About Your Color Palette

We use the 12-tone seasonal system. Each of the four classic families splits three ways according to which characteristic dominates: how light or deep the colouring is, how warm or cool, and how bright or muted. That last axis is the one the old four-season system missed, and it is why so many people were told they were a “Winter” in the 1980s and never felt it fitted.

Every season in our data is stored as a position on those three axes. Your answers and your photo produce a position too, and the result is simply which season you land nearest — scored against all twelve, not picked from a decision tree.

From your photo: we place 468 facial landmarks and sample only flat skin — both cheeks, the forehead — plus your irises and the hair above your face. Lips, eyes, eyebrows, nostril shadow and background are all excluded, which matters more than it sounds: the naive approach of averaging the middle of a photo quietly mixes dark hair into your skin tone and drags the depth reading down. Everything is converted to CIELAB, a perceptually uniform colour space, so that “how far is this from that season” has an honest answer.

From your answers: undertone, mostly. This is the part other online tools get wrong. A phone camera’s white balance shifts precisely the signal you would need to read warm-versus-cool off an image — so we ask the questions a human analyst asks instead: vein colour, which metal flatters you, how you react to sun, whether pure white or cream looks better against your skin.

The two sources are then blended per axis, weighted by how much each deserves to be trusted for that axis. Depth leans on the photo. Temperature leans on your answers.

Coloured contact lenses, heavy makeup, a strong tan, dyed hair and unusual lighting all move the reading. A filter will wreck it entirely. If two seasons come out close, we tell you the gap rather than rounding it into false confidence — being between two neighbouring seasons is common and is not a failure of the system.

An in-person analysis with fabric drapes and a trained eye is still the gold standard, and it costs $150–$500. If you want one, take one. This site gives you the same framework, an honest measurement and a usable palette for free, and the full written report for $19.

It never leaves your device. There is no upload endpoint, no storage bucket and no third-party vision API — we even host the face-detection model and its WebAssembly runtime ourselves rather than loading them from Google, so that running the analysis does not tell anyone else you are doing it. The original photo is discarded once measured; a small cut-out of your face stays in session storage until you close the tab so your report can show it. Details on the privacy page.