12 vs 16 Season Color Analysis
The 12-season system sorts coloring into four families — spring, summer, autumn and winter — and splits each family three ways, giving twelve palettes. The 16-season system splits each family four ways instead, adding a separate warm or cool variant alongside the existing ones. The palettes overlap heavily. The 16-season version mainly adds precision at the boundaries between families.
Find your season
Upload a photo in daylight, no makeup, neutral background.
Runs in your browser · nothing is uploaded
Both systems are descendants of the same idea: that coloring can be described by three properties — undertone, value and chroma — and that people who share those properties suit the same colors.
The 12-season system gives each family a "true" version plus two neighbors that lean toward the adjacent families. True Autumn is the warm center; Soft Autumn leans toward summer; Dark Autumn leans toward winter. The same pattern repeats around the wheel, and every season borders two others.
The 16-season system adds a fourth member to each family, usually by separating "warm autumn" from "true autumn" as distinct rather than synonymous. In practice the added palettes sit very close to the ones they split from, and the extra precision is only useful if your analysis was already accurate to within one season.
There is also a naming problem worth knowing about, because it causes more confusion than the systems themselves. The same season is often published under two names — Dark Autumn and Deep Autumn are the same thing, as are True Winter and Cool Winter, and Bright Spring and Clear Spring. If two sites appear to disagree, check whether they are actually using different names for one palette.
Which one should you use?
Use 12. This site does, and the reason is practical rather than philosophical: twelve is the level of precision that changes what you buy. Knowing you are a Dark Autumn tells you to stop wearing true black and start wearing espresso, which is an actionable, wardrobe-changing instruction. Splitting Dark Autumn further does not change that instruction.
Sixteen is worth the extra step in one situation: you have already tested confidently into a family, you sit right on a boundary, and two of the twelve palettes both look defensible. At that point the finer split can break the tie. For everyone else it adds decisions without adding clarity.
If you have been analysed under a 16-season system already, the mapping back is straightforward — your palette almost certainly corresponds to one of the twelve here, under a different name.
The twelve seasons
Every season below has its full palette, its true neutrals, gold or silver, and what to avoid — with the reason why.