What I Wish I’d Known Before Getting Colour Analysed

I’ve been thinking about what I would tell a past version of myself - the one who first decided to take colour analysis seriously, before the training, before the Toronto course, before any of this - and it’s quite a long list. Some of it is practical. Some of it is a bit more emotional than I expected to feel about it. All of it is stuff I now wish someone had told me plainly rather than leaving me to figure out in the middle of the process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”Your season” is not a personality diagnosis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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