The False Promise of Seasonal-Color Analysis

As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.

The press created a minor moral panic (“unscandale optique,” a French journal called it), which it then attempted to solve. An 1859 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read American women’s magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help “ill-dressed and gaudy-looking women” by invoking a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors were most “becoming” on various (presumably white) women. Chevreul advocated “delicate green” for those with fair skin “deficient in rose”; yellow for brunettes; and “lustreless white” for those with a “fresh complexion,” whatever that means.

Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades look best on them. They are doing it via seasonal-color analysis, a quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that holds that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that do not—that wash us out, make us look ruddy or green, emphasize our flaws, and minimize our beauty.

According to this method, everyone belongs to a “season,” and a “subseason,” determined by the coloring of their skin and features. Bright winters, for example, tend to have sparkling eyes and dark hair and look great in jewel tones; true autumns are defined by their golden undertones and should wear earthy colors.

The theory first became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s, only to resurface in South Korea and then surge on the English-speaking internet over the past few years. Today, Reddit’s seasonal-color-analysis community has 167,000 members, putting it in the site’s top 1 percent. Search seasonal-color analysis on Instagram, TikTok, or Pinterest, and you will find seemingly endless results: posts that “type” celebrities such as Mindy Kaling (a dark winter) and Sabrina Carpenter (a light summer); offer advice for people who are autumns but wish they were winters; and present the ideal jewelry, eye-shadow palettes, prom dresses, Halloween costumes, and just about every other item of clothing imaginable for each color season. Seasonal-color consultants, credentialed and otherwise, are racking up hundreds of thousands of followers and charging hundreds of dollars for in-person sessions.

Read: How color shapes our lives

The savviest among them film their sessions for social media. In a typical video, a client sits, makeupless, facing the camera, an adorable white bonnet covering her hair. A color consultant drapes her in a succession of colored fabrics, and evaluates each for its ability to make her complexion pop. In one TikTok, a young woman with high cheekbones and gray eyes is identified as a summer and shown a series of shades that make her look, as the color consultant Tatum Schwerin says approvingly, “like a baby doll.” (The difference was, to my eyes, noticeable but underwhelming. The video has more than 32 million views.) In another video, a young woman describes her experience flying to South Korea for color analysis, the results of which were, she says, “shocking”—vivid spring.

This seasons-based approach traces back to Carole Jackson’s 1980 book, Color Me Beautiful. In it, Jackson promised that “color is magic” and asserted that “women—and men—have discovered its power to make the world regard them with awe.” She used seasons to describe her readers:

(Like Chevreul, Jackson was writing primarily with white readers in mind.)

The book was a sensation. It spent seven years on the New York Times best-seller list and spawned what we now might call a lifestyle brand: Jackson published a sequel specifically for men, and began licensing the Color Me Beautiful system and name to other consultants. Across the country, people would congregate to get their colors done at events described by the Times as “halfway between a Tupperware party and group therapy.” Women kept color swatches in their pocketbook, in case of a shopping emergency. Reader’s Digest subsidized the cost of consultations for employees, under a benefits policy that covered self-improvement.

More than four decades later, Color Me Beautiful still exists, and still sells certification for consultants, though it has added AI color analysis to its suite of products. And its wisdom has escaped onto social media, where teenagers and 20-somethings are discovering it. The modern version of color analysis is, like so many modern versions of so many things, both more sophisticated—color analysis now acknowledges the existence of a wide range of skin tones—and more complicated. Jackson’s four seasons have been cleaved into 12 and sometimes 16 subseasons, depending on one’s philosophy. The nuances are detailed in long blog posts filled with pictures of color wheels and terms such as chroma.

The appeal to contemporary audiences is obvious. First of all, draping videos are eminently watchable, in the same way a cooking video is: simple process, observable result. But the concept also fills, I think, a genuine need brought on by the collision of technology and the fashion and beauty industries. Today’s young women are probably photographed more than any other cohort in history—but they live on the internet, which is a firehose of quick-moving trends, targeted advertising, cheap fashion, conflicting advice, and color-correcting software. It has never been more important to know what looks good on you, and never have there been more sources of information to sort through in order to find out.

Much like astrology memes and internet quizzes—two of the most enduring online products of the past decade—color analysis is diverting and narcissistic, and it promises an immutable, essential self-knowledge that can be put into action. It offers a small sense of belonging in a tribal society (online, you can find groups for people who identify with each of the subseasons) and guarantees simplicity in a complex world.

The fashion and beauty industries seem to be embracing a kind of faux empiricism these days. A person’s hair can be classified into one of 12 types, based on texture, density, and thickness. If a decade ago your average bottle of skin goo advertised itself using vague terms such as hydrating, today’s skin-care products foreground their formulas and invite customers to “cosplay as cosmetic chemists,” as the beauty reporter Jessica DeFino has written. Canny seasonal-color-analysis influencers play into this; some even wear lab coats in their videos. Jenny Mahoney opened a seasonal-color consulting firm in New York in 2023 and has already expanded to Orange County, California, and the Washington, D.C., area. The first thing she told me about color analysis is that it’s “logical, it is systematic, and it’s based on science.”

Sure, sort of. Color theory really is a science, in that it is an organized approach to observing the natural world. Color can be measured, categorized, and studied; Chevreul was onto something when he proposed that the eye reacts in specific and sometimes surprising ways to certain color combinations. The color-consultation industry, though, is “scientific” in the way the wellness industry is—some of its principles may be based in truth, but the marketplace that has sprung up around them is trading in something else. Often, it feels less like a solution than part of the problem: more vocabulary, more rules, more ways to be led astray, more reasons not to trust your own eyes. Winter is a cool-toned season, but so is summer—in defiance, perhaps, of what you might think the word cool means. Yellow like a marigold is warm, but yellow like a daffodil is cool, or at least suitable for people who are cool seasons. According to one website, if you are a soft autumn, like Tyra Banks, you should wear “lots of nuts, rose and wheat colours,” and if you are a true spring, like Blake Lively, you should dress in shades “reminiscent of colouring pencils.”

Online, people talk about avoiding colors they love, or throwing away favorite articles of clothing. One Reddit user, who said she’d spent 26 years and almost $1,000 on color analysis, recently posted that she was close to quitting the enterprise altogether. She had, over the years, been identified as several different types and had replaced all her clothes, jewelry, and makeup each time, but “I’ve never felt 100% comfortable in any of them,” she wrote. It’s enough to drive a person a little crazy.

I know this because seasonal-color analysis drove me a little crazy. Though I hate being told what to do, I am always searching for ways to look hot with little sustained effort. But I can’t seem to find myself in any of the seasons. My hair could fairly be described as blond, red, or brown, depending on the light and the time of year, and because of a benign genetic abnormality, my left eye is the muddy color of a New England pond, while my right is a bright, cool blue. I have read tens of thousands of words about what this might mean, and paid for two different color-analysis apps. They declared me, variously, a soft autumn, a warm autumn, a cool winter, a bright spring, and a soft summer, which means black is either one of my power colors or the express lane to looking pallid, maybe even very ill. And so I walk this Earth knowing that every day is another wasted opportunity to make my features pop. I sleep okay, most of the time.