Much of Heather Hurst’s TikTok content revolves around her taste for the upscale. Think: how-tos on styling Hermès scarves and sourcing Dior from estate sales. But one of her most-watched videos, viewed over 2.4 million times, is devoid of luxury fashion. Instead, it centers around a simple proposition: to guess what seasonal color palette suits her best.
In the video sharing her results, Hurst reads a description of each season. According to the international franchise House of Colour, springs are “clear, bright, light, warm, splashy” while winters are “clear, bright, icy, vivid and high contrast.” These descriptions don’t seem to lend much clarity to onlookers — commenter guesses at Hurst’s season land all across the board. Only at the end does Hurst reveal what it cost her $285 to find out from an image consultant at House of Colour: Hurst is an autumn. This means she’s best suited to a rich, warm, earthy, and vibrant palette (think: red, chocolate brown, and sage). Wearing a black dress, sweater, shoes, and bag, the creator is disappointed to learn that the perpetually chic shade is one of her “worst colors” (she’s still going to wear it, she insists).
Not everyone is willing to shell out nearly $300 to have someone tell them what colors to wear, but there are alternative inroads to seasonal color analysis that are drawing quite a crowd. The hashtag #coloranalysis, where color wheel filters allow users to determine which shades flatter their skin tone for themselves, has 1.2 billion views on TikTok. Professional color analyst Mariana Marques, who joined TikTok in 2020, has noticed a shift in attitude toward their speciality. Previously flooded with comments asking what seasonal color analysis means, their content now fuels discussions about the complexities of the practice, like whether or not redheads can be classified as cool-toned seasons. “Once you've seen it, you can’t unsee it,” Marques, a dark autumn, says of the system’s popularity.
When done right, personal color analysis cuts out one big piece of the fashion puzzle by giving consumers a definitive answer to the question: Which colors look best on me? Knowing, with a measure of certainty, your optimal palette is also permission to say “no” to all the others. In this way, getting your colors done puts a modicum of power back into your hands — it gives you, the consumer, a reason to like what’s best for you, rather than what a flood of powerful brands and campaigns tell you to like just because they say so.
Personal color analysis was first popularized in 1979 with the publication of Color Me a Season by American cosmetologist Bernice Kentner. “Draping,” in which analysts drape clients in a rainbow of fabric swatches to determine what colors best flatter their features, has sat at the core of color analysis since its inception.
While Kentner emphasized the importance of approaching everyone as an individual, the cosmetologist’s color-typing system does rely on some generalizations and overarching observations. For example: A deep, cool emerald typically makes a winter’s cool-toned skin and dark features come alive, whereas a grassy green — best suited to a spring — would make them look sallow and tired. Kentner also offered personality sketches of each season — take, for instance, autumns, who “hurt other people’s feelings, but are the most hurt when someone criticizes or hurts them.”
Today, color analysis has expanded beyond just four seasons to encompass subcategories like deep winter, bright spring, and soft summer, but the core principles of color analysis remain largely the same: If you have cool-toned, muted coloring, you’re a summer. Warm-toned and bright, you’re a spring; cool-toned and high-contrast, you’re a winter; warm-toned and earthy, you’re an autumn. Each season corresponds to an optimal color palette, like smoky grays and blue-toned pastels for summer and warm, rich neutrals for autumn (sorry, none include black except for winter).
Some, like Hurst, consider color-typing a helpful suggestion. “There were always clothes that I feel like didn't look good on me for whatever reason, that I couldn't put my finger on,” she says, adding that she still wears some of her “bad” colors — namely, hot pink, one of her favorite hues. Others approach it with a near-religious conviction. “[My analyst] had mentioned that some people had come in and started crying when they found out what their color palette was, as if it was some sort of death sentence.”
The prescriptive notions around style that color analysis can espouse might seem more suited to an era of Tupperware parties and Avon representatives than today’s progressive fashion norms. But that dissonance is precisely what’s helped fuel the popularity of personal color analysis among TikTok’s young users.
“The pendulum has swung toward this attitude of, wear whatever you want, there are no rules,” says Hurst, herself a member of Gen Z at 26. “That can almost be overwhelming for people.” Micah Lumsden, a stylist who offers color analysis and body-typing services to clientele with deeper skin tones, agrees. “Having a styling system, it helps a lot… [It’s] a little bit easier than just going through trial and error.”
But even as seasonal color analysis takes over TikTok, the practice has major flaws. Firstly: it’s built almost exclusively around white people. More often than not, online color wheels and typing tests exclusively showcase white women and typically caucasian features. Black and East Asian people are often assumed to be winters by default. A clip from Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me shows a color analysis session in which attendees are informed: “Blacks, Jews, Italians, most often are winters.”
You might not hear such language today, but Lumsden believes Black people are still underserved when it comes to color analysis. “In the Black community it’s like, ‘Everything's gonna look good to you. You don't even need it,’” she says. Lumsden cites Rihanna, a particularly contentious figure in the world of color-typing, as evidence that many analysts still aren’t tuned in to the differences in features among Black people. While some pros type the singer and Fenty founder as a soft summer, Lumsden contends she’s actually a soft autumn. A Reddit survey on her season doesn’t get any closer to an answer — some color analysis community members say she’s a spring.
Bottom line: Color-typing is a method-based practice that delivers purportedly quantifiable results, but it still requires faith on the part of the consumer. That’s because the method itself, based on color theory, might be inherently flawed.
Kentner derived much of her work in Color Me a Season from Swiss painter Johannes Itten’s 1961 book, The Art of Color, which in turn borrowed from Goethe’s 1810 color wheel that positions red, blue, and yellow as the primary colors. According to color theory educator Peter Donahue, color scientists disproved that wheel in the mid-nineteenth century after discovering that humans see color through three different photoreceptors that pick up on roughly red, green and blue wavelengths. “[Color analysts] are using this color wheel that is not perceptually accurate,” he says. “They’re basing it on how this one expressionist artist mixed paints, rather than on how science tells us we perceive color.”
That is not to say seasonal color analysis is useless. No one needs to get color-typed, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. For many, it’s a useful way to whittle down fashion choices, and feel empowered in their preference for, say, taupe over eggshell.
And color analysis has its loyal adherents, both in the U.S. and abroad. Though it originated in the U.S., seasonal color analysis has expanded to a global market. Marques (a dark autumn) says the system has been popular for years in her native Brazil, where schools like Resolva Meu Look train hundreds of stylists a year. But few cultures have taken to color analysis quite like South Korea.
“It's, like, the third question you ask a girl when you go to Korea: ‘Hey, what's your tone?’” says Korean beauty influencer Ava Lee, who is based in New York. Lee attributes the recent rise of systems like seasonal color analysis and the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to a cultural preference for neat categorization. “Koreans love categorizing things,” she says. “They love ranking things. Everything is systematized in Korea.”
Seasonal color analysis first emerged in the country about a decade ago. Since then, the practice has surged in popularity. When Sohui Emily Baek opened Color Society in April 2020, it was one of four color analysts in Seoul’s Mapo district. Now, the area is home to more than 20. “I think societal lockdown due to COVID-19 encouraged individuals to focus on oneself,” Baek says. “MBTI [Meyers Briggs Personality Type Indicators] and personal color became ice-breaking topics in the daily life of Koreans.”
“It's more about the social interaction of going to an expert with hermetic knowledge,” Donahue says. “There's a real social value in that.” At the end of the day, color-typing makes some people feel good — that at least is an objective truth.
Next, discover stories behind the Tik Tok viral songs.
