Colour analysis sorts people by the colours that make them look well. Not by taste, and not by gender — it reads three things about your colouring: whether it runs warm or cool, whether it is light or deep, and whether it is clear or soft. Get those three right and you have your season.

Here is how to find it without paying for a studio session.

The three questions that decide it

Undertone: warm or cool

Undertone is the cast underneath your skin, and it does not change with a tan.

Two ways to read it, standing near a window in daylight and away from strongly coloured walls:

  • The jewellery test. Hold something yellow-gold against your face, then something silver. One will make your skin look even and rested; the other will leave it looking slightly grey or slightly pink. Gold reads warm, silver reads cool.
  • The white test. Hold a soft cream next to a bright optic white. Warm colouring looks healthy against cream and slightly drained against optic white. Cool colouring does the opposite.

If both sides genuinely look fine, you are probably neutral, which usually places you in one of the softer seasons.

Depth: light or deep

Depth is how much darkness your colouring carries overall — hair, eyes and skin taken together, not skin on its own.

Squint at yourself in a mirror until the detail drops away. If the whole impression stays pale and blended, you are light. If a strong dark shape emerges, you are deep.

Clarity: clear or soft

This is the question most people skip, and it is often the one that explains why an otherwise correct palette still feels wrong.

Hold a clean, saturated colour — a true emerald, a clear cobalt — against a dusty, greyed version of the same thing. If the clean one looks deliberate and the dusty one looks like a mistake, you are clear. If the clean one seems to be shouting over you and the dusty one settles, you are soft.

The four seasons

Put undertone and depth together and you have a season.

  • **Spring** — warm and light. Coral, warm green, golden yellow. Black tends to look severe on you.
  • **Summer** — cool and soft. Soft blue, dusty rose, dove grey. A soft navy does everything black is meant to.
  • **Autumn** — warm and deep. Rust, olive, camel, terracotta. Icy tones read cold against you.
  • **Winter** — cool and deep. True red, royal blue, emerald, and genuine black and white.

If you would rather have the answer than run the tests yourself, the free quiz asks two questions and gives you a season. Nothing stored, no sign-up.

Then it splits into twelve

Four seasons is a useful start and a blunt instrument. Two people can both be Autumn and suit noticeably different things, because within each season one attribute leads.

Each season divides into three:

The sub-season is where the practical answers live: which neutral works as your black, which metals suit you, which white to buy.

Why people land on the wrong answer

Three things throw the result more than anything else.

  1. Artificial light. Warm bulbs make everyone read warm. Do every test by a window.
  2. Testing skin alone. Depth is the whole impression, hair included. Very fair skin under near-black hair is not a light season.
  3. Confusing preference with suitability. The colour you enjoy wearing and the colour that makes you look rested are two different questions. Answer the second one first, then wear what you like anyway.

What to actually do with the answer

A season is only worth having if it changes what you buy. Two moves that pay off immediately:

  • Sort your neutrals before your brights. Most of a wardrobe is neutral, so getting your version of black right does more work than any single statement colour.
  • Check your whites. Cream and optic white are not interchangeable, and the wrong one at the neckline quietly undoes everything else.

DUPI reads your colouring from a single photo, places you in one of the twelve, then searches real shops in your palette. The free quiz gets you to the season right now.