How to find your colour season at home
You do not need a studio appointment to find your season. Every analysis — professional or at home — comes down to reading three things about your colouring, then matching them to a palette. This guide walks the tests in order, tells you which ones to trust, and points you to your sub-season at the end.
Prefer to skip the manual tests? The free colour analysis quiz asks eight questions and does the same reasoning for you in about two minutes.
The three things every season is built from
Twelve seasons sounds complicated, but each one is just a combination of three simple reads. Get these three and your season falls out almost automatically.
Undertone
Warm ↔ Cool
The single most important read. Warm skin has a golden, peach or yellow cast underneath; cool skin has a pink, rosy or blue one. This decides your half of the wheel — Spring and Autumn are warm, Summer and Winter are cool — before depth or brightness matter at all.
Value
Light ↔ Deep
How light or dark your overall colouring is when you take skin, hair and eyes together. Fair hair with light eyes reads light; dark hair with dark eyes reads deep. Value separates a Light Summer from a Deep Winter even though both can be cool.
Chroma
Bright ↔ Muted
Also called clarity or saturation — whether your colouring looks vivid and high-contrast or soft and blended. Clear, sparkling eyes against contrasting hair read bright; a gentle, low-contrast face reads muted. Chroma is the tie-breaker that splits the three sub-seasons inside each family.
Five tests, in the order that works
Run them in sequence. The first sets up honest conditions; the middle three read undertone from different angles; the last breaks ties. No single test is the answer — look for the read that three of them agree on.
- 01
Set the scene: daylight and a bare face
Stand near a north-facing window in the middle of the day, with no makeup, clean skin and your hair pushed back. Indoor bulbs throw yellow or blue and will mislead every test below. Drape a white towel over your shoulders first so no other colour is competing against your skin.
- 02
Vein test — your quickest undertone read
Turn your wrist to the light. Veins that look green lean warm; veins that look blue or purple lean cool. If you genuinely cannot tell, that itself is a signal you may be neutral and able to wear both. Treat this as one vote, not the verdict — confirm it against the jewellery and white-vs-cream tests before trusting it.
- 03
Jewellery test — gold vs silver
Hold a gold item against one side of your face and a silver item against the other. Warm undertones look healthier and more lifted next to gold; cool undertones look cleaner and brighter next to silver. Whichever metal makes your skin look worse — sallow, grey, or blotchy — is pointing you away from that temperature.
- 04
White vs cream — the at-home drape test
Hold a pure, optic-white cloth under your chin, then swap it for a warm cream or ivory one. One will brighten your face and even out your skin; the other will make you look tired or yellow. Cool seasons win with pure white, warm seasons with cream. This is the home version of the professional drape test and the most reliable check on this page.
- 05
Sun reaction — a supporting clue
Think about how your skin behaves in summer. Skin that tans easily and rarely burns leans warm; skin that burns, goes pink and struggles to hold a tan leans cool. It is only a supporting clue — plenty of warm people burn — but it usefully breaks ties when the metal and drape tests disagree.
Turning three reads into one season
Work outside-in. Undertone picks your half of the colour wheel. Value and chroma then choose one of the three sub-seasons inside it.
Warm undertone → you are a Spring (clear and fresh) or an Autumn (muted and earthy). Bright colouring leans Spring; soft, blended colouring leans Autumn.
Cool undertone → you are a Summer (soft and cool) or a Winter (clear and high-contrast). Gentle, low-contrast colouring leans Summer; vivid, high-contrast colouring leans Winter.
Once you know your family, open its three sub-seasons below and read the commonly confused with section on each — that is where value and chroma settle the final answer.
Open your candidate seasons
Common mistakes that give a false read
Testing under the wrong light
Warm household bulbs and cool office strip lights both distort undertone. Natural, indirect daylight is the only reliable light. If you can only test at night, wait for morning rather than trust a bulb.
Keeping makeup, tan or coloured lenses on
Foundation, bronzer, a fresh tan and coloured contacts all overwrite the exact signals you are trying to read. Analyse the face you actually have, bare and in its natural state.
Judging by dyed hair
Hair colour shifts your contrast and can push you toward the wrong value. Read your skin and eyes first, and think in terms of your natural hair depth rather than this month's dye.
Forcing a single test to decide
No one test is definitive. The vein test can read ambiguous, jewellery can flatter both metals on neutrals. Look for the answer three or four tests agree on — that is your undertone.
Reviewed for accuracy by Viktoria (@vioda.makeup), a working makeup artist. This is styling method rather than measured data — see our editorial policy.
Questions, answered.
Can I really find my colour season at home?
Yes, to a good level of confidence. The at-home tests here read the same three things a professional analyst reads — undertone, value and chroma — using natural light, your own veins, gold and silver, and a white-vs-cream drape. A trained analyst with a full set of physical drapes will be more precise, but a careful home analysis places most people in the right family and usually the right sub-season.
What if the tests disagree with each other?
That is normal and usually means you are close to a border, or lean neutral. Weight the white-vs-cream drape test most heavily, then the jewellery test — those two read undertone most directly. If undertone still reads neutral, use value and chroma to decide which neighbouring season suits you, and try on real colours from each candidate palette to break the tie.
How do I go from undertone to one of the twelve seasons?
Start with undertone to pick your half of the wheel (warm = Spring or Autumn, cool = Summer or Winter). Use value to decide light versus deep, and chroma to decide bright versus muted. Those three reads together land you on a single sub-season — for example cool + light + muted is Light Summer, while warm + deep + muted is Deep Autumn.
Is the vein test accurate on its own?
Not reliably. The vein test is a fast first read, but lighting and skin thickness can make veins look ambiguous, and neutral undertones often show a mix. Use it to form a hypothesis, then confirm with the jewellery and white-vs-cream tests before you trust it.
Do I need to know my season before I shop?
Knowing your season makes shopping faster and cheaper because almost everything near your face flatters you and coordinates with the rest of your wardrobe. But you can start with just your undertone and best metal — that alone rules out a large share of colours that drain you, and you can refine to the exact sub-season over time.
Let the quiz do the reasoning
Eight questions on your skin, hair and eyes — no signup, nothing uploaded, and it runs entirely in your browser. It applies the same undertone, value and chroma logic and names your sub-season.