Dakota Fanning
is a Light Summer.

Light Summer asks for light, cool, and soft, and Dakota is all three without stretching. The lightness is obvious, nothing in her face is darker than a mid tone, so any color deeper than dusk outweighs her. The coolness is in the ash of the hair and the rose of the skin: put silver at her ear and it belongs, put yellow gold there and it looks borrowed. And the softness is in the eyes, that misted grey-blue has no hard edge, so a color with haze in it meets her exactly. Powder blue repeats her eyes almost literally. Rose quartz does what blush does. Lilac mist, the shade she wore climbing that ladder in the pale Rodarte-style gown, turns the whole face luminous instead of washed. Pearl works where optic white would glare, because it is white with the volume turned down. Her palette is essentially weather: sea glass, dove grey, dusty rose, soft periwinkle, all of it light, all of it cooled, all of it quiet enough that her face stays the loudest thing in the frame.

The tempting call is Light Spring, because light-plus-blonde-plus-blue-eyes describes both seasons and describes her sister. But Spring is warm and Dakota is not. Elle's blonde carries actual gold; Dakota's carries ash, the same family produced two different temperatures, and it is the single cleanest way to tell them apart. Put Dakota in Spring's warm coral or buttercup and her skin turns faintly sallow at the jaw while the fabric does all the glowing; cool the same lightness down to rose quartz and powder blue and her skin does the glowing instead. The honey-gold Emmys gown is the argument settled in public: a warm metallic sitting against her, beautiful on the hanger, and her face going flat above it. Cool Summer fails in the other direction, its wine, soft navy, and raspberry carry more depth than her low contrast can hold, and black, the extreme case, reduces her to a pale oval above a void. She needs cool at a whisper, not cool at depth, and light without warmth. That is Light Summer, exactly.