Hair: colour is half the job, the cut is the other
August 5, 2026 · 5 min read
There’s a sentence you rarely hear about hair, even though it explains most of the work: your hair colour follows your colour season. Your cut follows the shape of your face. Two different questions, two different answers.
Which is why two people with the same season — same undertone, same depth, same palette — can need opposite cuts. One wears a chin-length bob effortlessly; on the other the same length gets in the way. That has nothing to do with colour.
Colour: briefly, because it belongs elsewhere
Hair colour is decided by the same four things as clothing: undertone, depth, contrast, clarity. A warm, deep type carries chestnut and warm brown easily; a cool, light one is quickly overwhelmed by them. Which shades suit your season is covered at length in the season articles — for instance Soft Autumn, Deep Autumn or True Summer. If those four features mean little to you, they’re explained in Which colour type am I?.
Deliberately, there is no more on colour here. That part already exists.
The cut: what it actually does
A haircut does three things, and none of them involves colour.
It distributes weight. Wherever the hair is densest is where the eye goes first — a blunt cut gathers weight at the bottom, long layers spread it upward.
It sets edges. Every cutting line is a boundary, and the face reads it as a direction: horizontal, vertical or diagonal.
It frames. What sits beside your cheeks and jaw shapes how you perceive those areas — not because anything changed, but because the frame speaks too.
Those three effects meet the shape of your face. And that shape is independent of your season: an oval face with a soft jawline stays exactly that, whether you’re a Spring or a Winter.
What the report says about shape
The paid report names the face shape first — something like “oval with a soft jawline”. That’s a description, not a verdict: it states what is there, not what ought to be done about it.
From it follow four specifics that together describe a cut:
- Cut — for example soft, face-framing shapes such as a lob or long layers
- Length — where the edge sits best, say shoulder-length to just below
- Layers — whether long, flowing layers for movement make sense, or the hair is better kept compact
- Fringe — whether one suits you and in what form, such as curtain bangs that frame the face softly
Alongside that come three named looks, each with a line on what it does, and a note on styling — air-dry and shape with your fingers rather than pressing it straight, for instance.
That’s the whole trick: these are statements about shape, not colour. And they don’t change when you dye your hair.
Why nobody here talks about “hiding”
Most guides to face shapes rest on a quiet assumption: that there is one correct shape and every other one needs correcting. Out of that comes a vocabulary of balancing, elongating and concealing.
We don’t share that assumption, and it isn’t in the report either. A cut corrects nothing — it places weight and lines in particular spots, and that reads differently on every face. Whether you like the result is yours to decide. What an analysis can do is describe what a cut does; whether that’s desirable isn’t a question image analysis can answer.
In practice: “long layers bring movement into the top hair” is a usable statement. “Long layers hide your round face” is not — it asserts a problem that only the sentence created.
What you can work out without an analysis
A fair amount, with patience and a mirror:
Where is your widest point? Cheekbones, jaw or forehead. Tie your hair back and look at it calmly, without judging.
What’s your jawline like? Soft and rounded, or clearly drawn. That decides more about how a cutting edge reads than the overall shape does.
Where does your hair end today? Hold a ponytail at different heights and watch where your eye settles first. That’s exactly where an edge puts its weight.
What stays hard is the comparison: it’s difficult to stand next to yourself and judge. An image analysis reads shape and features in one pass from a photo and names both sides — colour and cut — side by side, rather than blending them.
Where colour does come back in
One thing connects both sides: a colour change alters the contrast between hair and skin. Dye very dark and you create a harder edge around the face — and the same cutting line reads sharper afterwards than it did before. The cut hasn’t changed; the frame has.
So it pays to decide both at once rather than one after the other. People who change colour and are then unhappy with the cut often don’t have the wrong cut — they have a new contrast.
This is part 2 of the series “The whole picture”. Part 1 shows why make-up in the right colours can still fall flat: The right colour in the wrong place. Part 3 closes the series: Why all the right pieces can still look wrong.
If you want to know where you stand on colour, your season is free — enter your e-mail, upload a photo, wait for the result. The full report adds face shape, cut, length, layers and fringe.