Your colour season and your element

Over the past few years, one practice has spread at remarkable speed: having your colour season determined. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, with their subcategories. Filters, tests, professionals, entire communities.

It is a mass phenomenon, and it is more interesting than it first appears.

What colour analysis does very well

It answers a precise question: which colours bring out the best in your face.

And the answer is useful. The same fabric can lift a complexion or dull it; the nuance decides everything. It can be verified in thirty seconds in front of a mirror with two pieces of cloth, which partly explains the enthusiasm: the result proves itself immediately.

It also has a less obvious and very real effect: it narrows the field. Knowing which colours suit you removes three-quarters of your purchasing decisions, and that release of attention is what most people describe when they talk about it.

What this proves

Something important: that this audience has already accepted the idea of a personal typology.

No one considers it irrational to have a season. People find it normal that individuals fall into families, and that a recommendation depends on the family to which one belongs.

This is exactly the reasoning that the skincare aisle has abandoned.

What colour analysis never says

It tells you what suits you. It never tells you what you need.

These are two different questions. The first concerns appearance — the harmony between a colour and a complexion. The second concerns how things work — what your skin produces, what it loses, what nourishes it and what unsettles it.

No colour analysis can answer the second, and it does not claim to.

The weak point, and it is well known

Two tests often yield two seasons.

This is not a flaw in execution: it is structural. Colour analysis is read by eye, on data that varies — a tan, a hair colour, a light, a makeup, a screen. Many people have received two different results a few months apart.

A classification meant to be stable, read on what changes, produces unstable results. This is the same limitation as the old typologies, and it has the same cause.

What comes next

Keep the principle and change the data.

The principle is sound: belonging to a family, and deducing from it what concerns you. This is what colour analysis has rehabilitated for millions of people.

What is missing is a key that depends neither on the light, nor on the season, nor on the eye of the person reading — and that bears not on the harmony of colours but on how the face works.

A reading that starts from a datum that nothing can alter does not have this flaw. It is the same idea, applied to a deeper question and with an instrument that does not move.