Which Colour Type Am I? The 12 Seasonal Types Explained

Hold a piece of clothing up to your face and something shifts: you look fresh and awake, or suddenly pale and tired. It isn’t your imagination. Colours near your face enter a quiet conversation with your natural colouring — your skin, eyes and hair. Some tones make it glow; others drain it. Colour typing is simply a way of mapping that conversation. It isn’t a rulebook of don’ts but a map that helps you understand why certain colours flatter you and others fight you.

Why colour typing works at all

Your skin has an undertone that shows through the tissue beneath it. Your eyes and hair carry their own depth and saturation. Place a colour beside all of this and one of two things happens: it harmonises, making your features look clearer, more even and more awake — or it clashes, casting shadows, emphasising redness, or pulling colour out of your face.

To make that interplay usable, modern colour analysis works with three independent axes.

The three axes

Undertone — warm or cool. If your skin leans golden, peachy or amber, you read warm. If it leans rosy, bluish or porcelain, you read cool. Undertone is the most important axis and also the trickiest — more on that below.

Value — light or deep. How light or dark is your overall appearance? Fair skin with light-blond hair sits high on the scale; dark hair with deep eyes sits low. This is about the contrast between skin, hair and eyes, not about a tan.

Chroma — clear or muted. Are your colours pure and vivid, as if fresh from the tube? Or soft and dusty, as though seen through a veil of grey? Clear types can carry saturation; muted types get overpowered next to anything too bright.

Combine these three axes and you get the four base seasons.

The four seasons

The names are metaphors for qualities of light, not statements about your favourite time of year.

Spring = warm + light + clear. The palette of a sunny April morning: fresh, golden, alive.
Summer = cool + light + muted. Like light through haze: cool, soft, washed-back.
Autumn = warm + deep + muted. Earthy, rich and matured, like leaves and spice.
Winter = cool + deep + clear. High-contrast and crystalline, like snow in bright sun.

Each season is a field, not a single point. So each one fans out into three sub-types — a “True” type at the centre and two neighbours that blend toward the adjacent seasons. That gives the 12 colour types of the Sci/ART system.

The Winter group

True Winter (cool, deep, clear) is the coolest, highest-contrast type: often porcelain or olive skin, dark hair, clear eyes. Its colours are icy and pure — black, true white, fuchsia, royal blue, emerald.

Bright Winter blends toward Spring and is clearer still than it is deep. Maximum contrast, almost electric colour: magenta, hot pink, clear turquoise, lemon yellow against deep black.

Deep Winter blends toward Autumn and is deeper still than it is cool. Dark, saturated tones with a cool edge: burgundy, pine green, aubergine, midnight blue, cool berry red.

The Spring group

True Spring (warm, light, clear) glows golden and fresh: light, golden-toned skin, often warm blond or gold-brown hair, clear eyes. Colours like coral red, warm turquoise, grass green, golden yellow.

Bright Spring blends toward Winter and carries the highest clarity on the warm side: vivid warm pink, clear aquamarine, fresh green, tangerine — colours with energy.

Light Spring blends toward Summer and is the lightest, most delicate Spring: very fair skin, light-blond hair. Its palette is a warm watercolour set — peach, butter yellow, soft coral, light warm green.

The Summer group

True Summer (cool, light, muted) is soft and cool like a misty morning: ash-blond to mid-brown hair, gentle eyes, rosy skin. Colours like blue-pink, lavender, slate blue, soft raspberry, mauve.

Light Summer blends toward Spring and is the lightest Summer: airy, delicate, faintly cool. Powder blue, soft lilac, washed rosé, pale grey-green.

Soft Summer blends toward Autumn and is the most muted, most neutral Summer: dusty, smoky tones with no hard contrast. Sage green, dove grey, muted berry-pink, soft teal.

The Autumn group

True Autumn (warm, deep, muted) is earthy and rich: golden to olive skin, often coppery or deep-brown hair, warm eyes. Colours like pumpkin, mustard, forest green, terracotta, rust.

Soft Autumn blends toward Summer and is the softest, least contrasted Autumn: muted, warm tones with a slight greyness. Clay pink, subdued olive, warm taupe, muted teal.

Deep Autumn blends toward Winter and is the deepest, richest Autumn: dark, warm intensity. Chocolate brown, dark curry, warm aubergine, deep forest green, brick red.

Honest caveats

Before you settle on a label, three things make this harder than any tidy table suggests.

Undertone is often genuinely ambiguous. Many people are neutral — somewhere between warm and cool — or have an olive cast that tips warm beside one colour and cool beside another. The famous wrist-vein test (blue = cool, green = warm) is a rough hint at best and tells you little if you’re neutral. If you feel unsure, you’re in good company: undertone is the axis that even trained eyes argue over most.

Light changes everything. The same skin looks golden under warm bulbs, sallow under fluorescents, cool in blue shade. For a reliable read you want neutral daylight — no direct sun, no coloured room lighting, no make-up masking your undertone.

Self-perception is hard. We’re used to seeing ourselves in certain colours, and it’s easy to mistake habit for suitability. You lack the outside view, and you rarely judge your own reflection neutrally. A common beginner mistake is to confuse hair colour or a tan with your colour type — both can change, your undertone stays.

So treat the 12 types as orientation, not pigeonholes. The transitions are gradual, and plenty of people sit somewhere on a border. Even just knowing whether you lean warm or cool, light or deep, clear or muted changes how you use colour — long before you commit to one exact type of the twelve.

A quick first read

If you’d like a starting point, shinealyse can give you a first read from a single selfie. The AI analyses your visible colouring along exactly these three axes and places you in a colour type, with a set of tones to try. The short analysis arrives free by e-mail; the detailed report follows within a few minutes. Take the result as a well-reasoned starting point — then test it where it’s most honest: in daylight, with a colour held right up to your face.