The Grift of Color Analysis
On aesthetic sensibilities
First, we find your season. If you have naturally dark hair, you’re probably a winter, but you could also be an autumn, or maybe a summer. Only in very specific cases will you be a spring. Next, within your season, we determine if you’re one of three categories, each of which is different depending on aforementioned season. The varying names of all of these will seem arbitrary and confusing, but if you assemble all of the seasons on a wheel, you’ll see that there are in fact axes running horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, determining that one can be, for example, a warm spring or warm autumn, but there exists no such category as a warm summer.
You can upload your photo to any number of websites that will run a color analysis for you, but make sure the photo is makeup-less and in natural light, and be careful where you put that little color-selector bubble, lest the algorithm assess your skin tone as the shadowed area near your jawline. If you have dyed hair, I do not know how to help you. The other option is to try one of dozens of TikTok filters that claim to provide the easiest ever iterations of color analysis, artificially draping you in various tarps or centering your head in color wheels and then leaving it up to you to determine which selection undoubtedly and emphatically “brightens you right up!” It will change your life. You will be so stunningly, undeniably gorgeous. No one will ever look away from you again.
The kicker about all of this is that, if you are anything like most of the women I know, you will attempt these various measures and come up with a conclusion that is muddy at best. You’ll spend too much time looking at your own face only to decide that you could equally be a soft summer or a bright winter, which is confusing, as those categories hold complementary positions on the wheel. Then, you’ll ask your friends what they think, and they’ll all disagree with one another, and say something unhelpful, like “I’ve always loved you in orange,” despite the fact that every version of orange is absent from your chart.
All my bitching aside, I’m sure you could pay a professional with a trained eye some uncomfortable amount of money to make an assessment for you, and reach a conclusion that has some sort of stated logic and the girding of expertise. Color analysis is rooted in fundamental aesthetic principles of color theory. Different colors—orange and blue for example—are opposites on the color wheel, and thus, putting one next to the other makes each look more vibrant. You remember fifth grade art class! As far as light, deep, bright, soft, etc., that’s tints, tones and shades, i.e. the way a pure hue (picture bright, true red on the color wheel) changes when white, gray, or black is added to it (red turns pink, or rust, or burgundy). The essential idea there is that people who naturally have less contrast in their features (light hair and light eyes, say) will look better in more muted iterations of colors that don’t overpower them. There’s a bit more to it than that, of course, but that’s the only version you’ll get from me, because ultimately my question is the same one it so often is: why do we give a shit?
The online fervor around color analysis is flooded with statements like, “stop wearing the wrong neutrals” and “dress for your palette.” And in all sincerity, I ask, for as much time as we’ve collectively spent trying to figure it out, are any of us actually going to use this information? Only winter palettes include true black. Everyone else gets brown or gray. Are you, dear reader, going to throw out all of your black sweaters and t-shirts and sweatshirts and LBDs because you’re low contrast? Are we supposed to start going to stores with pocket copies of our best colors, matching them up to clothes, heading to the register only when we’ve finally found something that we like and is in our price point and is deemed safe from threat of washing us out?
Of course, there are ways a lot of us already do this. I, for one, won’t wear yellow until I’ve been in the sun a bit, because I do not fancy jaundiced Victorian child chic on me. But we also eschew hard and fast rules all the time. As best as I can tell from the eighteen thousand attempts I have made at analyzing my own palette, red is nowhere to be found. But in real life, in a bright red dress—especially with a matching lip—I am unstoppable. I will frolic in a park. I will step over the skeletons of my enemies. I’m a French girl ingenue with a picnic basket or a femme fatale with a penchant for dirty martinis, depending on the dress in particular. Either way, for a few hours, I’m the best thing you’ve ever seen, at least in my head.
To that point, I guess what disturbs me about all the color analysis hand wringing is that it robs us of fun in favor of flattery. It turns getting dressed into a single-minded expedition in search of what will make us—our faces, not our outfits—look best. It turns fashion from self-expression—I’m feeling fun so I wore a brightly colored sweater—into a strict pursuit of beauty—I can’t buy that sweater because it doesn’t make my eyes pop. It sounds trivial, and maybe it is, but it also feels like the revival of the old “rules” women have been trying to run away from in fashion for so long. Because color analysis is old, older even than the Glamour Do’s and Don’ts that told us we couldn’t wear certain silhouettes if they didn’t match up to our body types, or all the many iterations of Fashion Police that shredded women to bits for wearing something “unflattering.”
The obsession—and I use that word with its full weight, because the topic has been ever-present and the discussion frenzied—with finding one’s colors feels, too, like the newest entry in the ever-growing book of “Times Grown Ups Who Know Better Were Led Astray By Teens on the Internet.” Because, duh, of course as a teenager, you are mostly getting ready every day to try and make yourself hotter. Even in this era of internet-informed teens who go right from being cute to being pretty, blissfully skipping over the tragic years of braces and acne and aggressively bad hair that we, the elders, suffered through, it feels safe to assume (and pretty well documented sociologically) that hormones and high school and the crushing weight of seeing thousands more faces than your brain was ever meant to compute, filtered and well-lit, means that there are still plenty of opportunities to wake up and resent every iota of your corporeal form. I don’t blame sixteen year olds for frantically searching for a wardrobe hack overhaul that will suddenly give them a promised glow from within.
Honestly, I don’t blame the rest of us either. The environment that exists on social media—and TikTok specifically, with its younger demographic—makes it so that thoughts and trends are so pervasive online that not partaking can feel like walking out into the street wearing a shirt that says, “I’m ugly and old. Heckle me.” But as it was when Millennials got upset about losing their side parts or skinny jeans, growing older and growing up sometimes means knowing yourself enough to realize that you don’t have to take every piece of feedback on board. It means knowing that you’re never going to buy a massively oversized jacket, because having to drape it around your shoulders for it to look good is not a behavioral modification you have the patience for at twenty eight the way you might have at eighteen. It means knowing whether you’re willing to skip over interesting or confidence-inspiring on the way to beautiful, because ultimately, if you hate fuchsia, how good can you really feel in it, even if it is “your color”?
As with most matters on the Internet, the answer to the whole debacle is probably somewhere in the vague, grey, un-viral middle. Try taking the test or using the filters; make your best guess. Use the information that’s valuable to you; throw the rest into the part of your brain where other pan flashes, like the dance to “Gangnam Style” or the recipe for that one feta pasta, go to wither and die. Don’t spend too much money on it. Don’t overhaul your wardrobe. Remember that in 2008, neon was really in style, and we all looked like shit, and lived to tell the tale.