One of the three summer color palettes
True Summer color palette
Purely cool, blue-based, elegant, slightly hazy.
20 colors to wear
Not sure you are a True Summer?
Free for your best and worst palette. All 12 in the full report.
All 20 True Summer colors, with hex codes
The colors that work hardest for True Summer, each with its hex code so you can match it exactly when you shop.
- Cool raspberry#C2185B
- Rose red#D81B60
- Soft rose#E091AE
- Dusty pink#C97B9B
- Cool berry#A85C7A
- Soft plum#7E5A82
- Cool lavender#9575CD
- Periwinkle blue#7986CB
- Cornflower#5C7CB0
- Cool blue#3F6FA8
- Teal blue#4A8FA8
- Soft teal#6DA9B5
- Cool jade#88B5AA
- Soft emerald#6E9E8A
- Soft sage#A3BCA0
- Dusty blue#B9C6D6
- Soft orchid#D0C0D8
- Pale rose#E8D5DC
- Slate#8895A8
- Cool aubergine#5D4E6D
Neutrals to build on
Buy these first. Neutrals are what you wear most, and they are where most wardrobe mistakes happen.
- Soft white#F0EFEC
- Cool gray#C7C6C4
- Medium gray#8E8F92
- Blue gray#5A6B7C
- Cool navy#2F4058
True Summer is the coolest of the soft seasons: every color in the palette is blue-based, with no golden warmth anywhere. The look is refined and slightly hazy, dusty blues, soft raspberry, cool navy and gray. It is the classic English-garden palette.
Temperature is the dominant axis here: get the warm-versus-cool call right and everything else follows. (Undertone is what the 12-tone system calls this season's primary characteristic.)
True Summer on the four traits
Undertone, depth and chroma are the three positions our analysis scores you against. The fourth trait, contrast, is part of the chroma reading.
- Palette lightness (L*)
- 6012-season range 36 to 79Mean CIELAB lightness of the palette, 0 is black, 100 is white.
- Palette chroma (C*)
- 3012-season range 15 to 79Mean CIELAB chroma of the palette: higher is brighter.
- Contrast
- Low to medium, and always gentle rather than crisp.
Is this you?
- Skin
- Cool with a pink, rosy or blue-ish cast; burns before it tans.
- Hair
- Ash blonde to ash or cool medium brown, never golden.
- Eyes
- Cool blue, gray-blue, gray-green, or soft cool hazel.
- Contrast
- Low to medium, and always gentle rather than crisp.
See your face in the True Summer colors
Free for your best and worst palette. All 12 in the full report.
True Summer celebrities
Famous faces that share True Summer coloring. The point is the pattern in skin, hair and eyes, not a resemblance.
Christie Brinkley
Diane Kruger
Emily Blunt
Jodie Comer
Photos via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY / CC BY-SA / public domain. The credit for each one is on the True Summer celebrities page.
Metals and makeup
Best metals: Silver, White gold, Platinum.
Lip
- Cool raspberry
- Rose
- Soft pink
Blush
- Cool rose
- Dusty pink
- Mauve
How to wear the True Summer palette
A styling example: three women who share True Summer coloring, each in a different outfit built from this palette.
More on True Summer
Often confused with
True Summer or Light Summer?
Free for your best and worst palette. All 12 in the full report.
Watch: this season explained
Hand-picked videos on True Summer from working color analysts, a different teacher, the same season.
Cool Summer Makeup Tutorial 💙 Best Shades for the True Summer Palette
Zee Dooley · YouTube
Is COOL SUMMER the same as TRUE SUMMER? | Colour Analysis Studio
Colour Analysis Studio · YouTube
How we know this
5,422
published season labels
We collected the celebrity seasons that 62 sites published and compared them, person by person.
Do the sources agree? →410
photos in our accuracy test
We ran our own analysis on celebrity photos and published every result, misses included.
The results →45
checked papers and books
Our encyclopedia pages cite only these, and cut any claim that has no checked source.
The source list →468
face points placed on each face
The points find your cheeks, forehead and eyes, so skin is read only there.
How it works →
Written by Ruslan Shchuchkin, ML engineer and data scientist, who built the measurement, and Jane Mitchell, certified color analyst, who writes the style guides.
Frequently asked
What colors are in the True Summer color palette?
20 wearable colors, listed at the top of this page with their hex codes, plus 5 neutrals to build a wardrobe around. You do not need all of them, most people live in six or seven, and the neutrals do the heavy lifting.
What is the True Summer color season?
True Summer is one of the twelve seasonal color types. It is strongly cool, moderately light and moderately soft. In practice that means cool raspberry, rose red and soft rose sit comfortably on you, while the colors in the avoid list make you look tired. Temperature is the dominant axis here: get the warm-versus-cool call right and everything else follows. (Undertone is what the 12-tone system calls this season's primary characteristic.)
How do I know if I'm a True Summer?
Three checks. Cool with a pink, rosy or blue-ish cast; burns before it tans. Ash blonde to ash or cool medium brown, never golden. Cool blue, gray-blue, gray-green, or soft cool hazel. Contrast is the fourth: low to medium, and always gentle rather than crisp. If two of those four describe you, True Summer is very likely your season, our free analysis scores all twelve and tells you how close the runners-up are.
What are the worst colors for a True Summer?
The clearest ones to drop are orange, golden yellow and black. The single most jarring color for a purely cool palette. Full explanations for each are on the colors-to-avoid page.
Am I a True Summer or a Light Summer?
They are neighbors, which is exactly why they get confused. The deciding axis is depth: True Summer is the deeper one and Light Summer is the lighter one. We have a full side-by-side comparison if you are torn between them.
Can a True Summer wear black?
Not near your face. True Summer coloring is too gentle for true black, it drops a hard edge under the chin and pulls shadows forward. Use Cool navy (#2F4058) instead for anything worn up top, and keep black for trousers, shoes and bags where it has no effect on your skin.
Is True Summer warm or cool?
Cool. True Summer sits clearly on the cool side of the temperature axis, which is why silver, cool raspberry and the rest of the Summer palette settle the skin while orange and golden colors turn it ruddy or gray. Temperature is also its dominant axis, so coolness matters more here than depth or clarity.
Should a True Summer wear gold or silver?
Silver, White gold and Platinum. Metal is one of the fastest at-home tests there is: hold silver and gold either side of your face in daylight and watch your skin rather than the jewelry, the wrong metal leaves a gray or sallow cast along the jaw.
How does True Summer color analysis work?
True Summer color analysis places your coloring on three axes, depth, temperature and clarity, and checks they match True Summer, which is strongly cool, moderately light and moderately soft. You can approximate it at home with the metal, vein and contrast tests, but those disagree often. Our free analysis settles it: it scores all twelve seasons from your answers and one photo, so you see how far True Summer leads the neighbors it gets confused with.
What is the best color for a True Summer to wear near the face?
Cool raspberry (#C2185B) is the safest high-impact choice. Anything worn near the face, collars, scarves, knitwear, has the strongest effect on how your skin reads, so spend the palette there first and worry about trousers later.
Can I use the True Summer hex codes for makeup or hair dye?
Use them for clothing and accessories, where a screen color maps reasonably well to fabric. For makeup and hair, use the dedicated pages, pigment on skin behaves differently from dye on cloth, and the recommended shades there account for that.