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). ◡̈

I’ve had so many conversations with people who’ve described a vague sense of wrongness about their hair - a colour they chose because it was trendy, or because their colourist suggested it, or because they saw it on a Pinterest picture of someone and loved it - but that has never quite looked the way they imagined. Often, the issue isn’t the style or the cut or even the technique. It’s the undertone of the colour itself.

Understanding your season gives you a framework for making hair colour decisions that work with your natural colouring rather than against it. It won’t remove the trial-and-error entirely - but it narrows the field significantly and prevents some genuinely costly mistakes.

Hair Colour for Springs

Springs have warm, clear natural colouring, and their best hair colours reflect and amplify that warmth. The goal for a Spring considering hair colour is always to lean into the golden, bright, and warm - never to cool things down.

The most flattering hair colours for Springs: golden blonde (not platinum, not ash - warm and sunny), honey blonde, strawberry blonde, warm light brown with golden or amber highlights, copper, and auburn. There’s a luminosity and warmth to all of these that harmonises beautifully with Spring’s peachy, golden skin.

If you’re a Spring with naturally darker hair and you’re considering lightening it: go warm. Golden balayage, honey-toned highlights, warm caramel pieces - these are your friends. Going ashy or platinum when you’re a Spring often results in that slightly yellowish or unwell quality to the skin, because the cool tones of the hair are fighting against the warm tones of the complexion.

If you’re a Spring going grey: consider warm pearl or golden grey tones rather than cool silver. A warm grey on a Spring can be beautiful; a steel grey can make the complexion look a little dull.

Avoid: ash blonde, cool brown, platinum, and anything with a blue or violet toner. These cool the hair down in a way that works beautifully for other seasons but fights against Spring’s inherent warmth.

Hair Colour for Summers

Summers have cool, soft, muted colouring, and their hair colours should mirror that. The goal is cool and soft - never warm, never vivid, never golden.

The most flattering hair colours for Summers: ash blonde, cool light brown, cool medium brown, soft platinum, cool dark blonde, and - for those ready to embrace it - a cool silver-grey that harmonises beautifully with Summer’s natural undertones. Summers tend to go grey in one of the most elegant ways of any season: cool, silvery, and quietly beautiful.

If you’re a Summer colouring your hair darker: look for cool browns with no redness or warmth to them. An ash brown or cool espresso, rather than a chestnut or warm brown.

If you’re a Summer adding highlights: cool, soft highlights in a slightly lighter version of your base colour, or soft platinum pieces. Not golden, not honey, not copper.

Avoid: warm golden blonde, copper, auburn, warm brown, and anything that has a warm or reddish tone. Warm hair colour on a Summer complexion often creates an orange or yellow cast to the skin that’s quite unflattering - it’s the colour version of that wrong-foundation-undertone problem.

Hair Colour for Autumns

Autumns often have some of the most naturally beautiful hair colour of any season - rich auburn, warm chestnut, golden brown, and deep copper are all quintessentially Autumn. The goal when colouring Autumn hair is to honour and deepen that warmth and richness, never to cool it down or strip it away.

The most flattering hair colours for Autumns: rich auburn, warm chestnut, copper, bronze, warm medium brown, warm dark brown, deep golden brown, and a warm near-black with brown or reddish undertones. There’s a richness and depth to all of these that feels entirely at home on Autumn colouring.

If you’re an Autumn going lighter: think golden and warm. Warm balayage, copper highlights, honey tones - the goal is warmth, not lightness for its own sake.

If you’re an Autumn going darker: deep warm brown, warm espresso, or a warm near-black. Never cool black - it has a harshness that fights against the warmth of Autumn skin.

Going grey as an Autumn: look for warm pearl grey, golden grey, or a grey that has warmth rather than coolness to it. Cool silver-grey on an Autumn can make the complexion look sallow.

Avoid: ash brown, platinum blonde, cool black, and anything that takes the warmth out of the hair. Autumns who go too cool or too ashy often find their complexion loses its golden glow - which is precisely the opposite of what you want.

Hair Colour for Winters

Winters tend to have naturally dramatic hair - very dark, very deep, or occasionally very light (platinum or near-white blonde). The goal with Winter hair colour is to maintain that sense of clarity and contrast, never to muddy or warm it.

The most flattering hair colours for Winters: true black, deep cool brown, cool dark brown, blue-black, and at the other extreme, cool platinum or icy white-blonde. What these have in common is a clarity and coolness - no warmth, no muddy middle ground.

Winters going grey have the same elegant option as Summers: cool, silvery grey. On a Winter’s colouring, a crisp silver-grey looks absolutely striking. Many Winters actually look more themselves as their hair lightens with age.

If you’re a Winter colouring or maintaining dark hair: look for cool versions of dark shades. A true black or cool dark brown rather than anything with warmth or redness.

Avoid: warm, golden, or auburn tones. A Winter with warm highlights can look as though the hair and the face are telling different stories — there’s a visual disconnection that’s hard to put your finger on but immediately noticeable. Warm hair makes cool Winter skin look somehow more grey or washed out rather than warmer.

The drama of Winter hair - that deep, cool, high-contrast quality - is one of the season’s greatest assets. It’s worth protecting.

What About Highlights, Balayage, and Money Pieces?

One question I get asked constantly is whether the guidance above applies only to full colour changes, or whether it extends to highlights, balayage, and the smaller accent pieces that have become so popular in recent years. The short answer is: it applies to everything, but the margin for experimentation is a little wider with partial colour.

Highlights and balayage often sit right around the face - exactly where they’ll interact most with your complexion. A face-framing piece in the wrong undertone can have an outsized effect precisely because it’s positioned where your eye, and everyone else’s, naturally goes first.

That said, smaller pieces of colour give you more room to play, because they’re diluted by your base colour. A Summer with cool ash-brown hair might tolerate a few warmer babylights without it looking wrong, in a way that a full warm balayage wouldn’t. If you love to experiment but don’t want to commit to a full colour change, subtle pieces in your season’s direction are a lower-risk way to test the waters.

I’d also gently suggest talking to your colourist about undertones rather than just shade names. ‘Ash’ and ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ mean slightly different things to different colourists, and the toner used can shift a colour considerably from how it looks on a swatch. Bringing a reference - even a photo of a colour from your palette - can help bridge that gap and get you closer to the result you’re picturing.

A Final Note

These are guiding principles, not absolute rules. Life is too full and hair is too personal for rigid rules. And there are also questions of maintenance, cost, and your hair’s condition that rightly factor into every colour decision.

But if you’ve ever walked out of a salon feeling like something isn’t quite right - and you couldn’t put your finger on it - your season might be where the answer lives.

As part of my colour analysis sessions, I’m always happy to talk through hair colour in the context of your season. It’s one of the most practical applications of the work, and honestly, one of the most satisfying!

Book an analysis!

But here’s the uncomfortable truth that no one tells you while you’re standing in the fitting room: “goes with everything” is not the same as “flatters everyone.” Black is a wardrobe workhorse, yes - but for the majority of people, it’s quietly working against their face, not for it.

At Glow Theory, this is one of the first myths I’d like to gently dismantle. So let’s talk about what black actually does, who it actually loves, and what you can wear instead that gives you all the chic with none of the drain.

The seductive promise of black

Black earned its reputation honestly. It recedes, so it has a slimming effect. It’s non-committal, so it pairs with anything. It reads as formal, expensive, and authoritative. Coco Chanel built an empire partly on the little black dress, and decades of fashion editorials have reinforced the idea that black is the height of elegance.

The problem is that black became a default rather than a choice. We stopped asking whether it suited us and started assuming it was universally flattering - the colour you could never get wrong.

You can, in fact, get it wrong. Most people do.

What black actually does to a face

To understand why, you have to understand what black is in colour terms. It is the deepest, most saturated, coolest “neutral” there is - essentially the absence of light. When you place that much depth and coolness directly beneath your chin, one of two things happens.

If your natural colouring can match that intensity - if you have genuine depth and contrast in your features - black sits comfortably beside you. Your face holds its own.

But if your colouring is lighter, warmer, or softer than black (which describes most people), the fabric overpowers you. Black pulls focus downward and casts a subtle shadow upward onto the face. The result is that it amplifies everything you’d rather it didn’t:

• Under-eye shadows look deeper

• Any redness or ruddiness looks more pronounced

• Fine lines and nasolabial folds gain definition

• Warm or sallow skin can look tired and slightly yellow-grey

In short: the garment wins, and your face loses the contest.

Who black genuinely loves

Black is not the enemy. For the right colouring, it’s spectacular. The people who can wear true black straight off the rack tend to share three qualities:

• Cool undertones (pink/blue rather than golden/peach)

• Natural depth in their hair, eyes, or skin

• High contrast between their features - think dark hair against fair skin, or rich skin with bright, clear eyes

In the seasonal colour system, this is classic Winter territory. A deep, cool, high-contrast Winter standing next to black looks crisp, dramatic, and effortlessly powerful, because black matches the intensity already present in their face.

Who black quietly drains

For everyone else - the warmer, lighter, and softer colourings - black tends to do more harm than good:

• Springs (warm, light, clear) get washed out; black is too heavy and too cool, and it dulls their natural brightness.

• Summers (cool, soft, muted) find black too harsh and too saturated; it overwhelms their gentle contrast.

• Autumns (warm, deep, muted) clash with black’s coolness; it can make rich, golden skin look sallow.

If you’ve ever put on a black top, glanced in the mirror, and thought I look tired today - it may not have been the day. It may have been the shirt.

Glow Check 🔍
In natural daylight near a window, hold a piece of true black fabric up under your chin. Look only at your face, not the fabric. Do your features look bright and defined - or does your skin look dull, shadowed, or tired while the fabric becomes the most noticeable thing? If the fabric wins, black isn’t your best neutral.

What to wear instead: finding your true neutral

Here’s the good news. Giving up black-as-default doesn’t mean giving up dark, chic, or versatile. It means swapping black for the deep neutral that actually harmonises with you. Everyone has one — often several.

• If you’re warm and deep (Autumn): espresso brown, chocolate, deep olive, and warm charcoal give you all of black’s grounding richness while flattering your golden undertone.

• If you’re warm and light (Spring): camel, warm taupe, ivory, and soft golden browns keep you looking fresh and lit-from-within.

• If you’re cool and soft (Summer): charcoal grey, greyed navy, soft slate, and cocoa offer sophistication without the harshness.

• If you’re cool and deep (Winter): congratulations - true black is your neutral. But you can also play with navy, charcoal, and pure white for variety.

Navy, in particular, is the unsung hero here. A deep, well-chosen navy reads just as professional and slimming as black but is far more forgiving on the face for the majority of people.

How to make the switch without rebuilding your wardrobe

You don’t need to purge every black item tomorrow. Instead:

1. Move black away from your face. Black pants, skirts, and shoes are perfectly fine - the colour isn’t near your complexion. It’s black tops, dresses, and scarves that do the damage.

2. Add a buffer. If you love a black top, wear it with a scarf, necklace, or collar in your best neutral or colour near your face.

3. Replace the high-rotation pieces first. Swap your everyday black tee or blazer for your true neutral, and you’ll notice the difference immediately.

The Glow Theory takeaway

Black isn’t “bad.” It’s simply not the universal flatterer we’ve all been raised to believe it is. For most people, there’s a deep, sophisticated neutral that does black’s entire job - chic, slimming, versatile - while making the face look more alive instead of less.

The goal of colour analysis isn’t to take your favourites away. It’s to give you a palette where every choice works for you. And once you find your true neutral, you may find you don’t miss black at all.

Curious which deep neutral is truly yours? A Glow Theory colour analysis pinpoints your exact season - and the dark, elegant shades that will become your new everyday go-to.

Book your analysis!

Let’s talk about something that almost no one tells you when you start dress shopping:

There’s no such thing as just one “white” when it comes to wedding dresses.

In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons a $200 dress can sometimes look more beautiful on someone than a $2,000 dress.

Not because of the fabric. Not because of the designer. Not because of the cut.

But because of the colour.

The right shade of white can make your skin look clearer, your eyes brighter, and your overall appearance more radiant. The wrong shade can make you look tired, washed out, or leave you feeling like something is just slightly... off, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why.

This is one of the core ideas behind colour analysis. The goal isn’t to make you look like you’re wearing an expensive dress. The goal is to make you shine, so that people see your face first and your dress second.

Now before we go any further, I want to say this clearly:

If you’ve already chosen your dress and you love it - this does not override that. At all.

I firmly believe that if you put on a dress and it makes you feel beautiful, confident, and excited to walk down the aisle, that’s what matters most.

This post isn’t about rules. It’s about understanding why some dresses seem to light you up instantly while others never quite feel right, even though they’re objectively gorgeous.

Why “White” Isn’t Just White

In colour analysis, white exists on a spectrum. It can be cool or warm, bright or soft, crisp or creamy, clear or muted. And your natural colouring has a huge impact on which version will harmonise with you versus compete with you.

Winter: Crisp, Cool, and High Contrast

Best whites: true white, bright white, blue-based white

If you’re a Winter, you can handle intensity. Your colouring naturally has contrast and clarity, which means you can wear a pure, stark white without it wearing you. Think of that classic bridal-magazine white: clean, crisp, bright, and unmistakably white.

Why it works: Winters have the cool undertones and visual intensity needed to match the brightness of true white. Instead of overwhelming them, it enhances the striking quality already present in their colouring.

What to avoid: Ivory, cream, yellow-based whites - these warmer shades can make Winter colouring appear duller or less vibrant.

Summer: Soft, Cool, and Romantic

Best whites: soft white, off-white, rose-tinted white, dove white, slightly greyed whites

Summers are cool like Winters, but significantly softer. A stark white often feels harsh against Summer colouring, creating contrast that draws attention away from the face. Think soft, elegant, and romantic.

Why it works: Summer colouring is naturally more muted and lower contrast. Softer whites create harmony and allow the face to remain the focal point.

What to avoid: Bright white, stark white, highly contrasting whites - these tend to overpower Summer’s gentler colouring.

Spring: Warm, Clear, and Light

Best whites: clear ivory, fresh cream, light warm white, soft golden ivory

Spring is often misunderstood as needing soft, muted colours - that’s actually more characteristic of Summer. Spring colouring is warm, clear, and light, which means Springs need brightness, but the right kind. Think sunlight through linen: fresh, glowing, and full of life.

Why it works: Springs can handle significantly more clarity and brightness than Summers. However, because their colouring is warmer and lighter than Winter, a stark white is often too cool and too intense.

The ideal Spring bridal white feels warm (rather than blue-based), clear (rather than muted), and light and fresh (rather than rich or heavy).

A quick nuance within Spring:

• Light Spring needs brightness in a gentler way - look for soft, warm, luminous ivories that feel airy rather than dramatic.

• True Spring thrives in clearly warm, fresh ivory tones with a subtle golden warmth.

• Bright Spring can handle the most intensity within the Spring family and often looks fantastic in a bright ivory that sits very close to white, provided it retains some warmth.

What to avoid: Stark white, cool blue-based whites, greyed or muted off-whites - these can either overpower Spring colouring or drain its natural freshness.

Autumn: Warm, Rich, and Deep

Best whites: ivory, cream, champagne, warm beige-toned whites

Autumn colouring shines in richness and warmth. Pure white often feels disconnected from the depth and earthiness that make Autumn colouring so beautiful. This is where those gorgeous champagne, antique ivory, and vintage-inspired bridal tones truly come alive.

Why it works: Autumn colouring is warm and generally softer or deeper than Spring. Richer whites create cohesion and allow Autumn’s warmth to shine.

What to avoid: True white and bright white - these can appear stark and strip warmth from the complexion.

A Quick Cheat Sheet

• Winter → true white, bright white, crisp white

• Summer → soft white, dove white, muted cool white

• Spring → clear ivory, fresh cream, bright warm ivory

• Autumn → rich ivory, champagne, warm cream

A tip for when you’re browsing: many designers label their shades - look for terms like “ivory,” “diamond white,” or “champagne” on their websites and in salon swatches. These labels are your first clue.

One Last Thing

Colour analysis is a tool, not a rulebook.

If you put on a dress and your whole face lights up... if you can’t stop smiling... if it feels like you...

That matters more than anything I’ve written here.

But if you’re standing in a fitting room wondering why one dress seems to make you glow while another leaves you looking a little tired - despite being equally beautiful - there’s a good chance the answer isn’t the silhouette. ✨ It’s the shade of white.

Ready to find yours?

Bookings open in July - and I’d love to help you feel completely confident before you step into a single fitting room. A seasonal colour analysis can identify not only your best clothing colours, but also the whites, ivories, metals, and bridal shades that help you look your most radiant on your wedding day.

If you want to be among the first to book, you can register your interest now at glow-theory.ca 💛

If soft, muted colours have always made you look a little washed out, but bold, clear, icy tones make your features snap into focus, you may be a Winter. Let’s explore what defines this striking season.

Winter in one line

Cool, deep, and clear: moonlight on snow.

Winter sits firmly at the cool, high-contrast, high-clarity end of every scale. Nothing about Winter is warm, muted, or gentle - everything is crisp, cool, and saturated.

The three defining qualities

1. Cool undertone. Winter skin has a clear, cool, blue-based or neutral-cool cast. Veins tend to look blue or purple, and silver flatters more than gold.

2. High contrast / depth. This is Winter’s hallmark. There’s usually a strong contrast between features - dark hair against fair skin, or richly pigmented skin paired with bright, clear eyes. The overall effect is striking.

3. High clarity. Winter colours are pure and saturated, never greyed or dusty. Where Summer’s blue is misty, Winter’s blue is electric.

The Winter palette

Think jewels, ice, and pure contrast.

• Heroes: true red, fuchsia, emerald, royal blue, magenta, cobalt, icy pink, icy blue

• Neutrals: pure white, true black, charcoal, navy

• Metals: silver, platinum, white gold

Crucially, Winter is the one season that truly owns true black - and the only season for which stark, pure white is ideal. Where black drains most people, it matches a Winter’s natural depth and contrast perfectly.

The power of high contrast

Here’s what sets Winter apart in styling: while most seasons look best in harmonious, blended outfits, Winter actually looks best in contrast. Black with pure white. Emerald with icy blue. A jewel tone against a crisp neutral. This high-contrast pairing matches the natural contrast already present in a Winter’s face - and anything too soft, blended, or muted will mute the wearer right along with it.

This is why a Winter in a dusty, earthy palette can look unwell, while the same Winter in a clear fuchsia or a crisp black-and-white looks instantly radiant and powerful.

What to avoid

• Muted, dusty tones - they grey out Winter’s clarity.

• Earthy, golden shades (mustard, rust, olive, camel) - too warm; they make Winter skin look sallow.

• Warm, blended neutrals like beige and camel - replace with crisp charcoal, navy, and pure white.

• Low-contrast, tonal outfits - they flatten Winter’s natural drama.

How to style a Winter

• Embrace contrast. Don’t shy away from black-and-white or jewel-against-ice pairings.

• Go bold with colour. True red, emerald, and royal blue are your power shades.

• Choose cool metals - silver and platinum echo your undertone.

• Keep it crisp. Clean lines, clear colours, and high contrast suit you best.

Glow Check 🔍
In daylight, compare a clear, true red against a soft, dusty rose. If the bold red makes your features snap into sharp focus while the dusty rose makes you look faded and tired, you’re leaning cool, deep, and clear - Winter’s signature.

The Glow Theory takeaway

Winter is the one season built for drama - so don’t water it down. Where many Winters mistakenly reach for “safe,” muted colours, their colouring actually craves boldness, clarity, and contrast. Lean into the jewel tones, the crisp neutrals, and yes, the true black, and you’ll look striking, polished, and unmistakably powerful.

Wondering if you’re a Winter? A Glow Theory colour analysis confirms your exact season and reveals the bold, high-impact shades that let your natural drama shine.

Book your analysis!

If bright, icy colours have always felt a little harsh on you, but rich, warm tones make your skin look lit from within, you may well be an Autumn. Let’s take a deep dive into what defines this most luxurious of seasons.

Autumn in one line

Warm, deep, and muted: a forest in October.

Like every season, Autumn is defined by where it sits on three scales: undertone (warm vs cool), value (light vs deep), and clarity (clear vs muted). Autumn’s signature is warmth combined with depth and a muted richness. Nothing about Autumn is icy, bright, or pastel - everything is golden, grounded, and full-bodied.

The three defining qualities

1. Warm undertone. This is Autumn’s most important trait. The skin has a golden, bronze, or amber warmth to it. Veins tend to look greenish, and gold jewellery flatters far more than silver.

2. Medium-to-deep value. Autumns generally carry some depth in their colouring - rich brown or auburn hair, warm hazel, amber, or deep brown eyes, and skin that ranges from warm ivory to deep golden.

3. Low clarity (muted). Autumn colours are rich rather than bright. Think of pigment that’s been deepened and warmed, never neon or icy. A muddy, earthy quality flatters Autumn enormously.

The Autumn palette

Picture a spice market and an autumn woodland combined.

• Heroes: mustard, rust, terracotta, pumpkin, olive, forest green, teal, warm burgundy, bronze, warm coral

• Neutrals: chocolate brown, camel, khaki, warm cream, warm taupe, coffee

• Metals: antique and warm gold, bronze, copper

The thread running through it all is warmth and richness - colours that look like they’ve been steeped in golden light.

Why Autumn is the “most luxurious” season

There’s a reason Autumn so often reads as expensive. Its palette aligns beautifully with the textures and materials we associate with luxury: tan leather, suede, camel coats, gold hardware, rich wools, and warm woods. An Autumn in a camel coat with bronze accessories looks effortlessly high-end, because the colours and the materials speak the same warm, grounded language.

Where Winter signals luxury through drama and Summer through quiet refinement, Autumn signals it through warmth and abundance - a kind of golden richness that feels both grounded and indulgent.

What to avoid

• Pure black and stark white: too cool and too high-contrast; they grey out Autumn’s warmth.

• Icy pastels (baby blue, ice pink): too cool and too light; they wash Autumn out.

• Fuchsia and cool brights: they clash sharply with golden skin.

• Dusty cool tones: Autumn loves muted, but muted-warm, not muted-cool.

How to style an Autumn

• Lean into spice and earth. Rust, mustard, and olive are your power colours.

• Embrace texture. Suede, leather, knits, and matte finishes flatter Autumn’s richness.

• Choose warm metals. Bronze, copper, and antique gold echo the undertone perfectly.

• Build tonal, warm outfits - camel with rust, olive with chocolate - for that “quiet luxury” effect.

Glow Check 🔍
In daylight, compare a rich rust or mustard against an icy pink or pure white. If the warm tone makes your skin look glowing and healthy, while the icy tone makes you look pale and slightly grey, you’re leaning warm and deep - classic Autumn.

The Glow Theory takeaway

Autumn’s superpower is richness. Think pigment and patina, not pop. Where many Autumns go wrong is reaching for black or bright, cool colours that fight their golden warmth. Embrace the spice tones, the earthy greens, and the warm metals, and you’ll discover a palette that looks not just flattering but genuinely luxurious.

Think you might be an Autumn? A Glow Theory colour analysis confirms your exact season and hands you a personalised palette of your richest, most flattering shades.

Book your analysis!