Can Your Season Change? (Hair Colour, Tanning, Ageing — What Actually Shifts)
This is one of the most common questions I get, usually phrased somewhere between hopeful and suspicious: “Can my season change?” Hopeful, because people quite reasonably want an explanation for why their old favourite colours suddenly feel off. Suspicious, because there’s an understandable worry that if seasons can shift on a whim, the whole system is a bit flimsy. The honest answer is: mostly no, but partly yes, and the why matters more than the yes-or-no.
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.