Your Most Flattering Hair Color According to Your Seasonal Color Analysis

Have you ever had a hair stylist or friend wonder what season you are? If you're unsure what they're discussing, you should know about seasonal color analysis. This can be particularly useful if you're constantly confused about why some outfits you pick look wrong, and others are just right. Your closet might have a rainbow of colors and shades, but you only choose a select handful regularly because you instinctively know they make you look great.

You might have instinctively discovered your seasonal color analysis to some degree. Diving into it in full force can mean learning about the underlying tones coloring of your skin tone, hair, and eyes. The darkness and lightness of each factor determines your color "season" of spring, summer, autumn, or winter. Your seasonal colors compliment your features, and seasons are used because most people naturally associate specific colors with them. You probably think of white snow and ice for winter, pink spring flowers blooming, red leaves falling in the autumn, and green summer grass.

A thorough hair color analysis review determines your season but also subtypes, such as deep, soft, or cool. You can always dress in any of your seasonal colors, but finding how muted or vivid shades can flatter your appearance the most can be worth it. At the least, it's worth knowing whether or not your eyes, hair, and skin have cool, warm, or neutral underlying tones. Once you have this information, you can pick clothing colors with matching overtones for a consistently great appearance.
 

What Is Seasonal Color Analysis?

You might be wondering where seasonal color analysis even started. Thank Albert Henry Munsell. His Munsell Color Theory had a significant role in developing modern seasonal color analysis. Many art students learn color theory from his books, and it teaches a three-dimensional model of organizing colors based on chroma, value, and hue. Robert Dorr was an artist who figured out that people could look very different just due to the colors of clothing they had on. This led him to explore the concept of undertones.

Modern seasonal color analysis became popular with Carole Jackson's 1980 book "Color Me Beautiful." This book introduced the four-season approach with specific colors for each part of the year. Users could determine their colors, creating a trend that is still practiced today. Across the various tones and colors of each season is a theme or key. Clarity is a best practice for spring, while summer is a time of mutation. Autumn is when you focus on tonation, and winter's secret is contrast.

Seasonal color analysis creates a color palette you can use to pick hair and clothing colors to complement how your body looks. The four primary groupings are autumn, spring, summer, and winter. Your seasonal type is based on the underlying tones of your body and the light or depth of your overall coloring. You can use this information to choose not just hair and clothing colors, jewelry, and makeup. Depending on how far you dive into each season, you might discover that you fall into one of the trio of sub-seasons for each primary season.

The Three Factors

Seasonal collar analysis depends greatly on three individual factors: your eyes, hair, and skin. The coloring and undertones of each factor also play a role.
 

Your Eyes

Your eyes have an impact on your seasonal color analysis with the variety of tones and colors they have. Warm eyes tend to have yellow tones, which are easy to highlight when you hold up something gold beside them. Cool eyes are likelier to feature blue tones and usually respond by holding up something silver beside them.

Your Hair

The second factor in finding your type is your hair. Skin tone might be the most prominent physical feature, but your hair garners attention from others. Hair with warm tones might have bright golden tints, but ashy hair has more of a cool tone to it. Platinum blonde and black are extreme hair colors with cool tones in most cases. Redheads usually fall into cool or warm categories.

Your Skin

Human skin has many shades, running from deep to fair, but they all play a role in your color analysis. What matters here is whether your skin is cool or warm. Your overall skin tone is a combination of its overtone and undertone, and it's the underside of all that sits on the tint scale. Warm tones correspond to yellow, blue represents cool, and red is neutral. The metal test is a popular way of determining your skin tones based on the colors you look best in. Gold means warm, and silver means cool. If both metals work for you, assume your tones are neutral.
 

The Four Seasons

Each of the color seasons has cool, neutral, and warm features within their respective color palettes. Spring is totally warm and bright with lots of tints of lighter colors. Summer is cool but muted, with lighter colors and plenty of tones. Autumn is entirely warm but muted, with darker colors featuring tones and shades. Winter is wholly bright and cool, with darker colors, tints, and shades featuring high intensity and contrast levels.


 

Breaking It Down

Knowing that you can use seasonal color analysis to create a wardrobe that meshes with your body well is good, but it's even better when you can put it into practice.

Start With Your Color Aspect

Your color aspect is based on three things. Your hue can be cool or warm, your value can be dark or light, and the chroma can be bright or muted. These three color dimensions form the basis of seasonal color analysis and theory.

Hue is also known as temperature. It tells you how cool or warm a particular color is. Colors get warmer with more yellow added but cooler if more blue is added. Whether or not you have warmer or cooler underlying tones determines whether you should wear clothing that is warmer, cooler, or neutral in the middle.

The lightness or darkness of a color is based on the value scale. When a color has more black added, it gets darker. Conversely, it gets lighter if more white is brought into the mix. Contrast level is a closely related metric that emphasizes the distinctions between your features.

Chroma is a scale corresponding to whether a color is soft and muted or bright, clear, and saturated. Pure colors are clear, but they become more muted as gray is added.
 

Secondary Aspect

In addition to determining your base season, you might have a secondary aspect to consider. You might straddle spring and summer if you have light eyes, skin, and hair. Someone with deep hazel, green, or brown eyes and dark hair might be in deep winter or autumn. Someone with a warm aspect could be an autumn or spring with a color palette that is neither pale nor intense. A soft aspect can fall into the summer and autumn range with neutral coloring and minimal contrast between eyes, hair, and skin. The clear aspect can be winter or spring; the general coloring is high in saturation and contrast. A cool aspect can fit the emerald green shade of winter or the periwinkle shade of summer.
 

Picking Hair Colors Based on Your Season Analysis

Picking the right color for your hair based on seasonal analysis can unlock stunning new looks for you to rock, but the colors you pick need to account for your color season and shade.

Autumn

Warm underlying tones work well with rich, earthy colors that feature depth.

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   Deep Autumn: Dark auburn, deep chestnut, and dark chocolate all make for alluring looks.
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   Soft Autumn: Soft auburn and warm golden brown are rich tones to try out.
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   Warm Autumn: Rich golden browns and vibrant coppers are colors to consider.

Spring

Flatter yourself with peachier shades. Medium golden brown can work, or you could opt for a linen blonde or light strawberry blonde color. Underlying tones tend to be warm and have bright, clear features. Light caramel or rich honey colors also work.

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   Clear Spring: Golden and coppery tones are bright, vibrant colors to consider.
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   Light Spring: Light golden or creamy blondes are soft and pale tones to look at.
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   Warm Spring: Golden browns and deeper blondes are the rich tones to look for. 

Summer

Cool underlying tones tend to happen with soft, muted coloring overall. Subtlety is the name of the game. Ashier shades in the dark blonde range are good choices, but you might also choose a neutral brown. Balance out these shades with highlights.

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   Cool Summer: Flatter yourself with a darker ash brown or a cool mocha hair color.
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   Light Summer: Make yourself beautiful with a light ash brown or soft ash blonde.
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   Soft Summer: Enjoy the subtle richness of blended colors such as dusty blonde or soft chestnut.

Winter

Deep winters are also called dark winters. Complement your skin and eyes with dark black, mahoganies, or browns for your hair color. Cool underlying tones should suit the most saturation and contrast.

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   Clear Winter: Very light ash brown, icy blonde, and platinum blonde are bright and vivid looks.
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   Cool Winter: Highlight natural contrast with the intensity of icy blonde, jet black, or brown colors.
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   Deep Winter: Dark and rich colors in the blacks and browns work well with cool underlying tones.

Tips You Should Remember

If you decide to change your hair color, consider your hair's health. Consulting a professional is always a smart move if you want to get optimal results. You also need to remember how much maintenance you're willing to tolerate; certain colors require more upkeep. Highlights or temporary colors are good options if you don't want to commit to a total change.
 

Look Your Best

If you want to find out what colors can flatter your appearance the most, then seasonal hair color analysis can be the way to accomplish that. Your seasonal colors will be based on your general appearance and the coloring of your skin, hair, and eyes. Every color season has a specific palette that can bring harmony to your natural appearance. Color analysis can be your path to finding the colors that look great, look good, or look bad on you. Knowing this information lets you start picking the best clothing colors for a stunning look while avoiding those that might make you look off.

Your seasonal color analysis doesn't account for body shape or personality, but it is useful for finding clothing colors that have aspects similar to your natural features. Not only does this make dressing up well easier to accomplish, but it also can save you time and money. Avoid hair colors that don't work, and don't buy garments you won't feel great in. Remember that seasonal color theory is one tool that can help you, but it's not a written law you must follow. While it's generally applicable, not everyone has a skin complexion that falls into a specific season.