None of it is bad. Much of it is lovely. Some of it made me think, oh, that’s clever. But somewhere around the fifth reel a small, unhelpful voice piped up: the market is saturated, Jena. What exactly are you adding?

Today’s post is my attempt to answer that voice honestly, without pretending I’ve got it all figured out.

Yes, it’s crowded. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Colour analysis has had a proper moment. Somewhere in the last few years it went from a slightly retro curiosity (hello, 1980s “Colour Me Beautiful” paperbacks) to a full-blown online phenomenon. Analysts are popping up in every city, training programmes are filling, and the algorithm has decided that everyone must know their season immediately.

I launched Glow Theory in May 2026, well after that wave started building. I’d love to tell you I strategically timed the market. I did not. I finished my training, got certified, and then discovered that a great many other people had done the same thing, some of them years earlier, some of them with a following of six figures and a ring light that probably cost more than my first car.

There’s a specific flavour of wobble that comes with this. It isn’t “should I quit?” It’s quieter and more insidious: does the world need another one of me?

The content trap

Here’s what I noticed when I started making things. The easiest content to make is the content that already works. “Which is she?” videos perform. Seasonal breakdowns perform. “Colours that make you look tired” performs like nobody’s business.

So the temptation is to make a slightly different version of those. Same format, different voice, maybe a nicer background. And I’ve done a bit of that, because you have to start somewhere and because, frankly, the formats are popular for a reason. People enjoy guessing. People enjoy being told which colours suit them. It’s satisfying in the way a good quiz is satisfying.

But I could feel myself sanding down the edges of what I actually wanted to say. When you copy a format, you inherit its assumptions, and most of the popular formats assume the audience wants one thing: a verdict. You’re a Soft Autumn. Here are your colours. Goodbye.

What about the person who’s been told she’s a Summer, bought an entire wardrobe accordingly, and still feels a bit flat in half of it? What about the person who got analysed twice and received two different answers? What about the one who wants to understand the why, the undertone and value and chroma of it all, rather than just being handed a swatch fan and a smile?

Those people exist. I’ve met them. They’re in my DMs. They’re just not the ones the algorithm is chasing.

The ideas problem (or: the opposite of writer’s block)

Now, you’d think a saturated market would leave me short of things to say. The reverse is true. I have too many ideas, and I’m not entirely sure that’s better.

A partial list of what’s currently living in my notes app:

• A deep dive into why so many draping results get muddied by makeup, and why I ask clients to arrive completely bare-faced (yes, even the tinted moisturiser, and yes, I know, I’m sorry)

• A series on what analysts actually see during a draping, translated from the blunt version we use in training (”her chin is casting a shadow”) into words a human being would like to hear

• A whole platform for other analysts, because I keep thinking that the profession would benefit from better shared language

• Sub-season content that goes way beyond the four main seasons

• Guides, glossaries, palettes, tools, a podcast I have no business starting, an entire imaginary shop

• At least three things I’ve forgotten about that I’ll rediscover at 2am

Every one of these feels urgent the moment I think of it. Every one of them is, in isolation, a decent idea. Together they are a very charming way of never finishing anything.

I suspect this is familiar to anyone who’s ever started something of their own. When you build a business, the ideas don’t queue politely. They arrive all at once, wearing party hats, demanding to be first. And the seductive lie is that if you just had enough time, you’d do them all.

You won’t. Neither will I. The real work is choosing.

So what do people actually want?

Here’s the honest bit: I don’t fully know yet. But I have some hypotheses, based on the questions I keep getting, the conversations in consultations, and the things I would have wanted to read when I was first tumbling down this rabbit hole myself.

1. They want to understand, not just be told.
People are curious about the mechanics. Why does one shade of green make your skin glow and another make you look like you’ve just stepped off a ferry in a gale? “Because you’re a Winter” is an answer. “Because your skin has cool undertones and high contrast, and that green has a muted, yellow-leaning quality that competes with you” is an explanation, and I think explanation is far more satisfying, and far more useful when you’re standing in a shop.

2. They want to know what happens in a real session.
There’s a lot of mystery around what colour analysis involves, and a lot of scepticism, too. What does a draping feel like? Why the bare face? What if I get a result I don’t love? How do you know? I’d like to pull the curtain back.

3. They want honesty about the messy bits.
Nobody talks enough about the results that don’t fit neatly, the in-between people, the “I’m technically a True Summer but I absolutely adore how I look in a rich burgundy” situations. Real life is fuzzier than a four-season quiz. I’d like to make room for the fuzz.

4. They want to actually use it.
Knowing your palette is one thing. Standing in a changing room with three options and a nagging doubt is another. Practical, wearable, “here’s what to do on a Tuesday” content feels like an underserved gap.

5. They might want the behind-the-scenes of someone building this in real time.
That’s what this post is, in a way. I’m not writing from the summit. I’m writing from about a third of the way up, slightly out of breath, taking notes.

I could be completely wrong about some of these, which is why I’ll ask you properly at the end.

On being unique (a word I’m trying to use less)

Whenever people talk about standing out, the advice tends to be “find your niche” or “be authentic,” which is roughly as helpful as telling someone lost in a forest to “find the trees.”

Here’s the more useful thing I’ve landed on: you don’t need to be the only one doing something. You need to be the one doing it in a way that could only be you.

There are lots of analysts. There is only one person who’ll explain undertone using a dachshund’s coat as the visual aid, who has strong opinions about the ethics of bare-faced consultations, who writes in this particular tone, and who has likened their client to a sickly Victorian child when they’re in the wrong colour on more than one occasion. My voice is warm, a bit cheeky, and I’d like to think reasonably clever. It’s not a strategy so much as a description of how I already talk.

The uncomfortable part is that this only works if I actually let it show. Which means resisting the pull toward the polished, generic, could-be-anyone version of my content. Every time I catch myself writing something that would fit equally well on any other analyst’s page, that’s my cue to start again.

Pushing forward when the maths feels bad

Some days, the truth is that momentum is a decision rather than a feeling. On the days I don’t feel like a person with a thriving business, I’ve found a handful of things that help:

Ship the imperfect thing. A published, slightly rough post teaches me more than a perfect one that lives in drafts forever. Feedback is the only real market research.

Pick one idea per season. Not per year, per season. (I’m aware of the pun.) The others go into a parking lot, not a bin. They aren’t rejected, they’re queued.

Stop comparing my chapter one to someone else’s chapter twelve. The analyst with the enormous following didn’t start there. I’m just seeing the highlight reel, and I know from experience that highlight reels leave out the reheated tea and the 11pm spirals.

Talk to actual humans. Every client conversation gives me more clarity than a week of scrolling. The people in front of me are not “the market.” They are individuals with specific, often surprising questions.

Remember why I started. When I was teetering on the precipice of 40, I started noticing my aging face. Not in a bad way, but in a way that says I’ve spent almost 40 years on this planet and I am, in fact, no longer a spring chicken. One day I saw a colour analysis video and saw for myself exactly how abruptly someone’s appearance changed when going from the wrong to the right colours. I decided at that very moment to learn my season - and because I never do anything half-assed, the only way in my mind to learn my season was to learn the methodology behind it. I very well may be the only person who has essentially paid $5,000+ for a “colour analysis” (aka mastery course, drapes, the whole she-bang), haha. But I don’t regret that for a minute because it has led me on this very wild and wonderful journey.

None of this is particularly dramatic. That’s rather the point. Pushing forward mostly looks like small, slightly boring, repeated action.

Now, over to you

This is where I need your help, and I mean that fully.

I’d love to know what you want more of. Not what you think you should say you want, but what you’d actually click on, read to the end, or forward to a friend. Have a think about these:

• What’s the one thing about colour analysis you still don’t understand?

• What content have you seen that made you think “finally, someone said it”?

• What are you sick of seeing?

• Would you rather have deep-dive explainers, real consultation stories, practical styling help, or a peek behind the curtain of building this business?

Hit reply, leave a comment, or send me a message. I read everything, and I mean that in the way that involves tea and slightly too much enthusiasm.

The market may be saturated, but a saturated market is also proof that people care. They’re hungry for this stuff. The question isn’t whether there’s room. It’s whether there’s room for the specific, honest, slightly chaotic thing I have to offer.

I think there is. I’m going to keep finding out.

Until next time,
Jena x

It’s the kind that allows you to spend an entire evening enthusiastically planning something that does not yet exist, for customers you do not yet have, using money the business has not yet made.

And somehow, while doing this, you think:

Yes. This seems perfectly reasonable.

Welcome to the business side of Glow Theory.

When I first started down the colour analysis rabbit hole, I was mostly thinking about the actual work itself: learning colour, understanding undertones, studying what happens to a face when you change the colour underneath it, getting certified, working with clients and eventually creating a space where people could come in and have that slightly surreal experience of realizing they have been buying the wrong shade of beige for fifteen years.

I knew I wanted Glow Theory to feel different.

Warm. Modern. A little irreverent. Educational without being stuffy. Somewhere between “here is the science behind why this works” and “that colour is making you look vaguely unwell, please remove it immediately.”

What I did not fully appreciate was that learning how to be a colour analyst and learning how to build a colour analysis business are two very different things.

And I am currently doing both.

At once.

While also working a full-time job.

Because apparently I enjoy having hobbies like “creating impossible amounts of work for myself.”

Building Something While You’re Still Building It

There is an odd stage of starting a business where it simultaneously feels incredibly real and completely imaginary.

I have a name.

I have a brand.

I have a website.

I have clients.

I have a studio.

I have actual people booking appointments, sitting in front of me, being draped in approximately seventeen thousand pieces of fabric and leaving with a completely different understanding of their colouring.

So yes, Glow Theory is very much a real business.

But then there’s the other side.

The part where I have a running list of ideas approximately the length of a Victorian novel and a business bank account gently reminding me that perhaps we could calm down.

There are so many things I want to build.

Tools. Guides. Better client resources. Digital experiences. Educational content. Technology that makes colour analysis easier to understand and actually use. Resources for other analysts. Systems that connect all the little pieces of the colour world that currently live in seventeen different places.

And every new idea tends to create three more.

It is equal parts exhilarating and deeply inconvenient.

Because this is where the great small-business chicken-and-egg problem arrives.

To build the things that could help Glow Theory grow, I need money.

To make more money, I need Glow Theory to grow.

To help Glow Theory grow, I would like to build the things.

To build the things—

You see where this is going.

There are days when I want to hit fast-forward.

I can see what this could become so clearly that sometimes the frustrating part is simply existing in the gap between the idea and the resources to execute it.

I want to build technology.

I want to create beautiful client materials.

I want to experiment.

I want to hire people.

I want to make mistakes quickly, learn from them and build the next thing.

Unfortunately, businesses generally prefer that you earn money before spending all of it.

Rude, but financially sound.

So right now, there is a lot of doing things the slower way.

Making something myself instead of paying someone to make it.

Learning software I never expected to learn.

Building prototypes.

Changing them.

Changing them again.

Asking myself at 11:42 p.m. whether a button should say “Get Started” or something slightly more charming.

Realizing the entire thing needs to be rebuilt.

Rebuilding it.

And then going to bed.

The Strange Double Life of Building a Business

Glow Theory is also not the only thing happening in my life.

I still work full-time in the Executive Assistant/Personal Assistant/operations world, which means my days can be…full.

Very full.

The kind of full where your calendar develops a personality.

I have spent most of my career around founders, executives and growing companies, and in hindsight, I think that has influenced Glow Theory much more than I realized it would.

Working behind the scenes of businesses teaches you a lot.

You see how decisions are made.

You see what happens when systems work beautifully and what happens when absolutely nobody knows where the spreadsheet is.

You learn how much customer experience matters.

You learn that the tiny details people barely notice are often the ones shaping how they feel about a company.

And you learn that an idea, no matter how good it is, eventually has to survive contact with logistics.

So there’s a strange crossover happening in my brain all day.

One part of me is coordinating, organizing, troubleshooting and thinking ten steps ahead in my professional life.

The other part is quietly taking notes.

Oh. Glow Theory should do this.

Glow Theory should never do that.

This would make a great system.

People hate this experience. How could mine be better?

Then I finish work and open the other laptop.

Metaphorically, at least. Sometimes literally.

And Glow Theory gets its turn.

Is this the easiest way to start a company?

Absolutely not.

There are moments when I desperately wish I could give Glow Theory my full attention.

There are also moments when I recognize that this strange season is giving me something valuable: I am building the business slowly enough to actually notice what it needs.

Every client teaches me something.

Every question someone asks becomes a potential resource.

Every moment of confusion tells me there is something I could explain better.

And every time I find myself saying, “I wish there were a tool that…”

Well.

That is how Glow Lab started.

The Part I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Glow Lab

Glow Theory began with colour analysis.

Glow Lab is the reason I know it won’t end there.

I love analysing someone’s colours. I really do.

There is something incredibly satisfying about watching the right colour suddenly bring someone into focus. Their eyes sharpen. Their skin looks clearer. The shadows soften. Sometimes even their facial structure seems to change.

And then you watch them see it too.

That moment is magic.

But I kept thinking about what happens after that moment.

Because knowing your season is useful.

Knowing what to do with it is better.

You can walk away knowing that you are a True Summer or a True Autumn or a Bright Spring—but then you go into a store and there are 400 sweaters and none of them have little signs saying:

HELLO TRUE SUMMER. THIS ONE.

You buy makeup online and every shade is described as something like “soft warm rosewood mauve nude,” which feels impressively committed to being every undertone simultaneously.

You decide to colour your hair and suddenly you are looking at words like ash, beige, golden, neutral, dimensional, mushroom, champagne, copper and caramel and wondering whether any of us actually know what caramel means anymore.

That gap fascinates me.

The space between:

“Here are your colours.”

and

“Here is how to live in them.”

That is where I think Glow Lab belongs.

My dream for Glow Lab is that it becomes the experimental, educational, slightly nerdy heart of Glow Theory.

A place where I can explore the parts of personal colour that go beyond simply naming someone’s season.

Hair colour.

Makeup.

Contrast.

Patterns.

Metals.

Neutrals.

Colour combinations.

How our colouring changes over time.

Why two people in the same season can still make very different choices.

How colour systems relate to one another.

How analysts describe what they see.

How we can use technology without removing the human judgment that makes colour analysis valuable in the first place.

Some of the ideas are for clients.

Some are for analysts.

Some are currently half-built experiments sitting in my computer that may never see daylight.

That is the lab part.

I want permission to test things.

To make tools that solve tiny annoying problems.

To question whether the way something has always been done is actually the best way to do it.

To build resources because I desperately wanted them to exist and eventually realized nobody was going to make them for me.

There is a version of this business where I simply become a very busy colour analyst.

And to be clear: that would be a wonderful business.

But I don’t think it is the business I am trying to build.

I don’t want the entire future of Glow Theory to depend on how many people I can physically fit into my studio every week.

There are only so many hours in a day and only so much draping one woman can do before she becomes one with the fabric rack.

I want Glow Theory to have a life beyond my appointment calendar.

I want to create things that are useful while I am sleeping.

Things another analyst can use across the country.

Things a former client can open six months after her appointment while standing in a Sephora having a minor existential crisis over lipstick.

Things that make colour analysis more accessible, practical and connected.

I want Glow Lab to become the place where those ideas get to live.

I don’t entirely know what it will look like yet.

And strangely, that is one of my favourite things about it.

There Is Room for All of Us

One of the biggest surprises of this entire experience has had nothing to do with colour.

It has been the people.

I went into my colour analysis course expecting to learn a new skill.

I did not expect to come out of it with a group of women I now talk to constantly.

We send each other ideas.

We ask each other questions.

We celebrate bookings.

We troubleshoot weird draping results.

We talk pricing, clients, marketing, websites, tools and the thousand tiny decisions involved in turning a certification into an actual business.

Sometimes someone drops an idea into the group and five people immediately start building on it.

Sometimes someone is having a discouraging day and everyone else reminds her why she started.

Sometimes we disagree about colour—which is actually useful, because despite what the internet would occasionally have you believe, personal colour analysis is not performed by a magical machine that spits out an indisputable answer.

There is judgment.

There is observation.

There is learning.

And there is enormous value in being surrounded by people willing to say, “Wait, what are you seeing there?”

What I particularly love is that it does not feel like competition.

Technically, I suppose we are competitors.

We are building businesses in the same industry.

But I have never felt that someone else’s success leaves less available for me.

If someone books ten clients this week, she did not steal ten clients from my imaginary allocation of humans who are allowed to receive colour analysis.

Her success is proof that people want this.

Her brilliant idea may spark a completely different idea in me.

My experiment may help her solve a problem.

There is room for different analysts.

Different styles.

Different approaches.

Different personalities.

Different businesses.

And frankly, I think the industry gets better when we stop acting as though knowledge has to be guarded in order to be valuable.

I would much rather build alongside people.

Maybe that comes from spending years in operations, where I have seen repeatedly that the strongest systems rarely come from one person sitting in a room protecting their ideas.

They come from collaboration.

Someone asks a better question.

Someone catches the thing you missed.

Someone says, “What if we did this instead?”

Suddenly the idea is better.

That energy has become a huge part of how I think about Glow Theory and eventually Glow Lab.

I want to contribute to an industry, not simply occupy a corner of it.

The Less Instagrammable Part

Starting a business is exciting.

It is also extremely good at making you question your own intelligence.

There are days when I feel wildly confident about Glow Theory.

I can see exactly where I want it to go.

Then there are days when I spend money on something, receive one booking notification and immediately think:

Well. We had a good run.

Small-business finances are humbling because everything feels expensive before the revenue catches up.

Software.

Supplies.

Drapes.

Printing.

Insurance.

Websites.

Products.

Marketing.

Equipment.

Education.

Every tiny idea appears to come with a monthly subscription.

And when you are funding growth mostly from the business itself, you become very familiar with prioritization.

What do I need now?

What will actually create value?

What can wait?

What can I build myself?

What deserves professional help?

What am I only tempted to buy because somebody on the internet has excellent branding?

I am learning.

Sometimes gracefully.

Sometimes after buying the thing.

But underneath the anxiety, there is something very cool happening.

I am watching a business become real.

Not overnight.

Not because I posted one video and suddenly 700 people formed an orderly queue outside my house.

Slowly.

A person books.

She tells someone.

That person follows.

Someone sends me a message.

A collaboration idea appears.

I test a new service.

A client asks a question that inspires a new guide.

One little thing creates another little thing.

And gradually there is momentum.

What I Hope This Becomes

I have no interest in pretending I have a perfectly mapped five-year plan for Glow Theory.

I have approximately a five-minute plan and several hundred notes.

But I know how I want this business to feel.

I want someone to interact with Glow Theory and feel like colour analysis suddenly makes more sense.

I want people to leave my studio understanding themselves better—not feeling like they have been handed another set of rules about what they are allowed to wear.

I want Glow Theory to be useful.

I want it to be curious.

I want it to evolve.

I want Glow Lab to become somewhere ideas can be tested, knowledge can be translated and useful tools can be built.

I want to collaborate with clever people.

I want to support other analysts.

I want to create resources that I wish existed when I started.

I want to see how far this can go.

And yes, I would eventually like the business to make enough money that every new idea does not begin with me Googling:

“Can I build this myself for free?”

Baby steps.

The funny thing about starting Glow Theory is that colour analysis was initially the obvious part of the business.

Now I think it may simply be the doorway.

The more I learn, the more interested I become in everything surrounding it: education, technology, tools, community, consumer behaviour, beauty, psychology and the way people translate information about themselves into actual decisions.

That is the bigger idea.

Not just telling someone which colours make them glow.

Building something that helps them understand why, remember it, use it and have fun with it.

And creating tools that help other people do that too.

Right now, I am somewhere in the messy middle.

Working.

Analysing.

Building.

Learning.

Making money.

Spending money.

Trying not to spend too much money.

Collecting ideas at a rate that is frankly becoming problematic.

Some days I am incredibly excited.

Some days I am overwhelmed.

Most days I am both.

But I think that might simply be what it feels like when you’re building something you actually care about.

Glow Theory is still small.

Glow Lab is still becoming whatever Glow Lab is going to become.

There are a lot of things I cannot afford to build yet.

There are a lot of things I do not know yet.

But for the first time in a long time, I have this feeling that I am not just building myself another job.

I am building toward something.

And I cannot wait to find out what it becomes.

There’s the session snippet video, usually shot on a phone, usually vertical, usually featuring a dramatic before-and-after drape reveal with music that implies something cinematic is happening (go check my Instagram - I’m living proof!). There’s the celebrity analysis, delivered with the confidence of someone who has personally examined the subject’s undertone under neutral lighting, which they have not, because the subject is a celebrity and the source material is a red carpet photo taken at an event where everyone is lit to look amazing. There’s the “do this test at home to find your season” content, which usually involves looking at your veins (unreliable, as I’ve written about extensively) or eye colour (also unreliable, also covered). And then there’s the content from people who are, bless them, figuring this out in real time and occasionally typing someone as a Deep Autumn when they are clearly - clearly - a Summer.

I say this last part with all the saltiness of someone who has spent a significant amount of time and money training properly, because yes, I am a little salty about it. I’ll own that.

The point is: colour analysis content is everywhere right now. A lot of it is the same. And a fair amount of it is wrong in ways that are consequential for the people receiving the advice, who then spend money building a wardrobe around an incorrect palette and wonder why nothing quite works.

So the question I kept asking myself, while building Glow Theory from the ground up in the middle of all of this: what’s actually the point of adding more?

How we got here, a brief and slightly chaotic history.

The seasonal colour analysis system has been around since the early 1980s. Carole Jackson’s book Colour Me Beautiful came out in 1980 and started a whole moment - suddenly everyone knew they were a season, colour draping was A Thing, and at some point in the subsequent decades it quietly faded into the background of cultural memory, the way a lot of very good ideas do when the trend cycle moves on.

Then the internet happened. And then, specifically, Carol Brailey happened.

If you’ve spent any time in the colour analysis rabbit hole online, you know who I’m talking about. Carol Brailey is widely credited as one of the first people to bring seasonal colour analysis back to a mainstream digital audience in a serious way - posting sessions, explaining the theory, showing the draping process, making it visible and accessible. She arguably reignited the whole conversation. The current explosion of colour analysis content? A lot of it traces back to that reignition.

Which is really great. More people understanding their colouring, more curiosity, more conversations about why some colours make us look like we slept for twelve hours and others make us look like we haven’t slept since 2022 - all of this is good. I am here for it.

What I am slightly less here for is the part where the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten a bit chaotic. Where the algorithm rewards confidence over accuracy, where a dramatic reveal performs better than a nuanced explanation, and where someone can post a celebrity “analysis” based on three red carpet photos and a hunch and get three hundred thousand views while someone doing genuinely careful, trained work gets forty-seven.

Again: I am aware this is a little salty. I contain multitudes.

The thing that kept nagging at me.

When I started building Glow Theory - properly, deliberately, after my certification training in Toronto with Karen Brunger at the International Image Institute - I knew I didn’t want to just post session snippets and join the pile of content that all looks the same. Not because session content is bad. It’s not. It’s useful and people clearly want it and I post it too. But I kept circling a problem that felt more fundamental than content strategy.

The problem is this: colour analysis makes a lot of intuitive sense when you can see it happening. When you’re in the room, watching a drape go up and watching someone’s face change in response - when you can literally observe that this particular shade of orange is pulling a sallow cast into the skin and this other one is doing the opposite - it clicks immediately. It’s not magic, it’s just observation. The evidence is right there, live, in front of you.

But when you try to explain it in words - in a blog post, in a caption, in a comment under someone’s confused “but why can’t I wear black?” question - it gets slippery. You say “high contrast” and people hear a concept. You say “muted chroma” and people hear jargon. You say “your undertone is cool but your depth is deep and your chroma sits low” and people hear a foreign language and quietly close the tab.

The gap between “understanding this in a room with a drape” and “understanding this from reading about it online” is enormous. And most colour analysis content doesn’t really try to close it. It either stays in the room (session videos) or stays in the words (educational posts), and neither quite bridges to the other.

I wanted to build something that did both.

Enter: Glow Lab.

Glow Lab is the part of Glow Theory’s website that I have been quietly building, and lovingly losing sleep over, for the past several months. It is, in the most direct description I can give you, an interactive colour education space. Not a quiz that spits out a season. Not a list of rules. Not a database of celebrity analyses (it may have this someday, but it will be with strict parameters rather than red carpet photos). A place where you can actually play with colour concepts and watch them behave - which is, as it turns out, worth approximately ten thousand words of explanation.

The philosophy behind it is simple: don’t tell people that contrast matters, show them contrast mattering. Don’t explain that “black” is not one universal colour, let them interact with multiple versions of near-black and watch what happens when the temperature and depth change. Don’t describe what undertone does to skin - demonstrate it, visually, in a way that creates those small moments of “oh. OH. I see it now.”

Because those moments are the whole point. They’re what happens in a consultation when a drape goes up and a client’s face changes and they suddenly understand, in their body rather than just their brain, why this matters. I want to give people some version of that before they ever sit down with me. Or alongside a result they’ve already received. Or just because they’re curious and they want to understand colour better, full stop.

What’s actually in there.

The Contrast Experiment is the one I think about the most, because contrast is probably the single most under-explained concept in popular colour analysis content. Everyone talks about seasons. Very few people talk clearly about why the same colour can look striking and intentional on one person and slightly exhausting on another - and the answer is usually contrast.

The experiment shows you the same scenario at different contrast levels, including one of my favourite examples: how black - which most people treat as a universal, safe, infallible neutral - actually interacts very differently with different people depending on their natural contrast level. A high-contrast person in black looks polished and deliberate. A soft, lower-contrast person in true black can look like the colour is working against them, pulling focus away from their features rather than framing them. Same garment. Wildly different outcomes. And you can see it, rather than just nodding along while I describe it.

I also want to flag something I care about specifically in how this experiment is built: the demonstration isn’t just on fair-skinned women. Colour theory doesn’t only apply to a narrow range of colouring, and colour analysis content has a long and somewhat embarrassing history of representing a very limited slice of humanity. Glow Lab is trying to do better than that, intentionally, from the ground up.

Beyond Black takes a similar approach to a different concept: the idea that even colours we think of as universal are anything but. “Black” is not one colour. There are warm blacks, cool blacks, blacks that pull blue, blacks that pull brown, true blacks and near-blacks and everything in between. The Beyond Black experiment lets you interact with different versions of deep, dark neutrals and observe - rather than just read about - how subtly shifting the temperature and depth of a dark colour changes the overall visual effect. It’s the kind of thing that, once you see it, makes you walk through a shop differently. Suddenly you’re looking at the dark corner of a clothing rail with different eyes, because you understand that “dark” is not a monolith.

There’s also the Colour Compass, which is an interactive tool that introduces you to your own colouring and the concepts behind seasonal analysis. I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t: it’s not a replacement for a professional analysis. It’s not going to tell you definitively what season you are with the accuracy of a proper draping session under controlled lighting. What it does do is walk you through the relevant concepts - undertone, depth, contrast, chroma - in a way that’s interactive and personal rather than abstract and theoretical. If you go through it and then come in for a consultation, you’re going to have a much easier time understanding what I’m seeing and why. That’s the point.

And then there’s the Season Shifter, which is maybe my favourite thing I’ve built, because it captures something specific to the 23-season system I work with: the fact that seasons aren’t just four tidy boxes. People’s colouring sits on a spectrum. You can flow between characteristics. You can be primarily in one season with notable characteristics of another. The Season Shifter lets you explore how the system changes when you adjust different variables - and it’s the best way I’ve found to explain, without a forty-minute lecture, why “just tell me if I’m warm or cool” is a useful starting point but not the end of the conversation.

Why I built this instead of just posting more session content.

Partly because I think the world has enough session content and not enough colour education that actually sticks. Partly because I’m an operations person at my core and I will always build a system when I could be building a system. Partly because I spent months learning colour theory from one of the best people in the business and I want to find ways to make that knowledge useful beyond the people sitting in a chair across from me.

But mostly because of a specific frustration I kept feeling, early in building this, when I’d try to explain something visually obvious in text and watch the explanation get clunkier the longer it went on. Colour analysis makes sense when you can see it. Full stop. So I decided to build something you could see.

Glow Lab is ongoing - more experiments are in progress, more tools are coming. It’s a bit of a labour of love, built by someone who finds colour theory really fascinating and wants other people to find it fascinating too, rather than confusing or gatekept or only accessible to people who can afford a consultation or who happen to follow the right accounts.

It’s also, I think, something a little different in a space that’s gotten a bit crowded with the same few types of content. Which is, if I’m honest, exactly the point.

Go have a look. Play with something. Let your brain make a connection it hasn’t made before.

That’s what it’s there for.

Explore Glow Lab

The internet has very strong opinions about this. Most of those opinions are somewhere between oversimplified and outright wrong, and they’re delivered with a confidence that I find both impressive and mildly alarming.

I’ve had people arrive at consultations with their season already decided - not because they’ve done extensive research, but because someone in a Facebook group told them that their eye colour basically settled the question. It did not settle the question. Eye colour does not settle the question. Please stop letting eye colour settle the question (that’s what this entire post is about, so buckle up!).

What eye colour actually contributes to an analysis.

In a proper colour analysis, eye colour is considered alongside skin undertone and natural hair colour - not independently of them. The combination of all three is what determines your season. Eye colour contributes specific information about intensity and clarity: are your eyes clear and vivid or soft and muted? High contrast against your skin, or similar in depth? These observations help narrow down sub-seasons and confirm or question what the skin’s undertone is already suggesting.

So if someone has vivid, clear blue eyes with strong depth and contrast against their skin, that’s a useful signal pointing toward a higher-intensity, clearer season. If someone has soft, slightly muted hazel eyes that blend gently with warm golden skin, that points toward a softer, lower-intensity, warmer season. Eye colour is contributing real data - just not the data people usually think it is. It’s telling us about intensity, not undertone. And those are different things, a distinction we’ll get to in a moment.

Why “blue eyes = cool, brown eyes = warm” is too simple to be useful.

This is the big one. The one I want to stamp “MYTH” on in large letters and put on a billboard somewhere.

Brown eyes are the most common eye colour in the world and they appear in every single season. There are Deep Winter women with very dark, almost black-brown eyes and cool undertones who look extraordinary in jewel tones. There are Warm Spring women with golden-brown eyes and warm undertones who glow in coral and peach. There are Soft Autumn women with medium brown eyes that read almost amber. Brown eyes, on their own, tell you essentially nothing about whether someone is warm or cool. A brown eye is doing about as much diagnostic work as knowing someone’s shoe size. Interesting! Irrelevant!

Blue eyes are slightly more correlated with cool undertones, but “slightly more correlated” is not the same as “always,” and it’s certainly not the same as “just look at someone’s eyes and call it done.” Very clear, bright blue eyes do occur more frequently in Spring and Winter seasons. But softer blue eyes show up in Summer palettes constantly. And there are people with blue eyes in warmer seasons when the rest of their features are warm enough to pull the whole picture in that direction. Blue eyes are suggestive of cool undertones, weakly, the way a person wearing a band t-shirt is suggestive of liking that band. Probably. But not necessarily. You’d want to confirm.

Green eyes and hazel eyes are the most variable and the most frequently overinterpreted, possibly because they’re rarer and therefore feel more meaningful. They’re not. Green eyes appear across a huge range of seasons. As for hazel eyes - hazel eyes are the chaotic neutral of the iris world. They contain multiple colours, they shift depending on the light, and they change significantly depending on what colour the wearer has near their face. Put an on-palette colour near a hazel eye and it looks brilliant and complex. Put an off-palette colour near it and it goes flat and muddy. Which makes hazel eyes a lovely confirmation tool once you’ve already found someone’s season - and an extremely unreliable starting point for trying to find it.

I have had a homestay student with hazel eyes insist to me, with the full authority of a seventeen-year-old who has done thirty seconds of TikTok research, that she was “definitely warm because hazel eyes are warm-toned.” I gently suggested we look at the whole picture. She was not warm. Her hazel eyes looked much more vivid and defined next to the cool tones we tested. She conceded this point with the graciousness you might expect. (She did, eventually, come around. Teenagers always do, right after they’ve established that agreeing with you was their own idea all along.)

What eye colour does reliably indicate.

A few things worth naming as genuine signals rather than oversimplifications:

The presence of vivid, distinct colour in the iris - a bright clear blue, a true emerald green, a hazel with multiple vivid flecks - tends to point toward a clearer, more vivid season (Spring, Winter, or the higher-clarity end of Summer). Soft, muted, greyed-down eye colouring - a grey-blue, a quiet hazel, a muted brown without much sparkle to it - tends to point toward the softer season types (Soft Summer, Soft Autumn). This is about intensity and clarity in the iris, not the specific hue. The question isn’t what colour your eyes are. It’s how loud they are.

The relationship between your eye colour and your skin is also informative in a way that eye colour alone isn’t. Very pale skin with very dark, dramatic eyes points toward high-contrast seasons. Eyes and skin that are close in depth and blend softly together point toward lower-contrast ones. Again - the picture, not the single feature.

The most useful thing to look at in someone’s eyes during an analysis.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where working in person is genuinely irreplaceable. Rather than using eye colour to determine a season, a trained analyst uses the eyes as a live feedback system during draping. When a colour is right, the irises look more vivid and defined. The whites of the eyes look cleaner and brighter. The whole eye area looks more awake. When a colour is wrong, eyes flatten, the contrast between iris and white reduces, and suddenly everyone in the room is thinking “they look a bit tired, don’t they?” even though they were absolutely fine five seconds ago before we held up that drape.

I find this part of the process genuinely - sorry, I find this part of the process very - (note to self: stop using that word, it’s in the banned list) - I find this part of the process one of the most satisfying things about draping in person. Watching someone’s eyes change in response to colour is almost immediate and almost always obvious once you know what to look for. The eyes are not the input. They’re the readout. That’s the most useful role they play.

What to do with this when you’re self-assessing.

If you’re trying to narrow down your season before a consultation - or just indulging some idle curiosity at eleven pm on a weeknight, which is a completely valid activity - here’s how to use your eye colour in a way that’s actually useful. Don’t start with it. Start with the broader question: does warm or cool colouring generally seem to work better near your face? Hold up different things. Watch your skin. Form a hypothesis. Then cross-reference with your eyes: do they look more vivid and defined near the warm options or the cool ones?

“Warm colours seem to make my skin glow AND my hazel eyes look more golden and vivid near warm tones” is meaningful evidence. “I have hazel eyes therefore I am warm” is astrology for your wardrobe. It feels like a conclusion. It is not a conclusion.

A note on iris patterns.

Some colour analysis frameworks place significant weight on the specific patterns within the iris - the rings, spokes, and markings visible under magnification - and occasionally clients arrive having read about this online and wondering if I’m going to examine their eyes in forensic detail. The answer is: I may look at your eyes closely, but I am looking at the overall impression they create (vivid or soft, high contrast or blended) rather than cataloguing individual markings like a very niche detective. You don’t need to sit unnaturally still while I produce a magnifying glass. That is not what’s happening.

I raise this mainly because the clinical-sounding nature of iris pattern analysis can make colour analysis seem more intimidating or pseudo-medical than it needs to be. It is not a medical procedure. It is, fundamentally, a very attentive conversation about what happens to your face when you sit near different colours. The iris patterns are one small part of that picture and I promise I am not mapping your eye like a geological survey.

The actual takeaway.

If you’re currently using eye colour as your primary self-assessment tool - “my blue eyes mean I’m definitely cool,” “my brown eyes mean I’m definitely warm” - I’d gently suggest filing that theory under “interesting starting hypothesis” rather than “settled fact.” Then go hold some different colours near your face and watch what happens. Do your eyes brighten? Go flat? Look more vivid or more washed out?

The response of your eyes to colour is more useful information than the colour of your eyes on its own. Let your eyes be witnesses rather than judges. They’re excellent at the former and shockingly unreliable at the latter.

And if anyone tries to tell you your season is determined by your eye colour alone: you now have an entire essay to send them. You’re welcome.

So here it is, offered without any particular filter. The things I wish I’d known before I got properly colour analysed. Buckle up, it’s a lot. (So was my wardrobe. These things are related.)

Your gut feeling about your own season is probably about 60% right, which is not enough to bet money on.

Most people who come into a colour analysis have some theory about themselves: “I’ve always thought I was warm,” “I know I’m definitely not a Winter,” “I think I’m probably Autumn but maybe not?” These intuitions are usually based on years of trial and error with clothing and makeup, which means they contain real data. They’re also filtered through all the wrong information about undertones and seasons that circulates online, which means they also contain real noise.

My personal theory, before my analysis, was that I was neutral leaning warm. I had been gravitating toward warm, earthy tones for years. I had done the research. I had watched the videos. I had read the articles. I had made a whole quiet internal case for being a being a Spring (desperation, mostly, haha), and I felt pretty good about it.

Reader, I am a True Summer. I am cool-toned. I have been fighting my own undertone with a wardrobe full of terracotta and rust for approximately a decade. The audacity of my own confidence, in retrospect, is truly staggering.

My advice: hold your theory loosely going in. Be curious rather than invested in being right. The outcome is not a judgement of your previous choices. It’s just new information that replaces old guesses. Possibly a lot of old guesses.

The lighting setup is going to seem fussy and it matters enormously.

If your analyst moves you to a specific chair near a specific window, or asks you to sit under a specific bulb, or adjusts the room in ways that seem slightly excessive before you’ve even started: this is not theatre. Lighting is the single variable most likely to produce a wrong result if it’s not controlled, because human eyes automatically adjust for lighting in ways that make colours look “fine” even when they’re not. Neutral light strips out those automatic corrections and shows you what’s actually happening between the colour and your skin.

Sit where you’re asked to sit, even if it’s not the cosy spot. Even if it’s slightly awkward. Even if the chair is near a draft and you wish you’d brought a cardigan. The cardigan, in this particular context, is a small price to pay for an accurate result.

Having your foundation and/or bronzer on will slow things down at best and skew results at worst.

I know. You want to look nice for this. Understandable impulse - you’re about to spend an hour (or more!) being looked at very carefully by a professional, and the instinct to show up polished is deeply human. Here’s the thing though: for the most accurate result, I’m going to ask you to take it all off anyway, and I’d rather tell you that upfront so it’s not a surprise when you arrive.

And I do mean all of it. Foundation is the obvious one - it’s specifically designed to change the appearance of your skin, which is precisely what we’re trying to read accurately. But it goes further than that. Self-tanner shifts your apparent skin tone. Tinted moisturiser changes how light reflects off your skin. Lip gloss alters the contrast between your lips and your face, which is a real variable in the analysis. Even mascara matters more than people expect: if your natural lashes are blonde or light brown and you arrive in black mascara, we’re reading a significantly different contrast level than your actual colouring presents. All of it adds up.

I provide makeup remover wipes, so you don’t need to come bare-faced if that feels uncomfortable - you can come however you like and we’ll sort it together at the start. What I want you to know, clearly and without any ambiguity, is that I have absolutely zero judgement about what’s underneath. Acne, redness, blotchiness, uneven skin tone, dark circles - I don’t just not mind, I actively don’t see it in any meaningful way. My entire job is to find the colours that work with your natural features and reduce focus on the things that bother you. The skin I’m looking at during a session is the skin I’m trying to help. There’s no version of it I’m not ready for.

Come as you are. We’ll take it from there.

”Your season” is not a personality diagnosis.

This sounds obvious in advance and is surprisingly hard to remember in the moment. Being told you’re a certain season can feel, briefly, like being told something about your character, your energy, the kind of person you are. It isn’t. It’s a description of the specific set of undertone and contrast characteristics in your skin, hair, and eyes. A Winter is not “more dramatic” as a person than a Spring. A Spring is not “more delicate.” These are colours, not archetypes.

I say this partly because I’ve seen people spiral about their season in ways that are really disproportionate, and partly because I once watched someone in a colour analysis community online be deeply upset about being typed as an Autumn because she associated Autumns with a certain kind of cosy, maximalist aesthetic that didn’t feel like her. She was not being told to decorate her home with pumpkins and wear cardigans to festivals. She was being told her undertone had warmth in it. These are different things.

The emotional response to a seasonal result is real and worth being prepared for - some people feel instant recognition and delight, some feel resistance, some feel a brief and minor grief about colours they’ve always loved that don’t turn out to be their best. All of this is normal. None of it has anything to do with the colours themselves being good or bad.

Whatever you think you know about yourself from online quizzes: consider it a rough first draft.

I did about forty online colour quizzes before getting properly analysed. They gave me repeatedly different answers. Not even versions of the same answer - completely different seasons. One of them told me I was a Winter, which would have been useful to know since I went and stood in my wardrobe afterward doing the maths on which items I’d have to reconsider, and it was quite a lot. (Spoiler: this result was incorrect. But I spent two weeks half-convinced by it anyway.)

Online quizzes are built on self-reported data - what do your veins look like? which do you prefer, gold or silver? - which is both low-resolution and subject to your own perception of yourself, which, as we’ve established, is often slightly off. They’re fine for initial curiosity. They are not a substitute for someone holding actual fabric next to your actual face under actual neutral light and watching what happens.

The result you get is only as useful as what you do with it.

This is the one I most wish I’d been told earlier, because I think a lot of people get their season and then sort of... let the information sit there. They know they’re a Soft Autumn or a True Winter or a Bright Spring, and they think about it when it’s convenient and forget about it when they’re shopping in a rush and see something that looks nice on the hanger, and gradually the whole thing fades back into a piece of interesting trivia rather than a usable tool.

The result is not the destination. The result is the beginning of a different approach to getting dressed. Building the habit of consulting your palette when you shop, being intentional about what goes near your face, training your eye to spot when something is working versus quietly not - that’s where the actual value is. The analysis is the map. You still have to decide to look at it. The map does not drive the car.

Getting typed as a True Summer when you’ve spent years gravitating toward warm earthy tones is a particular kind of humbling.

I’m including this one because it’s specific to me and I think you deserve to know, partly as cautionary tale and partly because vulnerability in public keeps me honest.

I got home from my certification course in Toronto having been typed, formally and definitively, as a True Summer - cool undertones, soft and slightly muted palette, the whole delicate dusty range of blues and roses and muted teals. I came home in a bright Spring pink top I’d packed with full confidence (or denial, or hope…still undecided on which it was, haha). I stood in front of my wardrobe and did a slow, dawning audit of everything hanging in it. The deep chocolatey brown. The warm olive. A burnt orange t-shirt I loved unreservedly. The mustard cardigan, which long-time readers will know has already received its own dedicated obituary in this newsletter.

None of it was wrong, exactly. Some of it works away from my face. But a solid 48% percent of my “go-to” colours, the ones I’d been reaching for on good days, important days, days I wanted to look my best - were fighting my undertone the entire time. I just didn’t know.

The moment of specific humbling came about a week after I got back, when on a Facetime call with Maya, our homestay student - sixteen, effortlessly stylish, delivered opinions with the serene confidence of someone who has never second-guessed a single thing - looked at me in a soft dusty blue top I’d bought as a first tentative True Summer purchase, tilted her head, and said “that’s actually really nice.” From her, this was essentially a standing ovation.

The wardrobe is being rethought. One piece at a time, on a budget, without throwing everything out in one dramatic gesture. But it is being rethought.

Don’t wait as long as I did to find this out.

The specific things I’d tell my pre-Toronto self, because sometimes a list is the right format.

Come with questions. The intake questions your analyst sends beforehand are not the limit of what you can bring. If you’ve had a nagging suspicion about a specific colour category, if you’ve always wondered why one particular shade of red works and another doesn’t, if you have a specific wardrobe problem you’re trying to solve - bring all of that. The session is yours.

Don’t come with a goal season. I know you have one. We all have one. The one we’ve decided in advance we want to be, usually because we love the aesthetic or we think the colours would suit us. Do your best to hold it lightly. The outcome that’s right for your actual colouring is more useful than the outcome that confirms what you hoped. (I wanted to be a Spring. I am not a Spring. I am fine. Mostly.)

Take photos of the drapes on your skin if your analyst allows it. Seeing the difference between what a good colour and a challenging colour does to your face, captured and comparable side by side, is one of the most useful learning tools going forward. It also makes for a slightly strange camera roll, but that’s a small price.

Ask what the edge cases were. If there was any discussion during the session about where you sat relative to an adjacent season, ask about it. Understanding why you landed where you did - what about your colouring put you there rather than somewhere nearby - is useful context for applying your palette in the real world, where colours are not always exactly what the label says.

Give yourself a few days before you overhaul anything. First responses to a seasonal result are often emotional rather than practical, and the practical work of applying it to your actual wardrobe is better done once the emotional response has settled. Do not, as I nearly did, immediately open a tab to donate forty percent of your wardrobe to a charity shop at 11pm on a Tuesday because you’ve just accepted that terracotta is not your friend. Sleep on it. The terracotta will still be there in the morning.

And finally: the guide you receive is a starting point, not a sentence.

The palette guide that comes out of a proper colour analysis is a tool, not a set of rules carved into stone and handed down by a judgemental, aesthetically opinionated mountain. It tells you where the most harmonious territory is for your specific colouring. It does not tell you that you can never wear anything outside it, that you must rebuild your wardrobe immediately, or that the colours you’ve loved your whole life are now contraband.

It tells you what the ground looks like when you’re working with your natural colouring instead of against it. What you do with that information - how quickly, how completely, how creatively - is entirely yours to decide.

The dachshunds, for the record, have no seasonal palette and look good in everything. I find this unfair but have chosen to accept it.

I say this as someone whose pre-colour-analysis packing strategy could generously be described as “vibes-based.” My suitcase used to look like I’d let a magpie pack for me - shiny things, random colours, nothing coordinated, six pairs of shoes for a four-day trip, and a backup outfit for a gala I was not attending. Our homestay student Maya walked past my open suitcase last spring, took one long look, said “that’s a lot of different colours,” and walked away without further comment. Teenager verdict: chaos. She was not wrong.

Here’s the logic. If you’re packing within your palette, everything you bring can technically go with everything else you bring, because they all share the same underlying colour logic. You don’t need to pack “matching sets.” You just need to pack within your range, and the mixing and matching happens almost automatically. A week’s holiday, five outfits, maybe two pairs of shoes, no mid-holiday “why did I bring this, nothing goes with this” crisis. That’s the dream and it is completely achievable. (Maya, if you ever read this: I’m working on it.)

Start with your neutrals, because they’re doing most of the heavy lifting.

Every season has a range of neutrals - the versions of beige, navy, grey, camel, olive, or white that work best given your undertone and contrast level. These are the anchors of a travel wardrobe. Pick two, maximum three, that work well together, and build everything else around them. For warm seasons, this might be a warm camel and a soft olive. For cool seasons, a true navy and a soft grey. For deep seasons, a rich chocolate brown and a deep teal might serve you better than a traditional “neutral.”

The key is that your chosen neutrals need to be *your* neutrals - not the generic concept of a neutral, but the specific shade and undertone that harmonises with your skin. A beige that runs slightly too warm or too cool for your undertone is not doing its neutral job, even if it technically photographs as “neutral” on its own. Check the undertone first. Your neutrals should be working quietly in the background, not staging a small coup against your complexion every time you put them near your face.

Build in two or three “glow” colours from your palette.

These are the colours that make you look most alive - the ones that reliably get you compliments, the ones you reach for instinctively on days you want to look your best. Pack these in your most-worn categories (tops, a dress, whatever you actually wear most on holiday). Don’t pack them speculatively in categories you think you might wear but historically don’t. Three glow-colour tops you’ll actually wear beat six theoretical options you’ll rotate past every morning while standing in a hotel room in your towel, increasingly frustrated, convincing yourself the sixth option might actually work today.

The “it’ll be fine” packing trap, and how your palette prevents it.

The single most common packing regret I hear about is some version of “I brought X because it seemed holiday-appropriate and I never wore it.” Holiday-appropriate is not the same as “works on me,” and the disconnect usually comes down to colour. Something seems right for the vibe - a bright coral because summer, a white sundress because Mediterranean - but doesn’t actually sit well against your specific colouring, and you feel slightly off in every photo and reach for something else instead. Every single time.

I have a specific, personal example of this that I’m including against my better judgement. A few years ago I packed a bright turquoise top for a holiday because it seemed extremely holiday-coloured. I wore it on a beach day, took approximately forty photos, and upon review found that the colour was doing something deeply unkind to my complexion in every single one. When I got home and showed our then-homestay student the holiday photos, she scrolled through in silence before landing on one from that day and saying, “you look tired here.” I was not tired. I was in full holiday mode. It was the turquoise. The turquoise did that. She moved on to the next photo before I could explain the colour theory implications.

Your palette solves this not by restricting what you pack, but by giving you a clear, honest test for each item before it goes in the bag. Does this actually work on me, or does it just seem like it should work on holiday? Those are different questions and the suitcase is not the place to resolve them. Resolve them at home, in natural light, before you zip anything up.

A suggested packing formula, adaptable by trip length:

For a one-week trip: two neutral anchors, three glow-colour tops, one or two bottoms in your best neutrals, one versatile dress in a palette-appropriate colour, one layering piece (evening temperatures, air conditioning on planes, the dachshunds stealing body heat - you know the drill) in your best neutral or a flattering accent colour. One pair of versatile shoes in a neutral. One pair for evenings. Done.

For a two-week trip: add two or three additional tops, one more bottom, another dress, and a second layering option. The formula doesn’t change, just the quantities.

What to do about the colours you love but aren’t in your palette.

Pack them away from your face if you really love them and can’t bear to leave them behind. That bold turquoise dress that doesn’t quite hit right at your neckline? If it’s a gorgeous cut and you love it, pack it, but pair it with a glow-colour scarf or earrings that pull focus toward your face and away from the slightly-off tone of the fabric. This is not a perfect solution but it is a workable one, and holidays are about enjoyment as well as perfect colour harmony.

The photography argument.

If you care at all about how you look in holiday photos - and most of us do, even if we pretend we don’t - colour analysis will do more for your travel photography than any filter ever will. On-palette colours make your skin look better, your eyes look more vivid, and your overall appearance more rested and vibrant. On-palette colours in good natural light on a holiday? Exceptional photos without any particular effort. This is not vanity, it is simply good logistics.

It also means fewer photos that require explanation. “The lighting was bad” is a perfectly fine excuse once. After the third or fourth time it comes up, people start to wonder. With your palette sorted, the lighting excuse retires permanently, and you get to be the person whose holiday photos actually look like them.

A note on occasion-specific packing.

If your trip includes a specific event - a wedding, a gala dinner, a fancy anniversary meal - pack for that occasion with the same palette logic you’d apply to anything else, but with the added context that evening lighting is your friend (slightly more forgiving) and that occasion dressing gives you the most opportunity to wear your season’s most dramatic, striking colours. A Deep Winter wearing full black and a statement jewel-tone accessory at an evening gala? Chef’s kiss. A True Summer in a dusty rose at a sunset dinner? Perfect. Plan these outfits first, then build the rest of the suitcase around what you’ve already decided.

The goal is to get to the holiday and find, perhaps for the first time ever, that you actually wear everything you packed. It’s a novel experience and I highly recommend it.

Why the palette makes mix-and-match actually work.

The reason capsule wardrobe advice so often fails in practice is that “buy fewer, better pieces that all go together” is only useful if the pieces actually do go together - and when you’re choosing from across the spectrum of whatever colours you happen to own, this is much harder than it sounds. Your palette changes this dynamic because all of the colours in it share an underlying tonal quality. The same undertone logic that means these colours suit your skin also means they tend to work harmoniously together as a colour story within an outfit.

A Soft Autumn who packs in muted terracotta, warm olive, soft camel, and a dusty warm rose doesn’t need to plan outfits carefully - every combination is going to be cohesive because all four colours live in the same tonal neighbourhood. A True Summer who packs in soft blue, dusty rose, muted lavender, and a cool off-white gets the same effect from the cool, soft end. The palette does the coordination work that capsule wardrobe advice usually just assumes you’ll magically manage.

Shoes and bags: the holiday edit.

Holiday footwear tends toward the neutral - sandals, a trainer, maybe one more formal option if the trip calls for it. As with accessories generally, shoes and bags sit far enough from your face that undertone rules relax, but it’s still worth broadly aligning them with your tonal palette. A warm camel sandal will look more cohesive in a warm-season outfit than a cool grey one. A black bag is probably fine for most cool seasons and acceptable for warm seasons with a flattering outfit doing the work nearby.

The specific advice: choose your shoe neutral in a shade that works with the majority of what you’ve packed rather than in the abstract. Hold it against two or three of your packed items before you leave - if it jars with more than one of them, that’s your sign to reconsider.

The underrated art of editing before you zip.

The single most useful packing habit I’ve adopted since doing my own colour work is the edit pass: once everything is laid out on the bed and ready to go in the case, I look at it collectively and ask whether each item is earning its place. Not “do I like this” but “will I actually wear this, and does it work with at least two other things I’ve packed?” If the answer to the second question is no, it stays home.

I should note that this edit pass now also involves physically relocating two dachshunds, who treat any item of clothing laid flat on a bed as a personal invitation to sit on it. I have had to make several wardrobe decisions while one of them made direct and unbroken eye contact with me from the centre of a blouse I was trying to evaluate. Their opinions on colour analysis are unknown but their commitment to being in the way is absolute.

Your palette makes this edit pass faster and more decisive regardless of dachshund interference. You’re not weighing “but I might feel like wearing something fun” against “but I have no idea what it would go with” - you’re looking at whether each piece sits within the colour logic of everything else you’ve packed. If it does, it’s versatile by default. If it doesn’t, you need a very good reason for it to be in the case.

A note on packing for multiple climates or occasions.

Some trips span more than one temperature zone or more than one dress code, which makes packing harder. The palette approach helps here too, because a piece that works at the cool end of your palette can often be layered in a colder climate and worn alone in a warmer one - the same muted teal cardigan that’s a light layer in Edinburgh is the whole outfit in Lisbon. The key is choosing pieces that are versatile in both function and colour, rather than packing a separate “holiday wardrobe” and a separate “slightly cooler evening wardrobe” that share nothing. One colour story, multiple configurations. That’s the goal.

And if you finish packing, stand back, feel truly pleased with yourself, and then a teenage girl walks past, looks at the open suitcase, nods noncommittally, and says “hm” - take comfort. “Hm” from a sixteen-year-old is practically a standing ovation. You’ve done well.

Nails are where I tell people to experiment first. Test your seasonal palette in your polish choices before you commit to a full wardrobe shift. Go a bit bold. See how it feels to wear your season’s colours intentionally. Learn whether you love it or whether you need to revisit the guide, because nail colour is easier to remove than a sweatshirt and infinitely cheaper to buy than a coat.

That said, there is a real undertone logic to nail polish that most people navigate by vibe rather than by system, and once you understand it, you’ll probably look back at a few years of manicure choices and have a small, private “oh, that’s why” moment. I did.

The undertone rule applies here too, it just operates slightly differently.

Nail polish sits on your hands rather than near your face, which means the undertone stakes are meaningfully lower than they are for a top or a lip colour. The proximity-to-face rule we’ve talked about in other posts is your friend here: the further from your face, the more flexibility you have with colour. Your nails are quite far from your face. This is good news and it means you have real latitude to play.

That said, hands are visible. People notice your nails. And if you’re choosing between two similar shades at the polish wall and really cannot decide, the undertone rule is a perfectly good tiebreaker - go for the one that aligns with your undertone, all else being equal.

Warm-undertone seasons (Spring and Autumn): Your sweet spot sits in the warm end of the spectrum - peachy nudes, coral reds, warm terracottas, golden caramels, warm berry tones that lean red-orange rather than blue-red. Summer’s classic brights - the poppy oranges, the sun yellows, the warm tomatoey reds - are all firmly in your territory. If you’re a Spring, lean toward the brighter, cleaner version of these. If you’re an Autumn, go richer, more complex, earthier - a spiced rust, a deep warm coral, a vintage brick red rather than a vivid fire-engine one.

The shades to approach with a bit more thought: true blue-based reds (they can look slightly cold and disconnected against warm undertones), very cool-toned mauves (they can give hands a slightly greyish cast against warm skin), and anything with a strong blue or grey base. You can still wear them - nails, remember, are not a crisis if they’re slightly outside your palette - but if you want to know which shade in the display will look most harmonious, look for the ones that have warmth in them rather than the ones that read cold.

Cool-undertone seasons (Summer and Winter): This is where the classic “cool red” earns its reputation. A blue-based red - think more raspberry than tomato, more crimson than coral - is a natural, harmonious choice for cool seasons. So is a true fuchsia, a cool berry, a deep wine, and any of the blue-toned nudes (rosy, slightly pink, rather than peachy or golden). For Summers specifically, a soft mauve, a muted rose, a dusty lilac, or a sheer cool pink are all summer-specific colours that work beautifully without going too vivid. For Winters, you can carry full drama - a deep burgundy, a true black, a vivid cobalt - and look absolutely deliberate about it rather than like you grabbed the wrong bottle.

Neutral seasons: You have the most range. Your sweet spot tends to sit in the middle - not the most intensely warm, not the most starkly cool - and you can lean slightly either direction depending on your specific sub-season. A true neutral nude that reads neither golden nor pink is often a great base for neutral undertones, and from there you can experiment in both directions without anything looking very wrong.

A word about summer-specific nail colour trends, because summer always brings out the same few archetypes and they’re worth knowing how to navigate.

The tomato red moment: Every summer there’s a “tomato red” or “strawberry” phase. This is a warm red, firmly in Spring/Autumn territory. If you’re a cool season and you love the aesthetic, look for a version that reads slightly more toward raspberry than true tomato - still festive and summery but working with your undertone rather than against it.

The “glazed donut” or sheer neutral: Sheer nails in a very light, barely-there tone are endlessly popular in summer and highly wearable across most seasons. The key is the base tone of the sheer - even a light, sheer polish has an underlying warmth or coolness that affects how it reads against your specific skin tone. A sheer peach reads warm. A sheer pink reads cool. Look at the bottle in natural light.

Bright neons: Summer’s neon moment is fun and I’m not going to be the person who tells you not to wear a neon if you love it. Neons skew warm (yellow-greens, hot coral) or cool (electric blue, neon pink), so your usual tiebreaker still applies. Neons are also one of the situations where even I’d say: if it brings you joy, wear it, because the inherent fun of neon somewhat outweighs the undertone consideration.

French manicures: The white tip’s undertone matters more than most people expect. A warm or yellowish white tip looks quite different to a cool, blue-white tip, and the difference is particularly visible on cool-toned skin (where a warm white tip can look slightly yellowed) and warm-toned skin (where a stark white tip can look slightly clinical).

Finish and formula considerations.

Beyond colour, the finish of a polish affects how it reads. Glossy polishes are slightly more saturated and vivid. Matte polishes soften and mute any colour, which can be useful for seasons that suit more muted tones. Chrome and metallic finishes follow the warm-cool logic: gold chrome for warm seasons, silver chrome for cool, rose gold sitting interestingly in between (leaning warm). Sheer and jelly polishes soften everything, as mentioned, which can be either an asset or a drawback depending on your specific season.

The summary: nails are the lowest-stakes entry point into wearing your season with intention. Buy two or three polishes in your palette’s colours this summer and see how it feels. I promise that “wearing your actual season” is a sensation that gets addictive quickly, and starting at your fingertips is as good a place as any.

Gel versus regular polish: does the format change anything?

The short answer is not much, in terms of colour undertone - a warm coral is a warm coral whether it’s in a regular lacquer or a gel formula. Where format does make a small difference is in depth and intensity: gel polishes tend to appear slightly more saturated and vivid than the same colour in regular polish, because the finish is glossier and the pigment is suspended differently. This means that if you’re choosing between a regular polish and its gel equivalent, the gel version will read as very slightly more intense - which can be an asset for seasons that suit vivid, saturated colours, and worth keeping in mind for softer or more muted seasons where that extra intensity might push a colour slightly further than you intended.

Gel also tends to photograph a little more dramatically because of the sheen level. If nail photos are something you do - for your own records, for content, just for fun - gel will give you the higher-impact visual. Regular polish is kinder on your nails long-term and easier to change at home when the colour obsession strikes at 10pm on a Tuesday.

A quick summer-by-season colour shortlist, for when you want a starting point.

True Spring: Clear coral, warm peach, light golden yellow, bright warm red, fresh melon. Light Spring: Very light peach, warm ballet pink, soft coral, champagne shimmer. Warm Spring: Bright warm tomato red, golden orange, clear turquoise, warm coral. True Summer: Soft rose, dusty mauve, muted raspberry, cool lavender, sheer cool pink (hi, it me). Light Summer: Pale pink, soft lavender, barely-there blush, cool lilac. Soft Summer: Muted berry, dusty rose, greyed-pink, soft plum. True Autumn: Warm terracotta, brick red, olive, spiced copper, deep warm coral. Soft Autumn: Warm dusty rose, muted olive, soft terracotta, warm caramel. Deep Autumn: Rich burgundy, dark chocolate, deep warm red, forest green. True Winter: Blue-red, deep fuchsia, true black, bright white, jewel-toned cobalt. Bright Winter / Clear Winter: Vivid fuchsia, icy lavender, true red, electric blue. Deep Winter: Deep burgundy, black cherry, navy, dark plum.

Take these as starting points rather than hard rules - nail polish can always be tested on a swatch card or against your wrist before committing, and most polish brands have return policies for unopened bottles if a colour doesn’t land the way you expected. ◡̈

I want to talk about the real practical challenge of dressing for summer heat without just quietly abandoning everything your colour analysis told you, which I suspect a lot of people do between June and September and then feel faintly guilty about.

First: fabric, because fabric changes everything in summer, and not just for comfort reasons.

The same colour reads differently depending on the fabric it’s printed or woven into, and this effect gets more pronounced in summer materials. A cool dusty blue in a heavy cotton jersey reads one way. The same shade in a floaty chiffon reads softer, lighter, almost faded - which might move it slightly outside your optimal range even if the colour name is technically the same. Conversely, a warm coral that would be too bright and overwhelming in a heavy fabric can become perfectly wearable in a lightweight linen that diffuses the saturation slightly.

The practical upshot: don’t assume that because a colour is in your palette as a concept, any version of it in any fabric will work equally well. Summer fabrics, especially anything very sheer, floaty, or loosely woven, tend to soften and lighten colours compared to heavier materials. If you’re a season that suits saturated, clear colours, you may need to size up slightly in intensity when buying sheer summer fabrics to achieve the same visual punch. If you’re a softer or more muted season, very lightweight fabrics can actually be your best friend, because the natural softening effect of the fabric does some of the work for you.

The white problem.

Here it is, the thing everyone wants to do in summer and the thing that is most variable by season: wearing white. Everyone wants to wear white in summer. It is a completely understandable impulse. It feels clean, it reflects heat, it reads as effortlessly summery in a way that a well-chosen dusty blue simply does not, at least not at the same gut-instinct level.

But as we’ve discussed before, “white” is not one colour. True stark white (cool and bright) is a Summer or Winter palette staple. Warm creamy white works better for Springs and Autumns. And for some seasons - particularly the very soft or very muted ones - even a carefully chosen white can be a bit much right at the face, simply because of the contrast issue rather than the undertone issue. The fix, as ever, is proximity. White linen trousers: nearly everyone. White sleeveless top right at the collarbone: depends very much on your season and your contrast level. A warmer cream or ivory wrap blouse: more forgiving across more seasons than true optic white.

The heat-specific styling problem nobody talks about.

When it’s very hot, you end up wearing less. Less fabric, less layering, fewer opportunities to put a good-colour cardigan between your off-palette top and your face. This is where summer is actually harder for colour analysis purposes than winter, when layering gives you all sorts of options for managing colours that aren’t quite right. In summer, it’s often just one layer, right there, nowhere to hide.

This is the argument for being more intentional about your summer basics than your winter ones, not less. Your summer tops - the ones you grab because it’s hot and you need something on - are the items that will be closest to your face with the least supporting cast around them. Getting those right is higher leverage than almost any other category in your wardrobe. A handful of simple, flattering-coloured summer tops will work harder for you than a carefully constructed winter layering situation, precisely because there’s nothing else in the frame.

Heat-specific tips by season type:

Warm seasons (Spring and Autumn): Your palette already includes a lot of the colours that feel instinctively summery - corals, warm peaches, golden yellows, warm greens. Lean into them. The main summer challenge for warm seasons is avoiding the drift toward the overly bright or overly saturated end that shops push in summer, which can skew too vivid for an Autumn or too sharp for a Spring. Warm but soft, warm but natural - that’s the sweet spot.

Cool seasons (Summer and Winter): Your palette includes a lot of colours that can read as slightly formal (navy, burgundy, plum) and not all of them scream “July” without some effort. Look for your palette’s lighter, airier versions — the icy lavenders, soft rose pinks, and clear sky blues for cool seasons tend to be both flattering and actually summery. For Winters, white (true cool white) and crisp colour-blocking are both summer-appropriate and very much in your wheelhouse.

Soft or muted seasons: The good news: your palette’s soft, dusty quality is extremely wearable in heat because you’re not fighting bright, saturated colours that feel heavy even when the fabric isn’t. The challenge is that summer shops tend toward high-saturation brights that you need to sidestep almost entirely. Stick to the less shouting end of the summer palette and you’ll be well served.

Deep seasons: Summer is perhaps the trickiest season for deeply-coloured palettes, because your best colours tend toward richness and depth, and those qualities can feel seasonally at odds with hot weather. Embrace your best lighter tones - a warm olive, a deep but clear teal, a rich coral rather than a dark burgundy - and save the deepest jewel tones for evenings when the temperature cooperates.

The real answer.

Honestly? Summer is the season that most rewards having already done a colour analysis, because it forces you toward exactly the clarity that a palette gives you. There’s no room to hide behind a great jacket or a clever scarf. It’s you, your skin, and whatever one or two layers you put on it. Having a clear shortlist of colours that reliably work means your “too hot to think about this” morning is no longer a random outcome. Grab from the pile, put it on, go. That’s the whole point.

You worked out your season so that summer mornings could be easier. Let them be.

A few more specific scenarios, because theory only goes so far.

The beach packing problem: Swimwear exists almost entirely outside the normal colour analysis conversation because it’s so context-specific, but cover-ups, sarongs, and beach-to-lunch pieces absolutely benefit from palette thinking. A warm Autumn who reaches for a coral cover-up will look radiant in the same photos where a cool Summer in that same coral looks slightly washed out. Pack beach layers with as much intention as your regular holiday clothes - they’re photographed just as often and worn just as close to your face.

The “I’m sweating through a silk blouse at a work event” scenario: Summer professional dressing is its own particular agony, made worse when you’re also trying to stay on-palette. Lightweight fabrics in your palette colours are the answer - a soft chambray, a fine linen, a very lightweight jersey - rather than trying to power through heat in heavier office-appropriate fabrics. Most workplaces are more tolerant of summer fabrics than people assume, and nobody looks professional while visibly overheating in the wrong material.

The festival and outdoor event situation: This is the context where the “proximity to face” rule does the most work. You’re wearing sunscreen, possibly a hat, definitely comfortable footwear, and the lighting is completely unpredictable. Keep your best colours at the top half - even just a well-chosen t-shirt in your most flattering hue - and don’t stress the rest. You’re at a festival. Some rules are allowed to take the day off.

Sunglasses frames: While not clothing, the colour of your sunglasses frames sits right next to your face all summer and benefits from the same undertone logic. Warm seasons tend to suit tortoiseshell, warm brown, gold, and warm metallics. Cool seasons tend to suit black, silver, cool grey, and clear or slightly smoky frames. This is a low-cost place to apply your season knowledge that pays off in every single outdoor photo of the summer.

One final thought on summer and self-compassion.

Summer is also the season where bodies are most on display, where social media is saturated with “summer looks” that bear approximately no resemblance to the average person’s actual summer, and where it’s easiest to fall into the trap of thinking that dressing well requires a certain body first. It doesn’t, and colour analysis is one of the more democratically useful style tools precisely because it’s about the relationship between colour and your face - not your size, not your shape, not anything other than the specific undertone and contrast already present in your own features. It works for everyone, at every size, in every summer. That’s the whole point.

I just completed the Colour Analysis Mastery course with Karen Brunger at the International Image Institute, and I need to tell you everything.

First: why Toronto, and why this course specifically.

When I decided to take Glow Theory from “obsessive personal hobby” to “actual business I am charging people for,” I knew I wanted to train properly. Not a weekend YouTube deep-dive situation, not an online certificate I could acquire without anyone ever watching me hold a drape - a real, rigorous course taught by someone who knows this field inside out. The International Image Institute’s Colour Analysis Mastery program kept coming up as the gold standard, and once I learned who was running it, the decision was easy.

So I booked a flight to Toronto, packed what I now know was not a single item in my correct season (more on that in a moment), and showed up ready to learn.

Let’s talk about Karen Brunger, because honestly, she deserves her own paragraph (several paragraphs!).

I knew, going in, that Karen was experienced. What I was not fully prepared for was the sheer scope of what “experienced” means in her case. Karen has been working in this field for over forty years. She was among the first people in Canada to be formally trained in seasonal colour analysis, back in 1984 - and when the company that trained her closed its doors, rather than simply moving on, she stepped up and became a trainer herself. That right there tells you everything you need to know about the kind of person Karen is.

Since then, she’s founded and built the International Image Institute, whose systems and products are now used in over 100 countries. One hundred countries. She’s presented on five continents, in fourteen countries. She’s authored sixteen books, co-authored four more, developed forty-five colour and image tools, and created an entire colour palette app called Colorology™. She also coined the phrase “the ABCs of image consulting” - appearance, behaviour, and communication - which is now used as a framework by image consultants all over the world. She’s a past president of the Association of Image Consultants International (AICI), and served four years as its VP of Education. She’s not a person who has been around colour analysis for a long time. She’s a person who has, in many meaningful ways, shaped what colour analysis looks like today.

I say all of this not to intimidate you (or to show off that I know impressive people now, though I am doing that a little), but because I want to paint an accurate picture of what it means to be in a room with her. The knowledge is extraordinary. What I didn’t expect was how she carries it. Karen is warm, funny, endlessly patient, and so clearly delighted by this work that it’s impossible not to catch the feeling. She doesn’t lecture. She teaches, which is a meaningfully different thing. She explains the “why” behind every step, answers every question without making anyone feel silly for asking it, and has this remarkable ability to translate decades of expertise into something that feels completely accessible even when it’s technically complex. I walked in a little intimidated and left feeling like I’d spent three days with someone who actually wanted me to succeed at this. Because she did.

Being taught by someone like that is a gift. I mean that without any exaggeration whatsoever.

The group - because this part surprised me too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my fellow students. I’d hoped for a decent group, maybe a few people I’d exchange LinkedIn connections with and politely never contact again. What I got instead was about fifteen women who were, without exception, warm, funny, enthusiastic, and exactly the kind of people you want in your corner when you’re learning something new.

There is something specific about learning an interpersonal skill like colour analysis in a group setting that you just can’t replicate on your own. You’re practising on each other. You’re watching each other’s faces change when a drape hits right. You’re collectively gasping when the warm versus cool difference is suddenly, unmistakably obvious. You’re also slightly commiserating when a practice session is harder than expected and the “obvious” answer turns out to be less obvious when it’s your turn to call it. We got through all of that together.

By the end of the weekend, I truly felt like these women are going to be my and each other’s biggest supporters as we all move forward in this work - and in this industry, which can be solitary once you’re out on your own, having that network matters. I came home with knowledge, materials, and fifteen new colleagues I’m pretty excited about.

Practising the actual thing - in person, on real humans.

Here’s the thing about learning colour analysis from online resources and doing it in a room under proper conditions with real drapes and a trained educator watching you: they are related, but not the same. Not even close.

In person, you train your eye in a way that’s almost impossible to replicate digitally. You see, live, what a warm drape does next to cool undertones versus warm ones. You notice the subtle shift in someone’s under-eye shadows, the way their skin either evens out or shows more irregularity, the way their eyes either pop or quietly retreat depending on what colour is near their face. You get corrective feedback in real time - “look at her jaw here, watch what happens to the shadow when we switch” - from someone who has been seeing exactly these reactions for four decades.

That live, in-person practice was the part of the course I was most nervous about and it turned out to be the most affirming part of the whole experience. My eye is better than I thought. My instincts, when I trust them rather than second-guessing every assessment, are largely right. That’s not something I could have known without actually doing it, under conditions where the drapes and the light and the person in the chair are all real, right in front of me. I walked out of that room feeling like I can actually do this. Not just theoretically. Actually.

The drapes. Oh, the drapes.

At the end of the course, I picked up my full set of draping materials. All of them. The ones I’m going to use in actual client sessions.

I have now carried them home on a plane, set them up in my living room, and stared at them for a probably-embarrassing amount of time. There is something about having the physical materials in your hands - holding the actual fabric, seeing the full sequence laid out - that makes it feel real in a way that even completing the coursework didn’t quite manage. It’s happening. I have the things. I’m doing this.

If you see me in public in the near future looking slightly dazed and occasionally narrating the undertone of strangers’ outfits under my breath, please be patient. I am adjusting.

And then there’s the part where I found out I’m a True Summer.

I know. After all of this - all the posts about undertones and seasonal palettes and “your colours are fixed and stable and set from birth” - I came home having been properly, formally, definitively typed for the first time, and reader, I have some wardrobe changes to make.

True Summer, for anyone who wants the summary: cool undertones, soft and muted colouring, lower contrast, the whole palette built around dusty roses, soft blues, lavenders, soft berry tones, muted teals and sages. Beautiful colours, all of them. Decidedly not the bright, slightly-too-much-for-a-summer-complexion colours I’ve been gravitating toward because I liked how they looked on a hanger.

The good news is that True Summer is a lovely, flattering season and the palette suits me in a way I can now see clearly with my newly trained eye. The less-good news - or at least the “mildly amusing in retrospect” news - is that I flew to Toronto in a Bright Spring top, arrived home with my True Summer analysis in hand, and immediately stood in front of my wardrobe understanding, probably for the first time, why roughly forty per cent of what I own has never quite felt right. It wasn’t the clothes. It was me. Wearing the wrong colours. For years.

My hair, as it currently stands, is also not quite aligned with my season. I’m going to be making some adjustments.

Slowly. On a budget. In an order that makes logistical sense. But still.

What comes next.

I am so ready to bring this to clients. That’s the thing I keep coming back to, underneath all the excitement about drapes and the mild horror about my own wardrobe: the whole point of this was always to be able to share it. To sit across from someone who’s been getting dressed on autopilot and feeling vaguely wrong about it for years, and show them, visibly, immediately, what changes when the colour is right. Karen showed me this weekend just how powerful that moment is when it’s done properly. I want to be able to give that to people.

Bookings are open now! I have my drapes, my materials, my certification, and - new as of this weekend - an eye that has been properly trained on real people in real conditions by one of the best in the business.

Let’s find your colours.

Foundation and base, the most important category. This is where undertone matters most of anywhere on your body, because foundation sits directly on your skin and any mismatch is glaringly obvious in a way that clothing, sitting a few inches further away, simply isn’t. Warm undertones generally need a yellow or golden-based foundation; cool undertones need pink or rosy-based; neutral undertones have the most flexibility but should still avoid anything that swings hard in either direction. The classic test: try the shade along your jawline, not your hand (the skin on your hand often has a different undertone and sun exposure history compared to your face), and check it in natural daylight, not the shop’s overhead lighting, which is almost always either too warm or too harsh to judge accurately. A correctly matched foundation should essentially disappear into your jawline with no visible line at all; if you can see a clear demarcation, that’s your sign the undertone, not just the depth, is off.

Concealer, while we’re on the subject, often needs to run slightly lighter and, for under-eye use, occasionally a touch more pink or peach than your foundation, regardless of season, simply because under-eye skin tends toward a different colour cast than the rest of the face. This is more of a universal makeup-artistry point than a season-specific one, but it trips people up constantly so it’s worth including.

Blush. Match the undertone logic, but you have more room to play than with foundation, since blush is meant to look like a flush rather than blend seamlessly. Warm seasons tend to glow in peachy, coral, or warm-rose blushes - these read as healthy and sun-kissed against warm undertones. Cool seasons tend to look most alive in true pink, berry, or mauve tones, which read as a natural flush against cooler undertones rather than the slightly orange cast a coral can take on. Soft or muted seasons generally do better with a sheer, blended-in blush rather than a high-pigment, sharply applied one, which can look like a costume rather than a flush; the goal for soft seasons is closer to “I just came in from the cold” than “I am wearing blush.”

Lipstick. This is the single easiest way to test colour theory without committing to anything, since lipstick is cheap, low-commitment, and instantly visible. Warm seasons typically suit coral, brick, warm red, and terracotta-leaning shades - anything with a golden or orange base to it. Cool seasons typically suit blue-red, berry, plum, and rosy pinks - anything with a pink or blue base to it. If you’re ever unsure whether a red is “your” red, the undertone test rule still applies: a true red has cool blue undertones, a warm red leans orange, and most people can actually tell the difference once they hold two reds side by side near their face, even without any formal training. Deep or high-contrast seasons can generally carry a bolder, more saturated lip than soft or light seasons, who often look more harmonious in a slightly more muted, blended lip colour.

Eyeshadow. This is where deeper or more muted seasons get to have the most fun, because eye colour palettes can be richer and more saturated than what works on the skin directly, since eyeshadow doesn’t interact with undertone in quite the same direct way that foundation does. Warm seasons generally glow in bronze, copper, golden-brown, and olive tones. Cool seasons generally suit taupe, plum, smoky grey, and rose-toned shadows. Clear or bright seasons can often carry more vivid, saturated eyeshadow shades - a true emerald or a saturated violet - that would overwhelm a softer season’s more gentle colouring.

Eyebrows and liner. Match these to your natural hair colour’s undertone rather than your favourite shade of brown or black, since this is one of the few makeup categories where “matching what’s already there” beats “matching your palette.” A warm-toned brow pencil on naturally ashy, cool-toned brows tends to look noticeably mismatched, regardless of what your overall season palette suggests.

Nail polish, a category I don’t think gets enough attention in most colour analysis content. The same undertone logic applies here as everywhere else, though because nails sit so far from the face, the rules relax considerably, similar to accessories. This is a good place to experiment with colours outside your core palette if you’re feeling tentative about applying the theory elsewhere first.

One last thing worth saying clearly: none of this is about restriction. If a colour outside your “official” palette makes you feel fantastic, wear it. These guidelines exist to help you understand why certain colours read as more harmonious, not to police your makeup bag with some sort of colour-analysis morality. Confidence is its own undertone, and it photographs beautifully on everyone, regardless of what’s technically “correct” for your season on any given day.

A practical approach to transitioning your existing makeup bag, rather than replacing it overnight. Makeup is one of the more expensive categories to overhaul all at once, so I’d suggest a staged approach rather than a clean sweep. Start with foundation and concealer, since those are the highest-impact, most visible category and the one where undertone mismatch is most obvious; if you’re going to prioritise replacing anything first, prioritise this. Lipstick is the next-easiest and cheapest category to experiment in, so it’s a good second step, and a great place to actually test your season’s recommendations in real life with minimal financial risk. Blush and eyeshadow can be transitioned more gradually, simply by leaning toward your better shades the next time an existing product runs out, rather than discarding perfectly good, half-used products purely on undertone grounds. Nail polish and the more decorative end of things really don’t need to be in any rush at all.

I’d also push back on the idea that you need an entirely separate, season-specific eyeshadow palette to do this properly. Most multi-shade palettes, even ones not marketed around colour analysis at all, contain at least two or three shades that work well for any given season, simply because eyeshadow ranges are usually broad by design. The skill is less about buying new, curated products and more about learning to spot which shades within what you already own (or are already eyeing up) are doing you the most favours, and reaching for those more often.

A note on the relationship between makeup intensity and your season’s intensity, since this is a layer of nuance I skipped over in the category-by-category breakdown above. Beyond simply choosing warm versus cool shades, the saturation and richness of the makeup itself should roughly echo your season’s overall intensity. Clear and bright seasons tend to suit fully saturated, high-pigment makeup applied with confidence - a vivid, true red lip, a sharply defined cat eye - because that boldness matches the natural vividness already present in their colouring. Soft and muted seasons, by contrast, often look more harmonious in lower-saturation, more blended applications, even when using technically “correct” warm or cool shades, because a highly saturated, sharply applied look can sit at odds with their naturally gentler colouring in a way that reads as slightly costume-like rather than polished.

This is probably one of the more subtle parts of applying colour theory to makeup, and it’s the piece that’s hardest to communicate through a quiz or a quick guide rather than an in-person consultation, since it depends on actually seeing the makeup applied and assessing the overall harmony rather than just checking a hue against a chart. It’s part of why I think the makeup recommendations in a proper guide are most useful as a starting framework you then adjust through your own trial and error, rather than a rigid prescription to follow to the letter.

If there’s one habit I’d want you to walk away with from this whole post, it’s simply trying on a “correct” undertone shade next to your usual go-to before assuming the usual one is right. The comparison itself, done slowly and deliberately in good light, teaches your eye more than any written guide ever could, mine included.

And as with everything in this post, the goal isn’t a rigid new set of rules to follow anxiously every morning at the bathroom mirror. It’s to have a slightly sharper eye for why some products feel effortless on you and why others require more concealer and prayer than they should. Once you see the pattern, you really can’t unsee it, and your makeup bag gets a little easier to shop for from that point forward, one swap at a time.

Black, in detail. For some seasons, true black can be harsh enough to overpower the face, creating a stark contrast that drags attention to shadows and tired-looking skin rather than features. This tends to be most noticeable for softer or lighter seasons - softer Summers and Springs especially - where the natural contrast between skin, hair, and eyes is gentle, and a harsh true black right at the face creates a jarring mismatch with that softness, making the face look washed out or tired by comparison. If black isn’t your strongest neutral, the fix isn’t necessarily avoiding it entirely - it’s keeping it away from your face. A black pair of jeans, a skirt, or a bag works fine for almost everyone, because the undertone and contrast clash only really matters in close proximity to your skin. If you love a black top, soften it with a scarf, statement earrings, a flattering lip colour, or a cardigan in one of your best colours layered over it, so the eye lands somewhere kinder first, before it ever gets to the black fabric itself. Charcoal, espresso brown, or a deep navy can also be excellent black substitutes for softer seasons, delivering the same “easy, grounding neutral” function without the harshness.

White, in detail. Similar logic, different mechanism. A stark, cool true white can be unforgiving on warmer undertones, creating a flat, almost clinical contrast that doesn’t have anywhere near the same warmth as the skin it’s sitting next to. Meanwhile, a soft, creamy off-white can look dull, slightly grubby, or flat against cooler undertones, because the warmth in the cream fights the coolness in the skin and the whole combination reads as muddy rather than crisp. The fix here is usually swapping shade rather than avoiding the colour family entirely - try ivory, bone, or warm white if true white feels harsh on you, or crisp optic white if soft white feels muddy on you. Read the labels with a healthy dose of suspicion, per the post on fabric undertones a few weeks back; “white” on a label means almost nothing reliable.

Denim, in detail. Most people don’t think of denim as a “colour” in the analysis sense, since it feels more like a fabric category than a styling decision, but wash and tone absolutely matter just as much as any other garment. A cool, dark indigo behaves differently against your face than a warm, faded, yellow-toned wash - the indigo reads cooler and crisper, the faded wash reads warmer and softer, and which one suits you better depends on exactly the same undertone logic as everything else in your wardrobe. If you’re noticing your favourite jeans don’t photograph well, or that a denim jacket feels like it’s doing something slightly off to your face in a way a similar-weight cotton jacket doesn’t, it’s worth checking the wash tone the same way you’d check any other garment. The fix is usually simple: have one or two washes that work close to the face (with a top tucked in, or worn as a jacket with a flattering colour underneath) and treat the rest as away-from-face pieces, worn as straightforward pants with a great top doing the visual work up top.

A worked example, because I think this is easier to absorb with a specific scenario. Say you’re a Deep Autumn - rich, warm, high-contrast - and you love a crisp white shirt for work. True stark white is going to feel slightly cold and clinical against your warmth. Instead of abandoning the white-shirt-for-work uniform entirely, you’d switch to an ivory or warm white shirt, which keeps the crisp, professional silhouette you like while actually working with your undertone instead of against it. Nobody in the room will consciously register “ah, she’s wearing ivory rather than true white” - they’ll just register that you look notably well that day, without being able to say exactly why.

The underlying principle across all three, and truly the single most useful mental shortcut in all of colour analysis: proximity to your face is what makes or breaks a colour decision. A colour that’s “wrong” for you at your collarbone is often completely fine at your ankle. The further a colour sits from your face, the less it interacts with your skin’s undertone and the more it simply functions as, well, fabric. This is the rule I find myself repeating, because it instantly de-stresses people who’ve just been told their go-to staple colour isn’t their strongest option - it’s never a full ban, it’s a proximity adjustment, and that distinction makes all the difference in how usable the advice actually feels day to day.

What about prints and patterns that include these neutrals? This comes up constantly, so it’s worth addressing directly. A black-and-white polka dot blouse, worn close to the face, can still be more wearable than a solid block of either colour alone, because the broken-up pattern means your eye isn’t reading one continuous, uninterrupted block of an unflattering tone right against your skin - there’s visual texture and movement that softens the effect considerably. The same logic applies to a denim shirt with a busy print layered over a base wash that wouldn’t suit you in a solid block; the print does a lot of the visual heavy lifting and the base wash becomes much less of a liability.

A useful rule of thumb here: the higher the contrast and the larger the colour blocks within a pattern, the more the underlying undertone rules apply, much like a solid garment would. The busier, smaller-scale, and more broken-up the pattern, the more forgiving it tends to be, almost regardless of the specific colours involved. A fine pinstripe in an off-palette colour is far more wearable close to the face than a solid block of that same colour would be, simply because the stripe is thin enough that your eye blends it visually rather than reading it as one dominant, continuous tone.

This is also a good moment to mention texture as a related variable: a textured black, like a bouclé or a slightly nubby knit, tends to read slightly softer and less harsh than a flat, smooth, matte black, simply because texture scatters light rather than reflecting it in one uniform block. If black is not your strongest neutral but you love the practicality of a black cardigan, hunting for one in a textured rather than flat-finish fabric is a small, easy adjustment that takes some of the edge off.

A quick word on layering as a styling tool generally, since it solves more of these problems than people expect. Layering isn’t just a practical, weather-driven habit; it’s one of the most useful colour-management tools available to anyone whose go-to neutrals don’t quite match their palette. A simple cardigan, blazer, or even an open shirt worn over a base layer effectively splits a single outfit into a “near the face” zone and an “away from the face” zone, letting you wear pretty much any colour in the outer layer as long as the piece closest to your skin, peeking out at the collar, is doing the undertone work properly. This is, in practice, how a lot of people who’ve never formally studied colour analysis still manage to look put together - they’ve intuitively landed on a layering habit that happens to solve the proximity problem without ever naming it as such.

If you take one final, very practical tip away from this post specifically, let it be this: keep two or three reliable, truly flattering layering pieces - a cardigan, a scarf, a blazer - in your absolute best colours, and treat them as the fix for almost any outfit that’s otherwise built around a less-than-ideal neutral. It’s a far cheaper and more flexible solution than trying to replace every black, white, or denim item you own all at once.

Think of these layering pieces as your colour-correction toolkit, the same way a good concealer corrects a foundation that’s slightly off. You’re not rebuilding the whole wardrobe from the ground up. You’re adding two or three small, deliberate tools that let everything you already own work harder for you.

It’s worth saying, too, that none of this means treating black, white, and denim as problems to be managed rather than useful, classic wardrobe staples. They’re staples for good reason - versatile, easy to combine, rarely out of style. The goal here isn’t to talk you out of them. It’s to give you a more precise, confident way of wearing them that works with your specific colouring rather than against it, so they stay in heavy rotation rather than quietly migrating to the back of the closet once you start noticing the mismatch.

Step one: the closet sort. Pull everything out - yes, everything, including the things shoved at the back you’ve forgotten about - and sort into three honest piles: clearly within your palette, clearly outside it, and “I really can’t tell.” Don’t overthink the first pass. Gut instinct, fast sorting, no agonising over borderline cases yet. You’re aiming for speed here, not precision; precision comes in step two.

Step two: wear-test the maybe pile. For anything in the uncertain pile, try it on near a window in natural light and hold your palette guide up next to your face while wearing it. Does the item itself flatter you, separate from how it photographs on a hanger or how it felt when you bought it three years ago? This is usually where the real surprises happen - pieces you assumed were “safe neutrals” turning out to be quietly working against you, and pieces you’d written off as “not really my colour” turning out to be lovely once you actually wear them rather than just glancing at them on a hanger. Take a photo of yourself in each maybe-pile item under the same lighting if you can; it’s much easier to compare ten photos side by side afterward than to trust your in-the-moment impression for each one individually.

Step three: don’t discard the outside-palette pile yet. This is the step that saves you the most money, and it’s the one people skip most often in their enthusiasm to declutter. Plenty of off-palette pieces can be rescued rather than replaced:

• The further away from your face, the better - so pants, skirts, or bags rather than tops - where undertone matters far less, because the colour isn’t sitting in direct contrast with your skin.

• Layer a flattering colour between the item and your face, like a scarf or a off-palette top underneath an in-palette jacket, which effectively neutralises a lot of the clash.

• Save patterned pieces that include even a small percentage of your good colours; the eye reads the overall impression, not a strict percentage breakdown, so a print that’s mostly off-palette but threaded through with one of your best colours can still work better than you’d expect.

• Reconsider accessories specifically. A bag, a pair of shoes, even some jewellery generally sits far enough from your face that undertone rules relax considerably. Don’t feel obligated to re-buy an entire accessory collection (unless you really want to, then by all means, shopping spree away my friend!).

Step four: build a “first five” list instead of a full wardrobe wishlist. Once you know what gaps actually exist, resist the urge to buy everything in your palette at once, which is an expensive and slightly overwhelming instinct that tends to lead to impulse purchases you don’t actually love. Pick the five pieces that would do the most work - usually a couple of your best colours in classic, frequently-worn categories like a top, a cardigan, or a jacket, rather than chasing a full seasonal capsule overnight. Prioritise pieces that sit closest to your face first, since that’s where colour accuracy matters most; the pants and bags can wait.

Step five: thrift and consignment shop with your palette guide as your filter, not your inspiration. Secondhand shopping becomes dramatically easier once you’re not browsing aimlessly. You’re not looking for cute things anymore; you’re hunting for specific colours, which narrows the search and speeds up the trip considerably. I’d suggest physically bringing your small printed swatch card of your palette colours with you, rather than relying on memory, because lighting in most secondhand shops is notoriously inconsistent and your memory of “is this my green” gets unreliable fast under fluorescent strip lighting.

Step six: be strategic about basics versus statement pieces. When you do start buying new, lean toward putting your best, most universally flattering palette colours into basics you’ll wear constantly - t-shirts, your go-to cardigan, everyday tops - and feel freer to experiment with your more adventurous palette colours in statement pieces you’ll wear less often. This maximises the return on the pieces you’re wearing weekly while still letting you have fun with the bolder end of your palette.

Step seven: don’t forget makeup and accessories can fill palette gaps cheaply. If a flattering top in your exact best colour is out of budget right now, a scarf, a lipstick, or even a phone case in that colour, worn or held near your face, can deliver a surprising amount of the same visual benefit for a fraction of the cost. This is an underrated trick for testing whether you love a colour before committing to a full garment in it.

The expensive version of colour analysis is the one where you panic-buy a whole new wardrobe the week you get your results. The smart version is auditing what you have, rescuing what you can, and being deliberate about the handful of new pieces that’ll move the needle. Your wallet will thank you, and so will your closet, which is currently very confused about its purpose in life and would like some clarity, please.

On the mindset shift this whole process requires, because I think it’s worth naming directly: The instinct, the moment you get a palette guide in hand, is to treat it like a shopping list rather than a filter. I understand the impulse completely - there’s something exciting about finally having a clear answer to “what colours look good on me,” and the natural next move feels like celebrating that answer by buying things in it. But a palette guide works best as a lens you apply to decisions you were already going to make, not as a new category of spending you weren’t planning on. If you weren’t already in the market for a new coat, a flattering-coloured coat isn’t suddenly an essential purchase just because the colour happens to be in your palette.

A useful exercise here: before buying anything new, try keeping a simple running note for a month of every time you reach for an item in your closet and feel a flicker of “I wish this were a better colour on me.” That note becomes your actual shopping list, built from real, lived friction points rather than abstract palette enthusiasm. You’ll likely find it’s shorter, cheaper, and far more targeted than the wishlist you’d have built in the first excited hour after your consultation, and everything on it will get worn, rather than sitting in a bag with the tags still on six months later.

I’d also gently suggest tracking what you actually spend during any wardrobe refresh period, even loosely. It’s easy for a series of individually reasonable-feeling purchases - “it’s only one top,” repeated eight times over two months - to add up to a significant amount without ever feeling, in the moment, like you’ve overspent. A simple running total, even just a note on your phone, keeps the budget honest in a way that good intentions alone rarely manage.

A note on quality versus quantity, since budget conversations often skew toward “buy less” without addressing the equally important “buy better” half of the equation: Once you’ve narrowed your shopping list to high-leverage pieces in your best colours, it’s worth spending slightly more on those specific items than you might have otherwise, rather than spreading the same budget thinly across more pieces of lower quality. A single, well-made cardigan in your absolute best colour, that holds its shape and shade wash after wash, will outperform three cheaper versions that pill, fade, or shift colour slightly after a handful of washes - and colour-shifted fabric is a common, under-appreciated problem, since cheap dye processes are often less stable over time, meaning an item that tested beautifully on day one can drift out of your palette within a year through nothing more than ordinary laundering.

This is also where secondhand and consignment shopping shines from a budget perspective: you can often access a noticeably higher quality tier, in well-tested, already-stable colour, for a fraction of the retail price of an equivalent new item, precisely because someone else already absorbed the steepest part of the depreciation curve. If budget is a real constraint, and for most people building a new wardrobe it is, I’d put a meaningful amount of your “first five” search effort into secondhand options before defaulting to fast fashion retail, both for the cost savings and for the quality and colour stability benefits that come along with it.

One final thought on budget specifically: don’t let “doing it properly” become a reason to do nothing at all. I’ve talked to people who felt so overwhelmed by the idea of a full, considered wardrobe audit that they simply never started, and kept reaching for the same off-palette pieces out of sheer inertia. You don’t need a perfect system on day one. Even a rough, imperfect closet sort, done in an hour on a Sunday afternoon, will teach you more about your own wardrobe than weeks of thinking about doing it eventually ever will.

Distrust the product title, completely. “Cream,” “ivory,” “off-white,” “bone,” “stone,” “oatmeal” - these words are doing almost no useful work. Brands name colours for vibe, not accuracy. A “cream” from one retailer can be warm and golden; a “cream” from another can be cool and almost grey, practically indistinguishable from a pale lilac-white. Treat the name as marketing copy, not data, the same way you’d treat “rustic” on a restaurant menu as a vibe rather than a factual description of the building.

Zoom into the product photo and look at the shadows, not the brightest highlight. Lighting in product photography is often warmed up deliberately to look inviting, which flatters the photo but lies to you about the actual colour. Shadowed folds in the fabric - where it bunches at a sleeve, where a hem creates a crease - tend to reveal the true undertone more honestly than the brightly lit flat areas, because the warming filter or lighting setup affects highlights more dramatically than shadows. If you only look at the brightest, most evenly lit section of the photo, you’re looking at the part of the image that’s been most aggressively flattered.

Check for a “true colour may vary” disclaimer or a lifestyle/model shot in natural light. Many retailers include at least one image shot outdoors or in a more neutral setting alongside the polished studio shot. Compare the two directly, ideally side by side in separate browser tabs. If the colour looks notably different between them, that’s your warning sign that the studio shot has been warmed or cooled for appeal, and the natural-light shot is the more trustworthy one.

Look at the undertone of other colours in the same photo as a reference point. If a product shot includes the model’s skin, hair, or other neutral background elements, you can sometimes cross-reference — does the white background look truly neutral, or does it have a yellow or blue cast? If the white background isn’t reading as true white, every other colour in that photo is being skewed the same direction, and you can roughly mentally correct for it. This is a useful trick once you start doing it habitually; you start noticing warming or cooling filters on product photography almost everywhere, and it becomes hard to unsee.

Read reviews for colour complaints specifically. This sounds obvious, but it works shockingly well. Search the reviews page for words like “mustard,” “more yellow than pictured,” “looked grey in person,” or “not as advertised.” Real customers in real lighting, photographing the item on their own phones in their own homes, are more reliable than any single studio photo, almost without exception. I’d personally rate a handful of honest customer review photos above the official product images for colour accuracy purposes (thanks to them for taking the hit for me, haha).

Check if the retailer offers a colour-matching swatch or fabric sample service. Some retailers, particularly for higher-cost items like coats or formalwear, will send a small fabric swatch before you commit to the full purchase. If this is available and you’re investing real money in a piece, it’s worth the small delay and minor cost. There is no substitute for seeing the actual fabric under your own lighting.

Consider the material itself, not just the colour name. Matte fabrics (cotton, most knits) tend to render their true colour more faithfully in photos than shiny or textured ones (satin, sequins, velvet), which can scatter light in ways that shift the apparent colour depending on the angle of the shot. If you’re choosing between two similar colours in different fabric finishes, lean toward trusting the photo more for the matte option and being more cautious with the shiny one.

When in doubt, order it and check it against your palette guide in natural daylight near a window, with the tags on, before removing them. Returns exist for exactly this reason. I’d really rather you order two options and send one back than keep something that’s quietly working against you every time you wear it. Don’t let the minor hassle of a return talk you into keeping something you’re already unsure about - the cost of an awkward returns process is significantly lower than the cost of a garment sitting unworn in your closet for two years because it never quite felt right.

The skill here isn’t becoming paranoid about every online purchase - it’s building a habit of pausing at the highlight-versus-shadow check before you click “add to cart.” That one habit alone will save you more wardrobe regret than almost anything else on this list, and it takes about fifteen extra seconds once it becomes automatic.

A worked example, because the abstract advice lands better with a real scenario attached. Say you’re shopping for a “sage green” cardigan online for a Soft Summer palette. You pull up three retailers, all calling their cardigan “sage.” Retailer one’s studio photo shows a fairly grey-green, photographed in flat, even, slightly cool lighting. Retailer two’s photo shows a noticeably more golden, yellow-leaning green, shot in warm studio lighting with strong highlights. Retailer three has both a studio shot and an outdoor lifestyle shot, and the two images look almost identical in tone, which is itself a good sign of accuracy. Without doing any further digging, retailer three’s listing is already the safest bet, simply because the consistency between their two different lighting setups suggests less aggressive colour correction is happening. If you wanted to go a step further, you’d check the shadowed fold of fabric in retailer two’s photo specifically, since that’s where the warming filter is least likely to be hiding the true colour, and compare that shadowed tone against what a cool-toned sage should look like.

One more thing worth mentioning: screen calibration is a real, if slightly nerdy, variable too. Your own device’s display affects how you perceive any colour you’re looking at, product photo or otherwise. Phone screens in particular often run slightly warm or oversaturated by default to make photos look more appealing generally, which compounds the product photography lighting issue rather than correcting for it. If you’re making an important colour decision - a wedding outfit, say - it’s worth double-checking the colour on a second device, ideally a properly calibrated laptop or desktop monitor rather than relying purely on your phone, just to rule out your own screen as a confounding variable before you commit to a purchase you can’t easily return.

A handful of smaller, faster habits worth building alongside the bigger checks above. Search for the product on a second retailer if it’s a popular item carried in multiple places; sometimes you’ll get a more honestly lit photo from one seller than another for what is technically the same garment. Check the product’s available colour options listed together on one page if the retailer offers a colour-swatch row; seeing your intended shade directly next to its siblings often reveals undertone more clearly than seeing it in isolation, the same way it’s easier to spot a slightly-off paint colour when you’ve got several chips lined up side by side rather than just one in front of you.

And finally, don’t underestimate the simple trick of squinting slightly at a product photo, or stepping back from your screen. Reducing visual detail temporarily forces your eye to register the overall colour cast more honestly, without getting distracted by the fine textile detail and styling that’s doing its best to charm you into not noticing the lighting trick underneath. It sounds almost too simple to be useful, but it’s an effective, completely free habit worth building.

None of this needs to turn online shopping into a research project every single time. Most purchases are low-stakes enough that a quick glance and a reasonable returns policy are protection enough. Save the fuller checklist for the items that actually matter to you - the pieces you’re hoping to wear constantly, close to your face, for years to come.

The broader point underneath all of this is one of patience over impulse. Online shopping is designed, deliberately, to encourage fast decisions - a tempting photo, a countdown timer, an “only three left in stock” nudge. Slowing down just long enough to check a shadowed fold of fabric or a second product photo runs slightly against the grain of how these platforms want you to behave, which is exactly why it’s worth building into a deliberate habit rather than trusting it’ll happen naturally in the moment.

I’m not exaggerating for comedic effect, though I’ll admit it does help the bit land. I owned colours because they existed in the world and I needed a shirt, not because I’d thought about whether they did anything for me. I had a dijon mustard brown cardigan I wore constantly because it was soft, despite the fact that it made me look like I was fighting off a cold. I didn’t know that. I just knew I was cold and the cardigan was nearby. It lived on the hook by my door for actual years. Years. I have photographic evidence I am choosing not to revisit publicly.

The turning point wasn’t even subtle. It was someone telling me, completely unprompted, “you look tired” on a day I felt fine - and me realising, slowly, horribly, that I was wearing the mustard cardigan. That’s it. That’s the whole humiliating epiphany. A colour did that. Not my sleep schedule, not my skincare, a cardigan. I remember going home that evening and standing in front of the mirror in it, studying my own face like it was a crime scene, trying to figure out what exactly was happening. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet - I didn’t know to say “this is pulling a sallow, slightly grey cast into my skin” - I just knew something was off and that it had apparently been off for years without me noticing.

Once I started paying attention, I noticed the pattern everywhere in my own closet. The clothes that got the most “you look so well today” comments were never my favourite-feeling fabrics or my most expensive pieces. They were almost always in a fairly narrow band of colours - and the ones that got vague, polite silence, or the dreaded “are you feeling okay?” were almost always outside that band. I just hadn’t been organising my closet by that logic before, because nobody had ever explained it to me as a logic rather than a vague personal style preference. I’d absorbed style advice my whole life that was about silhouette, about trends, about “investment pieces” - and almost none of it had ever mentioned that the actual colour of the fabric near your face might be doing more work than the cut of the garment itself.

I went back through old photos once I started really paying attention, and it was almost eerie in retrospect. There’s a clear, visible line in my own photo timeline - before I understood any of this, and after - where the “after” photos just look more alive, more rested, even on days I know for a fact I was running on five hours of sleep and stress. Same face. Same skin. Different colour near it. It’s a strange thing to sit with, how much of “looking well” turned out to be a solvable styling problem rather than a deeper wellness one, at least some of the time.

I also want to talk about the emotional side of this, because I think it gets glossed over in a lot of colour analysis content that jumps straight to “here’s your palette, go forth and shop.” There’s a real grief, even if it’s a small and slightly silly-feeling grief, in realising you’ve spent years in colours that didn’t suit you. I had a soft spot for that mustard cardigan. I’d had it since university. Letting go of the idea that it was “my colour” because it was comfortable and familiar took longer than I expected, emotionally, even once I understood the theory intellectually. Comfort and correctness aren’t the same thing, and untangling them in your own wardrobe is truly a process, not a switch you flip in one afternoon.

I want to be upfront about this, because I think there’s a version of colour analysis content that implies you’re somehow failing if you haven’t already cracked this code, that everyone else got the memo about undertones in their twenties and you’re somehow behind. I hadn’t. I wore a mustard cardigan on purpose, repeatedly, for years, well into the part of my adult life where I should have theoretically had this figured out. The whole reason Glow Theory exists is that I know exactly what it’s like to get dressed on autopilot and wonder why nothing ever feels quite right, without having the first clue why, and without anyone in my life ever framing it as something learnable rather than something you’re either naturally good at or not.

So if you’re reading this in something you grabbed because it was clean and not actively offensive, no judgement whatsoever. I see you. I was you, mustard cardigan and all. The system I’m building isn’t about shaming the “whatever’s clean” approach, it’s about giving that approach better raw materials to work with, so “whatever’s clean” and “what actually suits me” can finally be the same pile of laundry. That’s really the whole goal. Not a personality overhaul. Just better odds, every single morning, even on the days you’re too tired to think about it at all.

Why I think this matters beyond just “looking nice,” if I’m honest about the bigger picture. I’ve spent a lot of my career in operations and people-facing roles, and one thing I noticed long before I understood any of the colour theory behind it is how much of a difference small, low-effort visual signals make in how people respond to you, especially in professional settings. Walking into a meeting, an interview, or a difficult conversation while quietly looking tired or unwell - even when you feel perfectly fine - sets a subtle, unhelpful tone before you’ve said a single word. People read fatigue into your face that isn’t actually there, and they adjust how they treat you accordingly, often without either of you consciously clocking why.

I don’t think colour analysis is some magic fix for every challenge that involves being perceived by other people, and I’d be wary of anyone who oversells it that way. But I do think there’s something quietly powerful about removing one variable that’s working against you by accident, especially when that variable is as fixable as “which shirt is in the laundry pile closest to the door.” You can’t control most of how you’re perceived. You can control this one, fairly easily, once you know how.

There’s also a version of this that’s just about how you feel in your own body on an ordinary Wednesday, completely separate from how anyone else perceives you. I noticed, once I started dressing more deliberately within my palette, that I fidgeted with my clothes less. I second-guessed mirror checks less. There was simply less low-grade static in my head about my own appearance, freeing up a surprising amount of mental space for, well, everything else. That’s the quieter, less Instagrammable benefit of all this, and honestly it might be the one I value most.

A small postscript on the mustard cardigan itself, for anyone wondering. I still own it. I haven’t thrown it out, partly out of sentimentality and partly because I think there’s something useful about keeping a physical reminder of where this whole obsession actually started. It lives in the back of my closet now rather than on the hook by the door, which feels like the correct, slightly poetic demotion for an item that unknowingly launched an entire business. I’ve thought about wearing it once, deliberately, for an old-photos-versus-new-photos comparison post, purely so you can see the difference with your own eyes rather than just taking my word for it. Possibly that’s a future Note. Watch this space, and brace yourselves for some very unflattering side-by-side photography in the name of education.

I’d also encourage you, gently, to go find your own equivalent of the mustard cardigan. Almost everyone has one - a piece worn constantly, out of comfort or habit, that’s quietly never been doing them any favours. Finding yours, and understanding why it doesn’t work rather than just vaguely suspecting it, is honestly one of the more satisfying exercises I’d recommend to anyone starting to think about this seriously for the first time.

If you do go hunting for your own version of this, a tip: look first at whatever’s hanging on a hook, a doorknob, or the back of a chair rather than properly put away in your wardrobe. Those grab-and-go spots tend to hold the pieces you reach for on autopilot, which are exactly the items most likely to have slipped past any conscious colour scrutiny. Mine lived on a hook. Yours probably has a similar home somewhere in your house, hiding in plain sight, worn constantly, never once interrogated.

Before we even meet. I send a few short questions in advance - what you’re hoping to get out of the session, whether you’ve done any colour analysis before (quizzes count, even the ones that told you you’re a “summer moon rising”), and what’s been frustrating you about your wardrobe lately. This shapes the whole session. Someone who wants to finally crack the code on why their work clothes feel off needs a slightly different conversation than someone who just can’t stop buying the wrong shade of red. I also ask about any specific occasions or goals - a wedding, a new job, a general “I have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear” situation - so the tips I share after your analysis is complete is actually useful to your real life.

Setting up. Here’s where I become briefly particular in a way that might surprise you: lighting matters enormously, and I will politely but firmly move you away from the cosy warm-lit corner and toward something closer to natural daylight. Not because I’m difficult, but because warm indoor light is quietly flattering to everything and everyone, which sounds nice but makes it nearly impossible to see what a colour is actually doing to your skin. Think of it as the difference between trying on shoes in a dimly lit boutique and then wondering why they look different outside. Same principle. I’ll also ask you to pop off your foundation and anything that’s changing the appearance of your skin - mascara and a tinted lip are fine, a full beat is less useful for our purposes. You can put it all back on afterward, I promise.

Looking at you. Before any fabric comes out, I take a moment to look at you - your skin, your hair colour, your eyes - as a whole picture. Think of it as me forming a working hypothesis before the experiment begins. It gives us a useful starting point and means the session moves with a bit more direction rather than us both staring blankly at a pile of drapes.

Draping. This is the bit. I hold coloured fabric near your face, one at a time, and we watch what happens. That’s it. No complex formulas, no quiz, just paying close attention to what each colour does - does your skin look brighter and more alive, or a bit flat and tired? Do your eyes look more vivid, or does something just feel slightly off and we can’t quite say why? The drapes do the talking. I’ll guide the conversation, but honestly, by the time we’ve gone through a few, most people can start to see it themselves without me saying a word. It’s one of my favourite parts of the whole process, watching the moment someone’s face changes when we hit one of their best colours.

Talking it through. I narrate as we go rather than keeping a mysterious scorecard and announcing the verdict at the end. I’ll say things like “see how that one makes the shadows under your eyes look heavier?” or “notice how different you look in this one compared to the last - your whole face looks more awake.” And this is also where your preferences matter. If a colour that works beautifully on you is one you’d never wear in a million years, that’s completely useful information too, and we talk about it rather than me insisting you make peace with khaki green.

The result. By the end we’ve found your season and your palette, and I share your season’s written guide with you afterward - the colours that work best, the ones to use with a little more care, and practical direction on how to actually apply this to shopping, getting dressed, and choosing makeup. The goal is something you’ll actually pull up on your phone in a dressing room six months from now, not something that lives in a folder being technically impressive but never consulted.

After the session. I leave room for follow-up questions, because the real penny-drop moments often happen later - you’re standing in a shop holding a sweater, trying to remember if your particular shade of rust is “warm enough,” and a quick message in the moment is worth ten minutes of trying to reconstruct the session from memory.

I’m finishing my certification training in Toronto next month and cannot wait to run this properly for the five-plus people already booked in. I’ve spent the lead-up time making sure every part of the experience - from those first questions to the guide you leave with - is as useful and unfussy as I can make it. If it sounds like something you’d want, bookings open on July 1st for after my training wraps! If you register interest before I hard launch, you’ll have the opportunity to grab some pretty steep discounts (either virtually or in-person!) of 25%-50%!

A few practical questions I get asked, answered here so you don’t have to wonder.

How long does it take? Plan for around 60 minutes for the session plus any questions afterward.

Do I need to prepare anything? Mostly just: minimal (or no, preferably) makeup as mentioned, and ideally a plain, neutral-coloured top on the day - grey or white works well - so your own clothing isn’t throwing extra colour onto your face. I do have a drape to cover you, so no worries if this isn’t something you have! Come with questions if you have them. Come with nothing but curiosity if you don’t.

What if I don’t like my result? This comes up more than you’d think, usually from people who’ve already half-decided they don’t want to be told they’re a particular season. Every season is a good one - each has a full, beautiful range behind it, and a lot of the initial “ugh, not that one” tends to shift once you’re looking at the actual colours rather than just hearing the label. That said, if something doesn’t sit right, we talk about it. I’m not here to hand you a verdict and show you the door.

I think it’s worth being upfront about the fact that I’m building this consultation experience in real time, refining it as I go, even as I head into certification. I’d rather be honest about that than pretend I arrived at a perfect, fixed system on day one. The version of this you’ll get in six months will likely be even sharper than what I’m describing today, and that’s exactly how I want it to work.

Why in-person rather than a photo-based analysis? There’s obvious appeal to the idea of sending a few selfies and getting a palette back - no scheduling, no commute, done-by-next-Tuesday kind of vibes. But a photo taken on your phone in your bathroom under the overhead light is carrying a lot of distortion I can’t always account for after the fact. When we’re together, I control the lighting, I watch your live reaction to each drape in real time, and that makes a meaningful difference to the accuracy of what we land on. That said, I understand that in-person isn’t always in the cards for everywhere, whether distance or price being a limiting factor. So a virtual session can sometimes be a good entry point. I try to provide very clear instructions to give us both the best chance of getting an accurate result - so while not totally foolproof, and in-person will always be the gold standard, a virtual session can be an option for those that need it!

All that said? I love the in-person part of it. There’s something wonderful about watching someone’s face change in real time when a colour just clicks. A screen simply can’t replicate that.

Want a chance at your own in person or virtual session? Register interest here before July 1st and grab the chance at some pretty sweet discount codes for my first handful of bonafide clients! ◡̈

Your undertone - the core of your season - does not change. It’s determined by the pigments in your skin and is set from birth. Sun exposure, ageing, hormones, none of it rewrites your fundamental undertone. If you were assessed as a True Winter at twenty-five, you don’t quietly become an Autumn at fifty because your undertone shifted. It didn’t. This is, truly, the most stable piece of the whole analysis, and it’s worth holding onto as your anchor whenever anything else about your appearance feels like it’s in flux.

What can change is the supporting cast around your undertone, and that’s where things actually do shift over time. Let’s go through each one properly.

Hair colour is the biggest variable, by a wide margin. Your natural hair colour is part of what gets factored into a full analysis, and when that changes - greying, going lighter, going darker, even a long-term dye job you’ve kept up for years - the overall harmony of colours that flatter you can shift, even though your underlying skin undertone hasn’t moved an inch. This is why some people who go grey find that certain colours that used to wash them out suddenly work, and vice versa. Grey and white hair, in particular, often shifts someone’s effective contrast level: a person who used to have warm brown hair against fair skin (moderate contrast) might find that once their hair goes silvery-white against that same fair skin, their contrast reads as much higher, which can open up bolder, more saturated colours that didn’t suit the “old” version of their hair-skin combination. It’s not a new season; it’s a new variable interacting with the same season, and the practical effect can feel almost as dramatic as a full reclassification even though the underlying logic hasn’t changed.

Tanning changes your overtone, temporarily, as I talked about in last post on undertone versus overtone. It does not touch your undertone. Once the tan fades, your underlying colouring is exactly where it started. The practical advice here: if you tan significantly and consistently every summer, it can be worth having a “summer-adjusted” version of your foundation and a slightly different go-to red lip for those months, while your actual season classification and clothing palette stay exactly the same year-round.

Ageing affects skin in ways that can shift contrast levels - skin often softens in contrast with hair and eyes over time, which can mean someone who ran high-contrast in their twenties reads as softer in their fifties. There are a few mechanisms behind this: skin can lose some of its youthful pinkness and brightness, hair often greys or lightens (even before going fully grey, many people’s hair gradually loses some saturation), and the overall effect is a gentler, lower-contrast picture even though the underlying undertone hasn’t shifted. Some seasonal systems account for this by distinguishing between, say, a “true” season and softer or deeper variations of it, specifically to capture this kind of gradual contrast change without needing to invent an entirely new season every decade.

Eye colour and skin conditions can occasionally factor in too, though true eye colour changes are rare and usually a separate medical conversation rather than a colour analysis one. Some people do notice their eyes appearing to lighten slightly with age due to changes in the iris, and this can be factored into a re-analysis if it’s significant, though it’s a much smaller variable than hair colour or skin contrast shifts.

Pregnancy and hormonal changes deserve a mention too. Hormonal shifts can temporarily affect skin tone, causing things like melasma or a temporary change in glow and evenness. This is very much an overtone-level, temporary effect, similar to tanning, and doesn’t indicate any change to the underlying undertone, even though it can feel disorienting in the moment if your skin suddenly looks and behaves differently than it has for years.

So, practically speaking, when should you actually consider a re-analysis? I’d suggest it’s worth revisiting if any of the following apply: your hair colour has changed significantly and durably (not a one-off dye job you’re planning to grow out, but a real long-term shift), you’ve gone through a substantial grey transition, you’ve noticed a consistent feeling that your old “best colours” suddenly feel slightly off across multiple seasons rather than just during a tan, or it’s simply been over a decade since your last analysis and you want a check-in. None of these mean you’ll land in a different season necessarily - often a re-analysis confirms the same season with some adjusted recommendations around contrast and intensity - but it’s a reasonable, non-paranoid reason to book a follow-up.

Long story short: you don’t graduate out of your season. There’s no colour-analysis equivalent of “ageing out” of your category. But your season’s supporting details - hair, contrast, the specific intensity that suits you best - are allowed to evolve, and it’s worth checking in on them every so often rather than assuming the guide you got a decade ago is still capturing the full picture. Your undertone is your anchor. Everything else is context that can shift the styling around that anchor, sometimes meaningfully.

A few more lifestyle factors people ask me about, since this seems to be the question that generates the most follow-up curiosity of anything I write about.

Skincare and treatments: things like chemical peels, certain acne treatments, or conditions like rosacea can temporarily or semi-permanently change the visible redness or evenness of your skin. This affects overtone and sometimes the apparent intensity of your colouring, but again, doesn’t touch the underlying undertone. If you’re mid-treatment for something that’s visibly changing your skin, it’s worth mentioning during a consultation so we can talk through it honestly, though I’d generally suggest waiting until skin has stabilised before locking in a full analysis, simply because you’ll get a clearer read.

Illness and fatigue: everyone’s overtone dulls somewhat when they’re unwell or exhausted - this is such a universal, temporary effect that it’s not really season-specific at all, just a general rule that skin looks its best, regardless of season, when you’re rested and well. It’s worth scheduling a consultation on an ordinary, reasonably rested day rather than during an illness or a particularly brutal week, simply so the baseline we’re working from is representative.

Seasonal light exposure, separate from tanning specifically: people who live somewhere with dramatically different light levels between summer and winter sometimes notice their skin looks different month to month in ways that go beyond simple tan lines, related to overall vitamin D levels and general skin health. This is, again, an overtone-level seasonal fluctuation, layered on top of an undertone that hasn’t moved.

The throughline across all of these: there’s a real difference between the things that change how you currently look and the things that change what fundamentally suits you. Almost everything on this list falls into the first category. Genuine undertone shifts, on their own, essentially don’t happen outside of the hair-colour and ageing-contrast mechanisms I’ve already covered. That stability is, honestly, one of the more reassuring parts of this whole field once you understand it properly - it means the work of figuring out your season is something you do once, thoroughly, and then largely get to keep for life.

A short note on why this stability is actually good news, even though it can initially feel like a slightly disappointing answer to “can I change my season.” I think there’s sometimes a hope, when people ask this question, that the answer will be yes - that a difficult relationship with a particular season label might be solvable by simply waiting it out or changing something about themselves. I understand that hope, especially if someone’s first colour analysis experience, perhaps an at-home quiz years ago, delivered a result they never quite warmed to. But I’d reframe this slightly: the stability of undertone means you get to invest in understanding your season properly, once, with real confidence that the underlying logic isn’t going to shift under you in five years’ time. Compare that to, say, skincare or fitness advice, which seems to update every other month. Your undertone is refreshingly, almost boringly permanent, and once you’ve made peace with what it actually is rather than what you wish it were, that permanence becomes an asset rather than a limitation. The work, in most cases, isn’t accepting a new season. It’s getting properly, thoroughly familiar with the one you’ve had all along, often for the first time.

Undertone, defined properly. Undertone is the underlying hue beneath your skin’s surface - the thing that doesn’t change with a tan, a flush, or a questionable fake-tan decision in 2014 (a real decision I made, a real regret I still carry). It’s typically described as warm (yellow, golden, peachy undertones), cool (pink, red, blue undertones), or neutral (a balance of both, leaning neither strongly warm nor cool). This is the deep, structural layer of your colouring. It’s largely genetic, present from birth, and barring some changes I’ll cover in a future post about ageing and hair colour shifts, it stays fairly consistent your whole life. Think of it as the bedrock. Everything else gets built on top of it.

Overtone, defined properly. Overtone, sometimes called your surface tone, is what’s happening on top - your actual visible skin colour right now, today, in this lighting, after this weekend’s gardening or that holiday or simply because you’re a bit flushed from the heat. Overtone is changeable and surface-level. It shifts with sun exposure, season, time of day, even what you ate for breakfast if we’re talking about a flush from spicy food or a glass of wine. Undertone is fixed and structural. Overtone is the weather. Undertone is the climate.

Why this distinction matters so much in colour analysis, and why getting it wrong leads people astray constantly: a lot of at-home quizzes and “hold a piece of white paper up to your face” tricks are actually reading your overtone, not your undertone. So someone with cool undertones who’s just come back from a sunny holiday might look in the mirror, see a golden overtone, and conclude they’re warm. Then they buy a wardrobe full of warm-toned pieces that will fight their actual undertone the second their tan fades, and they’re left wondering, three months later in the middle of winter, why everything they bought in August suddenly looks slightly off. It’s not the clothes’ fault. It’s that the test they used was measuring the wrong layer.

I want to give a concrete example here because I think it lands better than the abstract explanation. Imagine two people, both with cool undertones. One has been indoors all summer, pale, and holds up a white paper test and sees a clearly pink-toned reflection - easy, obvious, correctly reads as cool. The other has spent the same summer outside constantly, has a deep golden tan layered over the exact same cool undertone, and holds up that same white paper and sees gold reflected back. Same undertone. Wildly different overtone. If both of them trust the paper test alone, one gets the right answer by luck and the other gets actively misled, despite their underlying colouring being identical in category.

This is also why the “veins are blue, so you’re cool-toned” advice that circulates everywhere is unreliable on its own - vein colour is affected by skin thickness, lighting, and overtone, not just undertone. It’s one small data point, not a verdict, and I’d really encourage you to stop using it as your sole evidence if you’ve been relying on it. It’s a fun party fact. It is not a diagnostic tool on its own.

How a proper analysis actually isolates the right layer. A proper colour analysis doesn’t rely on a single trick or a snapshot of how you look today. It looks at the underlying structure - how your skin, eyes, and natural hair colour interact with different hues under neutral lighting, using draping, to find the undertone that stays true regardless of your tan line or your lighting situation. That’s the whole reason draping under controlled, neutral light is the gold standard and quizzes aren’t: it isolates undertone from all the noisy, temporary overtone variables by testing reaction rather than appearance. You’re not looking at what colour your skin currently is. You’re watching how your skin responds when different colours are placed near it, which is a fundamentally more reliable signal.

A few overtone-related situations worth knowing about, because they come up constantly in real life:

A flush from exercise, alcohol, heat, or embarrassment is overtone, full stop: it tells you nothing about your underlying undertone, however dramatic it looks in the moment.

Seasonal Affective shifts in skin - many people look paler and slightly more sallow in deep winter months purely from lack of sun, regardless of season classification - are overtone fluctuations layered over a fixed undertone.

Foundation matching gets harder in summer for exactly this reason: your overtone shifts with your tan, but your undertone hasn’t moved, so the “right” foundation shade can need to shift seasonally even though your colour analysis results haven’t changed at all.

So next time someone tells you they “know” they’re warm because they tan easily, gently remind them: tanning easily is information about your overtone and your skin’s melanin response. It is not, on its own, proof of your undertone. The two are cousins, not twins, and mixing them up is the single most common reason people end up unhappy with a self-diagnosed colour palette.

A quick rundown of the other popular at-home tests, and what they’re actually measuring. Since we’re on the topic, it’s worth going through a few of the other tests that circulate online, because most of them suffer from the same overtone-versus-undertone confusion in slightly different ways.

The gold-versus-silver jewellery test - does gold or silver look better against your skin - is a reasonable starting hypothesis, but it’s still being observed under whatever lighting you happen to be standing in at the time, and it’s still just one data point rather than a full picture. It can be a decent first clue, especially if the result is strong and obvious, but I wouldn’t treat it as conclusive on its own any more than I’d treat the vein test as conclusive on its own.

The “does my face look better in this colour shirt” test, done casually at home without controlled lighting or a proper sequence of comparison colours, runs into the same overtone problem as the white paper test - you’re comparing your current presentation, tan and all, against a colour, rather than isolating the structural undertone underneath that current presentation.

Sun reaction (do you burn or tan) is actually a reasonably useful piece of supporting evidence, more reliable than most home tests, because it reflects something closer to your underlying pigment biology rather than a temporary surface state. It’s still not the whole picture on its own, but it’s one of the better DIY data points if you’re trying to form a hypothesis before a proper consultation.

None of this is to say self-assessment is pointless - I’d rather you walk into a consultation with some curiosity and a hypothesis than none at all. It’s just worth holding any home-test conclusion loosely, as a starting guess rather than a verdict, and being willing to have it confidently overturned once you’re seeing your reaction to colour under properly controlled, neutral conditions rather than guessing from a single data point in imperfect lighting.

One more layer worth unpacking: why neutral lighting specifically matters so much, beyond just “good lighting is nice to have.” Most indoor lighting is not neutral, even when it looks perfectly normal to your eye. Standard household bulbs skew warm, adding a yellow-orange cast to everything they touch, including your skin and whatever fabric you’re holding up to it. Many office and retail fluorescents skew the opposite direction, adding a cooler, sometimes slightly green-tinged cast. Your eyes and brain are remarkably good at automatically correcting for this without you consciously noticing - a phenomenon called colour constancy - which is exactly why you don’t walk around feeling like your living room is bathed in orange light, even though, technically, by camera-sensor standards, it often is.

This automatic correction is fantastic for everyday life and unhelpful for colour analysis, because it means your eye is quietly lying to you about the true colour of things, all the time, as a built-in feature rather than a flaw. A drape that looks neutral and flattering under your warm living-room lamp might look completely different under true daylight-balanced light, and your brain won’t necessarily flag the discrepancy for you. This is the actual, unglamorous reason professional colour analysts insist on neutral lighting setups rather than just “well-lit” rooms - it’s not fussiness for its own sake, it’s removing a variable your own perception is actively working to hide from you.

Early morning, before anything else: I don’t start with colour, I start with coffee and Tandem Ops emails, because right now I’m running two businesses simultaneously and my brain needs the boring admin stuff done before the creative stuff, or it never gets done at all. If I let myself start the day with the fun, visual work, I will absolutely still be doing it at 4pm having never opened my inbox, and then I’ll be apologising to someone for a slow reply at 9pm instead. So: inbox triage first, a few client check-ins, the unsexy backbone work that keeps the lights on across both ventures. It’s not exciting to write about, but it’s the scaffolding everything else sits on.

Mid-morning: This is when I get into the actual craft. Some days that’s working through the colour analysis training material for my Toronto certification - yes, I am still very much a student in this, and I think that’s worth saying out loud rather than performing expertise I haven’t earned yet. There’s reading, there’s practical exercises, there’s a fair amount of staring at colour wheels until my eyes cross slightly. Other days it’s building out the season guides for Glow Theory, which means colour theory research, drafting long-form reference material, and then the fiddly work of building accurate palette visuals so the colours on screen actually match what I mean. That last part is more technical than people expect - colour rendering on screens is its own small nightmare of colour profiles and display calibration, and I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit making sure a “muted teal” looks like a muted teal on someone’s phone and not like a swamp.

Midday: Content. Writing Notes like this one, planning what’s coming up on the Substack, occasionally falling down a research hole about why certain undertones read differently under fluorescent versus natural light (this happens more often than I’d like to admit, and I regret nothing - it’s actually some of my favourite time of the week, even when it eats two hours I’d earmarked for something else entirely). I try to batch this work where I can, writing two or three pieces in one sitting when the ideas are flowing, because the alternative is staring at a blank page on the day something’s due, and that’s a bad system for everyone involved, especially me.

Early afternoon, a quick aside on the music thing: Some days there’s a chorus-related task wedged in here too - sheet music to review, a board email to send in my capacity as president, the occasional logistics fire to put out before a competition. I mention this because it’s easy to assume founders have one job. I currently have what feels like four: Glow Theory, Tandem Ops, chorus board president, and “person learning to run two businesses at once without dropping either one.” The afternoons are often where these collide a bit, and I’ve made peace with the fact that a perfectly clean, single-focus day basically doesn’t exist for me right now.

Mid-afternoon: Client-facing work - at the moment that’s mostly responding to booking enquiries, answering questions from the five-plus people already on my calendar for after my certification finishes, and refining what the actual consultation experience is going to look like. I want the first real session I run to feel like I’ve done it a hundred times, even though it’ll technically be my first. That means a lot of dry runs. I’ve draped friends, family members, and at least one very patient neighbour who agreed to “just hold this orange fabric near your face for science.” I take notes after every single practice session - what worked, what felt clunky, what I’d explain differently next time - because I really believe the gap between “technically certified” and “actually good at this” gets closed by reps, not by the certificate itself.

Late afternoon: This is when I usually do something visual and a bit more playful - testing palette combinations, photographing fabric swatches in different light, occasionally roping a very patient friend into letting me hold drapes up under their chin “just for research.” I’ve started keeping a small physical swatch book by my desk specifically so I can cross-check digital colours against real fabric, because screens lie more often than you’d think and I don’t trust any colour until I’ve seen it in two different lighting conditions and, ideally, touched it.

Evening: Depending on the day, this is barbershop chorus rehearsal, which sounds unrelated to colour analysis but honestly isn’t - both are about understanding how individual elements either harmonise or clash, just one’s audible and one’s visual. There’s something almost meditative about going from “is this teal too cool for a warm undertone” all afternoon to “are these four voice parts actually in tune with each other” in the evening. Different sense, same underlying question. I’m the board president for our chorus too, so some evenings are spent in meetings about risers and competition logistics rather than singing, which is its own kind of unglamorous, and a good reminder that even the parts of my life that are supposedly “just for fun” still come with admin attached.

Late evening, if I’m being honest: Sometimes I’m back on my laptop answering one more enquiry email, because I enjoy hearing from people who are curious about this, even when it costs me twenty minutes I’d set aside for winding down. I’m working on getting better boundaries about this. Ask me again in six months.

What surprises people most when I describe a day like this is how much of building a colour analysis business is not colour. It’s admin, training, content, and a slow, deliberate build toward a launch that I want to get right rather than rush. There’s no version of this where I skip the unglamorous middle and arrive fully formed. But the parts that are colour? Those are the parts that remind me why I started this in the first place, and they’re worth all the inbox triage in the world to get to.

A few of the actual tools and habits behind the scenes, for anyone curious about the operational side. I plan to keep a running spreadsheet of every practice (and real) drape session, logging the person’s general colouring, which drapes I tested, and what I observed, partly because I find patterns more visible in aggregate than in the moment, and partly because it’s good training discipline to document your reasoning rather than relying purely on instinct. I also keep a separate document of “explained badly” moments - instances where I tried to articulate why a colour worked or didn’t and fumbled the explanation - so I can go back and refine how I talk about this with actual clients later. Teaching something well is a different skill from understanding it well, and I’m trying to build both deliberately rather than assuming one comes free with the other.

My week also has a rough rhythm to it that took some trial and error to land on. Mondays tend to be heavier on Tandem Ops admin, since that’s when client weeks are kicking off for the people I hope to support there. Midweek is when I do my deepest Glow Theory content and training work, when my focus is most reliable. Fridays are lighter and more flexible, often spent on the smaller, satisfying tasks - replying to comments, tidying up a guide, scheduling the week’s Notes. It’s not a rigid system, and chorus commitments or an unexpected Tandem Ops fire will reshuffle it constantly, but having a rough shape to default to means I’m not reinventing my priorities from scratch every single morning, which is a kind of decision fatigue I’ve learned to actively design around.

I’ll also admit that running two businesses at once is, some days, exactly as chaotic as it sounds, and I don’t want to present this as a perfectly balanced, serene existence. There are days the Tandem Ops side eats the whole day and Glow Theory gets twenty rushed minutes before bed. I’m working on the balance. I suspect I’ll be working on the balance for a while yet, and that feels like an honest thing to admit in a newsletter that’s supposed to be the more personal, behind-the-scenes side of this whole project.

Weekends look different again, and I think that’s worth mentioning too. Weekdays are fairly structured, but weekends tend to be when the more exploratory, less deadline-driven parts of Glow Theory happen. That’s when I’ll spend an entire Saturday morning experimenting with a new palette layout, or just playing with colour combinations that have nothing to do with a specific deliverable, purely because I find it relaxing in a way that surprises people who assume “more colour work” would feel like overtime to me. It doesn’t, most of the time. It’s closer to how I imagine other people feel about a hobby that happens to have turned into a business, which is a strange and lucky position to be in, and one I try not to take for granted given how recently I was in a much more uncertain spot.

Sundays are usually quieter and more protected - chorus-adjacent admin aside, I try hard to keep at least one half-day a week where I’m not working on either business at all, partly for basic sustainability and partly because I’ve noticed my best ideas for both Glow Theory and Tandem Ops tend to show up during the unstructured time, not during the scheduled work blocks. There’s a lesson in there about not optimising every single hour, even as a founder building two things from scratch, that I’m still actively learning to trust rather than just intellectually agreeing with.

If there’s one thing I’d want anyone reading this to take away, it’s that there’s no single “right” way a day in this kind of business is supposed to look. Mine is a patchwork of admin, craft, training, and the occasional barbershop rehearsal, and it’s still finding its shape. I’d rather show you the real, slightly messy version of that than a tidied-up highlight reel that doesn’t actually reflect what building something from scratch looks like.

All this said, if you’re still reading - thank you! And if you’re interested in getting a colour analysis done, either virtually or in person, I am hard launching on July 1st and if you register interest before then, I’ll add you to an email list with some discount codes (think 25%-50% off for the first handful of clients!).

I’ve been there. I’ve also watched people come back from shopping trips with pieces that seemed so right in the store and then felt... weirdly off at home. Like they’d brought home a stranger. The context changes everything. The lighting lies. And the thrill of a good shop can absolutely override your better instincts (we’ve all been there, no judgment).

So here’s everything I’ve learned about shopping your season in a way that actually works - minus the spiral.

Always Bring Your Palette

This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you, and also the one most people conveniently “forget.” Bring your palette. With you. Every single time.

If you’ve had a professional colour analysis, you’ve probably received a colour fan or palette card - and its natural habitat is your bag, not a drawer at home where it’s contributing nothing to your life 🫣. If you had a virtual analysis, save your digital palette to your phone where you can actually find it (not buried in your camera roll between screenshots of recipes you’ll never make).

Here’s why this matters: colour memory is shockingly unreliable. You might know you’re an Autumn who loves earthy tones, but can you confidently tell, from memory, under shop lighting, whether this teal is your teal or just teal’s slightly judgmental cousin? Almost nobody can. The palette card removes the guesswork - and the slightly delusional “I’m sure this counts” moment we’ve all had.

When you hold something up to your palette card, you’re not vibing. You’re matching. Does this green match the forest green in my palette, or is it a bit cooler, a bit more yellow, a bit... not it? The palette knows. Your memory, bless it, does not.

Learn to Scan for Undertone First

One of the most satisfying skills you can develop is learning to scan a rail for undertone before you even start touching things. This alone will save you so much time - and spare you from the heartbreak of falling in love with something that was never going to work.

Warm-toned pieces — golden yellows, orangey reds, warm greens, peach, camel, rust — cluster differently from cool-toned ones — blue-pinks, cool greys, icy blues, blue-greens, true red. Train your eye, and you’ll start spotting this almost automatically, like a slightly nerdy superpower.

If you’re a warm season (Spring or Autumn), drift toward the warm side of the rack first. Cool season (Summer or Winter)? Cool side. You’re not committing to anything - you’re just narrowing the field, which is the secret to shopping without that creeping sense of overwhelm.

Eventually you’ll start noticing things like: this is a blue that’s secretly warm (teal, aqua) versus a blue that’s proudly, unapologetically cool (cobalt, icy blue). This is a red with orange hiding in it versus a red with blue hiding in it. This is colour analysis - happening in real time, on a Tuesday, in aisle four.

Use the Changing Room Strategically

Changing room lighting is, almost universally, an enemy of the people. Too yellow, too harsh, too “is that what I actually look like.” So the changing room is only step one.

What you’re really doing is getting the item near your face. Hold it up at chin height. Then make your way toward the entrance, or a window, or - if you’re feeling bold - just outside the shop for three seconds (most staff have seen weirder…though maybe ask them before doing this so you don’t end up tackled on the sidewalk!). Natural light is the gold standard. Everything else is a guess.

Once it’s near your face in decent light, look at your face - not the garment, however pretty it is. Your face is the canvas; the colour is just the frame. Ask yourself: does my skin look brighter, fresher, more like I’ve slept? Do my eyes look clearer? Or do I suddenly look a bit tired, a bit flat, a bit “rough week”?

This difference is often immediate and honestly kind of startling once you know what you’re looking for. The right colour lifts you. The wrong one quietly drains you. And once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it - sorry in advance.

What you’re not doing here is deciding whether you like the colour. Of course you like it. It’s gorgeous. The real question is: does it like you back?

Prioritise Neutrals Over Statement Colours

When you’re building or refreshing your wardrobe, start with neutrals, not the fun stuff. I know, I know. But your season’s best navy, grey, camel, brown, or white is the quiet hero that’s going to make everything else work - and work harder.

Nailing your neutrals first also makes it much easier to tell whether a statement piece actually belongs. If your neutrals are warm (camel, warm brown, ivory), a screamingly cool pink is going to sit there looking a bit lost. If your neutrals are cool (cool grey, soft navy, rose-taupe), a juicy warm coral might just not get the invite.

Think of neutrals as the foundation and accent colours as the furniture. Lovely furniture doesn’t help much if the foundation’s a mess.

Develop Permission to Pass

This might sound like an odd thing to put in a shopping guide, but I think it’s one of the most powerful habits you can build: getting completely, unapologetically comfortable walking away from something gorgeous that simply isn’t yours.

Once colour analysis really clicks, it reframes what “beautiful” means in a shop. A colour doesn’t need to be in your palette to be beautiful in the world - it just needs to be in your palette to be worth you buying it.

The coolest thing you can learn to do is to pick up something truly stunning - a rich cobalt blue dress, say - take one look, and put it straight back without a flicker of regret. That kind of clarity feels amazing. You’re no longer deciding based on “is this nice” (everything’s nice). You’re deciding based on “is this nice on me.” Which, last I checked, is the entire point of getting dressed.

A Note on Shop Lighting

Most shop lighting is warm and flattering in a deliberately generic way - designed to make things look appealing, not to help you make good colour decisions. Translation: warm colours often look better in-store than they will at home, and cool colours can look a touch duller than they really are.

So if you’re ever torn on something, here’s my go-to trick: take a photo of yourself holding it up (or wearing it), then check that photo in natural daylight - or send it to someone who actually knows your palette. Cameras are slightly more honest than shop lighting, which, frankly, has an agenda.

And if that “someone” is me? Send the photo. I will absolutely have an opinion, and I promise it’ll be a kind one.

Book a colour analysis!

I got laid off. The kind of layoff where one day you have a calendar full of meetings and a sense of who you are professionally, and the next day you have neither - just a severance letter, an away message you forgot to take down, and a lot of unscheduled time to sit with your own thoughts. Not my favourite season of life, if we’re using that word loosely. There’s a very specific kind of disorientation that comes with a layoff that nobody quite prepares you for. It’s not just the loss of income, though that’s real and immediate and worth naming honestly. It’s the loss of structure. The loss of a built-in answer to “so what do you do?” The loss of the small, constant feedback loop of being useful to other people in a defined, measurable way.

Here’s the thing about a layoff nobody warns you about: it doesn’t just take your job, it takes your certainty. For weeks I felt like I was standing in front of my own closet - the actual one, with clothes in it - and not recognising anything. Not because the clothes had changed. Because I had. I didn’t know what I wanted to look like, what I wanted to feel like, what “put together” even meant for the next version of me. I’d get dressed for nothing in particular - a grocery run, a coffee with a friend who was trying to be kind about my situation without saying the word “situation” - and stand there for ten minutes feeling like I was choosing a costume for a person I wasn’t sure I was anymore.

So I did what I always do when I’m spiralling: I researched my way out of it. This is a deeply ingrained habit of mine, for better or worse. Give me an emotional problem and I will, within about 48 hours, have a small army of browser tabs open and a half-formed system for solving it. I’d known about colour analysis for years, mostly as a fun party-trick kind of thing, the sort of content you scroll past on social media - “find out if you’re a winter” quizzes, that sort of thing. Fun, low-stakes, not something I’d ever taken seriously. But this time I went deep. I started reading about undertones and seasons and contrast levels and why some colours make people look like they slept eight hours and others make them look like they’re coming down with something. And somewhere in that rabbit hole, a switch flipped.

This wasn’t just “what colours suit me.” This was about control. About having one small, concrete thing I could understand and act on when so much else felt like it was happening to me instead of because of me. Job hunting, at least in those early weeks, felt like shouting into a void - applications going out, silence coming back, no clear cause and effect I could learn from. Colour, by contrast, was immediate. I could test a theory in the mirror in under a minute. I could be wrong, adjust, and be right ten minutes later. After months of a job search that offered no such feedback loop, that immediacy felt like oxygen.

I started applying it to my own wardrobe and noticed something almost embarrassing: people commented. Not “nice top,” but “you look so well,” “you seem really good lately.” I hadn’t changed anything else. My sleep was still inconsistent, my stress levels were still doing whatever stress levels do during a layoff, my skincare routine hadn’t suddenly transformed. Just the colours. That gap between how little I’d actually changed and how much people noticed was the thing that really got me. It felt almost unfair, in a good way, like I’d found a cheat code that had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

That’s when Glow Theory started taking shape, properly, back in May. Not as a pivot I talked myself into out of desperation, though I want to be honest that the timeline actually does trace back to a hard professional season - there’s no use pretending otherwise. But it became, fairly quickly, the first thing in months that felt like me again. The part of me that loves music theory and pattern and systems, applied to something visual and personal instead of spreadsheets and org charts. I spent years building operational systems for other people’s businesses. It turns out the instinct to find the underlying structure in something that looks chaotic on the surface translates surprisingly well from “fixing a hiring pipeline” to “figuring out why one shade of blue makes you glow and the next shade over makes you look faintly unwell.”

I’m currently finishing my certification training in Toronto next month, and I’ll be honest, I’m the kind of person who wants the credential done properly before I call myself an expert out loud. I’ve seen enough “self-taught overnight expert” energy online to know I don’t want to be that. I want to know the theory cold, I want to have done the supervised practice hours, and I want my first real client session to be built on training, not just enthusiasm and a colour wheel I bought on a whim. But I’m already taking bookings for after I’m certified, and I’ve got over five clients on the books already, which is the kind of thing that makes me grin at my phone in public like a weirdo. Five people, trusting me with this before I’ve technically finished the course - that’s not nothing, and I don’t take it lightly.

So that’s the origin story. Not a tidy “I always knew I’d do this” narrative, the kind you see in a lot of founder bios that make the whole thing sound inevitable in hindsight. A “I lost the thing I thought defined me and found something better while looking for my keys” narrative. Messier, slower, with a lot more research tabs involved. I suspect a lot of you know exactly what that feels like - the season where nothing makes sense yet, where you’re testing things just to feel like you have agency over something, anything, while the bigger picture sorts itself out in its own time.

If you’re in a season like that right now - unscheduled, uncertain, closet full of clothes that don’t feel like you anymore, maybe your own version of a layoff or just a quieter kind of in-between - you’re going to fit in well around here. This newsletter isn’t just going to be palette guides and styling tips, although there will be plenty of that. It’s going to be honest about the fact that getting your colours analysed is sometimes about a lot more than the colours.

Thanks for being here for the start of it. There’s a lot more coming.

A bit more on what “starting over” actually looked like, practically. I think it’s worth being specific rather than just gesturing vaguely at “researching colour theory,” because the in-between period was longer and clumsier than that makes it sound. There were weeks where Glow Theory was a notes app document with half-formed ideas and no name. There was a period where I considered three or four different business names before landing on something that actually felt true to the slightly cheeky, warm tone I wanted this to have. I read more about colour theory in those first two months than I’d read about anything, academically, since university, and I was a music major who really loved being a student. That tells you something about how thoroughly I fell into this.

I also want to be honest that the layoff itself wasn’t a clean, single moment of clarity followed by a triumphant pivot. There have been weeks in between where I apply to roles that look a lot like my old one, because that felt like the responsible, sensible thing to do, and a part of me hasn’t been ready yet to trust that a colour analysis business built from a personal obsession could be a real, sustainable thing rather than a hobby I was using to avoid the harder work of job hunting. It has taken time, and a fair number of conversations with people who know me well, to get to a place where I believe this could be both the thing that helps me personally and a legitimate business with paying clients.

What ultimately tipped it for me wasn’t a single dramatic realisation. It was the accumulation of small data points: the unprompted compliments, the way I felt energised every single time I worked on this versus the low hum of dread I’d associate with some job applications, the fact that I kept coming back to it on weekends without anyone asking me to. Eventually that pattern has become too consistent to ignore, and I’ve stopped treating it as a side project and started treating it as a thing I am actually building.

I share all of this not to dramatise an ordinary career pivot, but because I think there’s a version of “founder origin story” content that smooths over the uncertainty in a way that isn’t honest, and isn’t useful to anyone else going through their own uncertain middle. If you’re in your own messy middle right now, I’d rather tell you the truth about mine than a tidier version of it.

Are there still days where I wake up in a panic because I remember that I have zero income coming in whereas there used to be a relatively sizeable one allowing me my mortgage payments, HomeSense runs, and the ability to pay for something without feeling like I want to vomit? Absolutely. More than I can count. But, I am thankful to have a husband who is willing to support me through this crazy transition, an Airbnb that hopefully will help cover a part of our mortgage so that we can keep a roof over our heads, and enough disdain for the corporate world to fuel myself forward.

So, hi. Welcome to the party - it’s going to be colourful over here (both in word choice and fabric swatches). ◡̈