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How our color quiz works
Our quiz turns 12 answers about your skin, hair, eyes and the colors you wear into three scores: warm or cool, light or deep, and bright or soft. The strongest score and its lean pick one of the 12 color seasons, by fixed rules, so the same answers always give the same season.
What the quiz measures
Color analysts describe anyone's coloring in three ways, and each of the 12 questions adds a little to one or more of them:
- Temperature: warm (golden) or cool (rosy, blue-red).
- Depth: light or deep, across your hair, eyes and skin together.
- Clarity: bright (clear, high contrast) or soft (muted, blended).
An answer adds up to 2 points one way or the other. "Not sure" and the middle answers add nothing.
From answers to a season
We add up the three scores and compare them on the same scale. The strongest of depth and clarity leads. Temperature leads only when it clearly beats both, by more than 0.2 on a scale of 0 to 1: the four warm or cool seasons are for people whose undertone is the most striking thing about them. That margin is our design choice, because the temperature questions tend to agree with each other.
The lead trait's second clue then picks between two seasons:
| Lead | Decided by | Seasons |
|---|---|---|
| Light or deep | warm or cool | Light Spring or Light Summer; Deep Autumn or Deep Winter |
| Bright or soft | warm or cool | Bright Spring or Bright Winter; Soft Autumn or Soft Summer |
| Warm or cool | bright or soft | Warm Spring or Warm Autumn; Cool Winter or Cool Summer |
If that second clue is exactly even, a third one decides, and if everything is even, we name the closest season and say that your answers sit between seasons.
The reasons on your result
The two or three reasons are your own answers that pushed hardest toward your season. An answer that also points the other way is never shown as a reason.
Fair to every skin depth
Every season includes people of every skin depth. No question relies on visible veins or sunburn. Skin depth is one question of twelve, and only its two ends count, by a single point. Dark brown eyes and tan-to-brown skin, which are common everywhere, add nothing on their own. We test that every season can be reached at every skin depth.
Where the method comes from
Seasonal color analysis grew from Johannes Itten's color teaching and Suzanne Caygill's seasonal palettes. Carole Jackson's Color Me Beautiful (1980) made the four seasons famous, and later work split each season by its strongest trait, which gives the 12 seasons used today. We describe colors with the Munsell system's three dimensions and measure them in CIELAB.
Each season's colors are our own picks, checked against measurable rules: light seasons must measure light, soft seasons muted, warm seasons golden, and no two colors in a palette may look alike. They were reviewed by three independent reviewers, including one focused on deep skin tones.
What a quiz can't do
A quiz is a first answer from what you tell it; it can't see you. If your result surprises you, or you sit between two seasons, try the colors on your own face in the quiz's color mirror, or book a draping in person. We claim no accuracy figures, because we don't have any.