Season Palette

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Skin Tone Chart

Skin tone and skin undertone are two different things. Skin tone is how light or deep your skin is — the shade you would match a foundation to, running from very fair to deep. Undertone is the color sitting underneath it: warm, cool or neutral. Skin tone changes when you tan. Undertone does not, and undertone is the one that decides which colors suit you.

Find your season

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Almost every "skin tone chart" online is really a depth chart. It sorts skin from fair to deep and stops there, which is useful for buying foundation and close to useless for choosing clothing colors — because two people at identical depth can need opposite palettes if their undertones differ.

Depth still matters. It is one of the three axes that decide your season, and it maps to value: how light or deep your overall coloring is. But it is the axis people over-weight, because it is the one that is easiest to see.

The practical version of the chart has two axes rather than one. Depth runs fair to deep. Undertone runs cool to warm. Where you sit on both is what narrows twelve seasons down to two or three.

One more thing worth knowing: depth is about your coloring as a whole, not your skin alone. Fair skin with dark hair and dark eyes reads as high contrast and medium-deep overall, which is why it lands in a different season than fair skin with blonde hair and light eyes, despite the skin being identical.

Placing yourself on the scale

Find your depth first. Look at a photo of yourself in daylight and squint until the detail goes. What is left is value. If your skin, hair and eyes blur into one light mass, you are light. If they stay clearly separated, you have contrast. If the whole thing reads dark, you are deep.

Then find your undertone, which the depth chart cannot tell you. The undertone test covers four methods and which of them are actually reliable.

Then combine them. Light plus cool points at Light Summer. Deep plus warm points at Dark Autumn. Medium plus muted points at one of the soft seasons. Two axes and you are down to a handful, which is close enough that the analyser can finish the job.

The twelve seasons

Every season below has its full palette, its true neutrals, gold or silver, and what to avoid — with the reason why.