Summer · cool · soft
True Summer Color Palette
Also called Cool Summer. Same season — one palette.
True Summer is cool and soft at medium depth — the middle of the summer family, and the least extreme season in the cool half of the system. Nothing about your coloring is loud, and the mistake most often made on your behalf is adding contrast that is not there.
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Your 8 colors
Cool and muted at medium value. Slate blue, rose, mauve, soft burgundy. There is grey in everything, and that greyness is what lets the colors sit with you rather than in front of you.
Your neutrals
Grey blue is your black. It anchors without the hard stop that true black creates against a soft coloring.
Pearl is your white. Slightly cool, slightly soft, and it avoids the glare that pure white brings.
Slate covers the deeper end when grey blue is too light, and it is the neutral most True Summers are missing.
Gold or silver?
Silver or white gold. Rose gold is workable; yellow gold is the one to leave alone.
What to avoid
Black — grey blue or slate instead.
Orange — no route into a cool muted palette.
Warm gold — both as a metal and as a color.
Bright clear colors — the saturation fights the softness. The right hue at lower chroma almost always works.
True Summer at a glance
| Undertone | cool |
|---|---|
| Value | medium |
| Chroma | soft |
| Contrast | low-medium |
| Family | Summer |
How to tell if you're really True Summer
True Summer sits between Light Summer and Soft Summer, and both neighbors share its cool undertone. Value and chroma decide it.
Against Light Summer, try soft navy at medium depth. True Summer carries it comfortably. Light Summer starts to look overwhelmed.
Against Soft Summer, take rose at two strengths. If the fuller rose looks right and the greyed one looks flat, you are True Summer. If the greyed one looks harmonious, you are Soft Summer.
Gold should look wrong in all three cases. If it does not, you are looking at the summer family when you should be looking at autumn.