, and a black-and-white photo in which everything blends. Warmth is unclear with a slight cool lean, depth is medium, and softness is the clearest answer. Softness names the subtype, and the cool lean chooses Soft Summer over Soft Autumn.

Once you have a candidate, read its page and the pages of its neighbours. Our guide to the twelve seasons shows the wheel and which subtypes border which.

Where a home test reaches its limits

A careful home test can often narrow things to one season, or to two neighbouring subtypes. It rarely gets further with confidence, and the reasons are practical.

Daylight changes with the hour and the weather, and your eyes adjust to the colour of a room within a minute or so, which is why a tint you noticed on walking in soon disappears. Phone cameras correct white balance and smooth skin on their own, so two phones can show two different faces, and screens differ again. A tan, a recent self-tan or dyed hair shifts what you see, and so does a lifetime of wearing the same favourite colours: habit is persuasive.

Judging your own face is the hardest part. Friends help a little, since they see you without the mirror's familiarity, but they bring their own taste. If two neighbouring subtypes still both seem right, that is an honest result. Wear what the two share while you look closer, and the colour analysis myths guide will spare you a few common wrong turns.

A next step

The free colour test is a short quiz that runs in your browser and estimates your season, which makes a useful cross-check against what you found in front of the window.

If you would rather not be the judge of your own face, the personal colour analysis works from a few questions about your hair, eyes and skin plus one to three photos taken in natural light, the same kind of light you have just been using. It determines your season and the subtype within it, and sends a PDF report by e-mail with your recommended colours by name, the colours to avoid, wardrobe and style advice, accessories and metal tones, make-up and hair colours, and personal tips.