Undertone The colour ledger, kept honestly

Twelve seasons · four undertone tests

Which season is your colour?

A colour season is shorthand for three measurable things: whether your natural colouring leans warm or cool, how light or dark it reads, and how clear or muted it is. This color analysis quiz asks seven questions about exactly those things, scores every one of the twelve seasons, and shows you the whole scoreboard.

The shelf · twelve palettes

Every season, framed

The Bright Winter Palette

Bright Winter in plain terms: cool undertone, medium depth, bright chroma and…

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The True Winter Palette

True Winter: a cool undertone, medium depth and bright chroma, with silver…

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The Dark Winter Palette

Dark Winter: cool undertone, deep depth, bright chroma, silver metal — the…

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The Light Summer Palette

Cool, light and soft: the Light Summer palette laid out plainly, from…

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The True Summer Palette

True Summer — also called Cool Summer — is cool, medium and…

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The Soft Summer Palette

Soft chroma is the whole story of Soft Summer. A cool, medium-depth…

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The Light Spring Palette

Warm, light and bright: the Light Spring palette from peach to aqua,…

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The True Spring Palette

True Spring, or Warm Spring, runs warm, medium and bright. Five verified…

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The Bright Spring Palette

Bright Spring in plain terms: warm undertone, medium depth, bright chroma, gold…

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The Soft Autumn Palette

Soft Autumn is warm, medium and softly muted, with gold as its…

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The True Autumn Palette

True Autumn, also called Warm Autumn: a warm undertone, medium depth and…

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The Dark Autumn Palette

Dark Autumn is warm, deep and soft, with gold as its metal…

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What the quiz looks at

The quiz puts seven observations in front of you. Four of them circle your undertone from different directions: the colour your wrist veins appear — blue and purple reading cool, greenish reading warm, a mix reading neutral; whether silver or gold jewellery sits more easily on you; whether pure stark white or cream is the kinder of the two near your face; and how your skin responds to sun, since burning easily is associated with cool undertones and tanning readily with warm, as a tendency only. Each of these is a convention with exceptions, which is why the quiz asks all four rather than trusting any one of them.

The remaining questions read depth and chroma. Depth is how light or dark your colouring is overall — chiefly the combined lightness or darkness of hair and eyes. Chroma is clarity: bright colouring is high-contrast, with saturated-looking eyes and hair, while soft colouring is low-contrast, greyed and blended. A final question asks which quality leads your overall impression.

How the result is scored

Your answers are scored against all twelve seasons — three Winters, three Summers, three Springs and three Autumns. The result screen shows the full point spread rather than a single verdict, and when two seasons finish close together it says so plainly: a near-tie is called a boundary between two seasons, because that is what it is.

How the palettes were checked

The season grid behind this quiz was authored twice, independently, and the two versions agreed on all 48 entries. The palettes were then judged blind in two further independent readings, and that judging was itself audited with 24 planted decoys — all of which were caught.