Let me paint you a picture of the colour analysis corner of the internet right now.
There’s the session snippet video, usually shot on a phone, usually vertical, usually featuring a dramatic before-and-after drape reveal with music that implies something cinematic is happening (go check my Instagram - I’m living proof!). There’s the celebrity analysis, delivered with the confidence of someone who has personally examined the subject’s undertone under neutral lighting, which they have not, because the subject is a celebrity and the source material is a red carpet photo taken at an event where everyone is lit to look amazing. There’s the “do this test at home to find your season” content, which usually involves looking at your veins (unreliable, as I’ve written about extensively) or eye colour (also unreliable, also covered). And then there’s the content from people who are, bless them, figuring this out in real time and occasionally typing someone as a Deep Autumn when they are clearly - clearly - a Summer.
I say this last part with all the saltiness of someone who has spent a significant amount of time and money training properly, because yes, I am a little salty about it. I’ll own that.
The point is: colour analysis content is everywhere right now. A lot of it is the same. And a fair amount of it is wrong in ways that are consequential for the people receiving the advice, who then spend money building a wardrobe around an incorrect palette and wonder why nothing quite works.
So the question I kept asking myself, while building Glow Theory from the ground up in the middle of all of this: what’s actually the point of adding more?
How we got here, a brief and slightly chaotic history.
The seasonal colour analysis system has been around since the early 1980s. Carole Jackson’s book Colour Me Beautiful came out in 1980 and started a whole moment - suddenly everyone knew they were a season, colour draping was A Thing, and at some point in the subsequent decades it quietly faded into the background of cultural memory, the way a lot of very good ideas do when the trend cycle moves on.
Then the internet happened. And then, specifically, Carol Brailey happened.
If you’ve spent any time in the colour analysis rabbit hole online, you know who I’m talking about. Carol Brailey is widely credited as one of the first people to bring seasonal colour analysis back to a mainstream digital audience in a serious way - posting sessions, explaining the theory, showing the draping process, making it visible and accessible. She arguably reignited the whole conversation. The current explosion of colour analysis content? A lot of it traces back to that reignition.
Which is really great. More people understanding their colouring, more curiosity, more conversations about why some colours make us look like we slept for twelve hours and others make us look like we haven’t slept since 2022 - all of this is good. I am here for it.
What I am slightly less here for is the part where the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten a bit chaotic. Where the algorithm rewards confidence over accuracy, where a dramatic reveal performs better than a nuanced explanation, and where someone can post a celebrity “analysis” based on three red carpet photos and a hunch and get three hundred thousand views while someone doing genuinely careful, trained work gets forty-seven.
Again: I am aware this is a little salty. I contain multitudes.
The thing that kept nagging at me.
When I started building Glow Theory - properly, deliberately, after my certification training in Toronto with Karen Brunger at the International Image Institute - I knew I didn’t want to just post session snippets and join the pile of content that all looks the same. Not because session content is bad. It’s not. It’s useful and people clearly want it and I post it too. But I kept circling a problem that felt more fundamental than content strategy.
The problem is this: colour analysis makes a lot of intuitive sense when you can see it happening. When you’re in the room, watching a drape go up and watching someone’s face change in response - when you can literally observe that this particular shade of orange is pulling a sallow cast into the skin and this other one is doing the opposite - it clicks immediately. It’s not magic, it’s just observation. The evidence is right there, live, in front of you.
But when you try to explain it in words - in a blog post, in a caption, in a comment under someone’s confused “but why can’t I wear black?” question - it gets slippery. You say “high contrast” and people hear a concept. You say “muted chroma” and people hear jargon. You say “your undertone is cool but your depth is deep and your chroma sits low” and people hear a foreign language and quietly close the tab.
The gap between “understanding this in a room with a drape” and “understanding this from reading about it online” is enormous. And most colour analysis content doesn’t really try to close it. It either stays in the room (session videos) or stays in the words (educational posts), and neither quite bridges to the other.
I wanted to build something that did both.
Enter: Glow Lab.
Glow Lab is the part of Glow Theory’s website that I have been quietly building, and lovingly losing sleep over, for the past several months. It is, in the most direct description I can give you, an interactive colour education space. Not a quiz that spits out a season. Not a list of rules. Not a database of celebrity analyses (it may have this someday, but it will be with strict parameters rather than red carpet photos). A place where you can actually play with colour concepts and watch them behave - which is, as it turns out, worth approximately ten thousand words of explanation.
The philosophy behind it is simple: don’t tell people that contrast matters, show them contrast mattering. Don’t explain that “black” is not one universal colour, let them interact with multiple versions of near-black and watch what happens when the temperature and depth change. Don’t describe what undertone does to skin - demonstrate it, visually, in a way that creates those small moments of “oh. OH. I see it now.”
Because those moments are the whole point. They’re what happens in a consultation when a drape goes up and a client’s face changes and they suddenly understand, in their body rather than just their brain, why this matters. I want to give people some version of that before they ever sit down with me. Or alongside a result they’ve already received. Or just because they’re curious and they want to understand colour better, full stop.
What’s actually in there.
The Contrast Experiment is the one I think about the most, because contrast is probably the single most under-explained concept in popular colour analysis content. Everyone talks about seasons. Very few people talk clearly about why the same colour can look striking and intentional on one person and slightly exhausting on another - and the answer is usually contrast.
The experiment shows you the same scenario at different contrast levels, including one of my favourite examples: how black - which most people treat as a universal, safe, infallible neutral - actually interacts very differently with different people depending on their natural contrast level. A high-contrast person in black looks polished and deliberate. A soft, lower-contrast person in true black can look like the colour is working against them, pulling focus away from their features rather than framing them. Same garment. Wildly different outcomes. And you can see it, rather than just nodding along while I describe it.
I also want to flag something I care about specifically in how this experiment is built: the demonstration isn’t just on fair-skinned women. Colour theory doesn’t only apply to a narrow range of colouring, and colour analysis content has a long and somewhat embarrassing history of representing a very limited slice of humanity. Glow Lab is trying to do better than that, intentionally, from the ground up.
Beyond Black takes a similar approach to a different concept: the idea that even colours we think of as universal are anything but. “Black” is not one colour. There are warm blacks, cool blacks, blacks that pull blue, blacks that pull brown, true blacks and near-blacks and everything in between. The Beyond Black experiment lets you interact with different versions of deep, dark neutrals and observe - rather than just read about - how subtly shifting the temperature and depth of a dark colour changes the overall visual effect. It’s the kind of thing that, once you see it, makes you walk through a shop differently. Suddenly you’re looking at the dark corner of a clothing rail with different eyes, because you understand that “dark” is not a monolith.
There’s also the Colour Compass, which is an interactive tool that introduces you to your own colouring and the concepts behind seasonal analysis. I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t: it’s not a replacement for a professional analysis. It’s not going to tell you definitively what season you are with the accuracy of a proper draping session under controlled lighting. What it does do is walk you through the relevant concepts - undertone, depth, contrast, chroma - in a way that’s interactive and personal rather than abstract and theoretical. If you go through it and then come in for a consultation, you’re going to have a much easier time understanding what I’m seeing and why. That’s the point.
And then there’s the Season Shifter, which is maybe my favourite thing I’ve built, because it captures something specific to the 23-season system I work with: the fact that seasons aren’t just four tidy boxes. People’s colouring sits on a spectrum. You can flow between characteristics. You can be primarily in one season with notable characteristics of another. The Season Shifter lets you explore how the system changes when you adjust different variables - and it’s the best way I’ve found to explain, without a forty-minute lecture, why “just tell me if I’m warm or cool” is a useful starting point but not the end of the conversation.
Why I built this instead of just posting more session content.
Partly because I think the world has enough session content and not enough colour education that actually sticks. Partly because I’m an operations person at my core and I will always build a system when I could be building a system. Partly because I spent months learning colour theory from one of the best people in the business and I want to find ways to make that knowledge useful beyond the people sitting in a chair across from me.
But mostly because of a specific frustration I kept feeling, early in building this, when I’d try to explain something visually obvious in text and watch the explanation get clunkier the longer it went on. Colour analysis makes sense when you can see it. Full stop. So I decided to build something you could see.
Glow Lab is ongoing - more experiments are in progress, more tools are coming. It’s a bit of a labour of love, built by someone who finds colour theory really fascinating and wants other people to find it fascinating too, rather than confusing or gatekept or only accessible to people who can afford a consultation or who happen to follow the right accounts.
It’s also, I think, something a little different in a space that’s gotten a bit crowded with the same few types of content. Which is, if I’m honest, exactly the point.
Go have a look. Play with something. Let your brain make a connection it hasn’t made before.
That’s what it’s there for.