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To find your color season, answer three questions in order: what is my undertone, how light or deep is my coloring, and do bright colors suit me or soft ones. Match the answers to one of the 12 seasons, then confirm by holding your best and worst colors to your face.
How to find your color season
- 1Find your undertone. Look at your inner-wrist veins in daylight: blue or purple reads cool, green reads warm. Then check metals, silver tends to suit cool skin and gold suits warm.
- 2Judge your depth. Squint at a bare-faced photo. Do your hair, skin, and eyes read light, medium, or deep as a whole?
- 3Judge your chroma. Put a bright saturated color beside a soft muted one. Whichever makes your face look clearer is your answer.
- 4Match a season. Combine undertone, depth, and chroma and find the one season that fits all three.
- 5Confirm with color. Drape your suspected best and worst shades near your face. The right palette evens your skin, the wrong one greys it.
Start with undertone, it decides the most
Undertone narrows you down faster than anything else, so start here. For most people the vein test and the gold-versus-silver test agree. If they don't, you're probably neutral, and your depth and chroma will end up doing the real sorting.
Depth is about all of you, not just your hair
People fixate on hair color, but depth is your overall lightness. Fair skin with light hair and light eyes reads light. Deep skin, or dark hair against dark eyes, reads deep. Plenty of us sit in the middle and lean one way, and that lean is enough.
Chroma trips people up
This is the one most people skip. Clear coloring has natural contrast and can wear vivid, saturated color without being swallowed by it. Soft coloring is blended and low-contrast, so muted and dusty shades sit better and brights take over the whole face.
| Trait | The question | Quick test |
|---|---|---|
| Undertone | Warm or cool? | Wrist veins + gold vs silver |
| Depth | Light or deep? | Squint at a bare-faced photo |
| Chroma | Bright or soft? | Vivid swatch vs muted swatch |
Match, then confirm
Put the three together, land on a season, and check it against that season's palette and anti-palette. Stuck between two neighbours? That's the normal place to get stuck. Our season-comparison guides put any two side by side, and a photo analysis will settle it outright.
Quick answers
Common questions.
How do I find my color season at home?+
Check undertone with the vein and metal tests, judge your depth and chroma from a bare-faced daylight photo, match the three to a season, then confirm by draping your best and worst colors near your face.
What if I'm between two seasons?+
Adjacent seasons share part of their palette, so the overlap colors are safe either way. Compare the two on undertone and depth, or run a photo analysis, to land on your exact one.
Can I find my season without a kit?+
Yes. The vein test, the gold-versus-silver test, and daylight draping with clothes you already own get most people to the right season for nothing.
Emily Kim
Color researcher, Yuree
Emily researches color theory and the science behind seasonal analysis at Yuree. She digs through the studies and the data so the guides are built on more than vibes, and translates the findings into steps you can actually follow.
Further reading