About Season Palette

Season Palette is a colour analysis tool that runs in your browser. Upload a photo, get the season, the palette, your true neutrals and what to avoid — and the reason why, which is the part most guides skip.

It exists because the pages that rank for these questions are mostly blog posts with a JPEG of a palette on them. A JPEG cannot be copied, is unreadable on a phone, and cannot be taken shopping. Every colour on this site is a real swatch with its hex code, and you can copy it.

How the analysis works

The analysis reads three things from your photo and scores your colouring against all twelve seasons.

Undertone comes from the hue angle of your skin in CIELAB colour space — whether it sits toward yellow or toward pink. This is weighted most heavily, because it halves the field and is the most reliable signal available from a photograph.

Depth comes from the Individual Typology Angle, a measure used in dermatology, blended with how light or dark your hair is. Value in colour analysis describes your whole colouring, not your skin alone — someone with medium skin and near-black hair reads deep.

Contrast is the gap between skin and hair lightness. Chroma — how bright or muted your colouring is — is the least reliable of the four to infer from one image, so it carries the least weight in the scoring.

Skin is sampled from the centre of the frame and hair from the darker edge of the top band. That sounds crude and it is deliberate: the standard colour test for skin cannot tell skin from hair, because in colour terms brown hair and skin are the same thing. Position is the only signal that separates them.

Where it is unreliable

The honest version, because a tool that hides its limits produces confident wrong answers.

Photographs lie about colour. Indoor bulbs push everything yellow, which reads as a warm undertone even on cool colouring. Shade and screens push everything blue. The tool detects a colour cast and says so, and offers to correct for it, but the best fix is a photo by a window.

One photo cannot always decide. Some season pairs differ by very little. When the top two are close the tool says so and hands you the gold-and-silver test rather than picking one and sounding certain.

It can sample the wrong thing. If it marks a wall instead of your cheek, you can tap the correct spot and it recalculates. The markers on the preview show you exactly what it read, so a wrong answer is visible rather than mysterious.

Colour analysis is a system, not a science. It is a useful framework for narrowing thousands of colours to a workable palette. It is not a measurement of anything fundamental about you.

Why twelve seasons and not sixteen

This site uses the 12-season system, not the 16-season variant, for a practical reason rather than a philosophical one: 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. Splitting Dark Autumn further does not change that instruction. There is a fuller comparison if you have been analysed under the other system.

Season names differ between sources — Dark Autumn and Deep Autumn are the same thing, as are True Winter and Cool Winter. Where two names exist, both appear on the page, and there is one page per season rather than two competing ones.

Getting in touch

Season Palette is a small independent site, not a company. If something is wrong, unclear, or you think the analysis has misread you, that is genuinely useful to hear — the failure cases are how the tool improves.

The site is free, has no account, and collects almost nothing. See privacy for exactly what that means.