Personal Color Palette vs. a Generic Season Chart

Years ago, before I’d ever done this work myself, I was asked to dress Joan Holmes, then head of The Hunger Project, for an important event in New York. She handed me a fan of fabric swatches. “Here are my colors,” she said. “Can you match them?”

I looked from her face to the swatches and back again. “Oh, my goodness,” I said. “These look just like you!”

That’s the difference between a personal color palette and a generic one. A season chart tells you the kind of colors you might wear. A personal palette looks like you. It frames your face so that more of you comes forward. That’s what personal color analysis is for.

In this post I’ll show you what a season chart can and can’t do, what a personal color palette adds, and how to tell which one you’re dressing from right now.

What a Generic Season Palette Gives You

A season palette is a set of guidelines for everyone who shares your seasonal essence. It’s a real starting point, and I teach these guidelines myself.

• Spring does well with elements of a color triad, like a green dress with cognac boots and a scarf with touches of purple. The contrast keeps things fresh and lively.
• Summer works with analogous colors, neighbors on the color wheel, from the cooler side: teal, navy, grape, eggplant, violet and burgundy, generally muted and sophisticated.
• Autumn is also analogous, but on the warm side: rust, bronze, olive to hunter green, mustard, umber and deep emerald.
• Winter builds on black, white and charcoal, with metallics and saturated jewel tones from cardinal red to royal purple.

If you’ve ever been handed a chart like this, you’ve seen how helpful it can be. You’ve probably also seen its limit. It narrows your choices. It doesn’t finish the job.

What a Personal Color Palette Adds

A personal color palette is built from your own pigmentation. Everyone’s palette is unique, as individual as a fingerprint.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. These are two real client palettes from my book, Dress Your Essence:

	A Spring client	An Autumn client
Her coloring	Clear pink skin, medium brown hair, blue eyes	Café-au-lait skin, brown hair, warm green eyes
Her neutrals	Black, navy (darkest value of her eyes), rich gray (also in her eyes), saddle brown (a deeper value of her hair)	Espresso brown, dark olive (the darkest color in her eyes), chestnut brown (from her hair), caramel (slightly deeper than her skin)

Not one of those neutrals came from a chart. Every one came from her.

A personal palette also gives each color a job:

• Your neutrals: a formal neutral (the darkest value your coloring can support), a semi-formal one and a casual one drawn from your hair
• Your Romantic Red: the color of passion and celebration, found in the natural flush of your cheeks
• Your Power Color: for when you want to be center stage
• Your Supplementary Power Color: a slightly quieter color that still carries authority
• Your Support Color: for teamwork, or when you want someone else to take center stage
• Your Optional Colors: lighter values of your palette
• Your metals: drawn from the lights of your eyes and the highlights of your hair

A season chart can’t tell you any of that. It doesn’t know your eyes.

Why Two Women in the Same Season Need Different Palettes

This is the part most people never hear. Seasons have exceptions, and the exceptions are written in your face.

Some Summers have warmer eye colors, like brass, olive or antique gold. Those Summers can wear warm and cool colors together, olive with purple for instance. A cooler-eyed Summer can’t. Some Winters can wear earth tones like copper, olive or antique brass when those colors reflect their eyes, even though a standard Winter chart would tell them to avoid earth tones.

Hand those women the same season chart and at least one of them is dressing from the wrong answer.

There’s a subtler problem, too. Even the right colors can be worn in the wrong place. My client Kate, a Summer, owned a beautiful eggplant suit that was in her palette. It was also her Support Color, the one that says empathy and cooperation, not authority. She wore it to every final sales presentation and kept losing contracts. When we identified her Power Color, a deep, rich blue, and she started wearing it to final meetings, she started closing clients with ease.

A season chart would have told Kate eggplant was fine. Her personal palette told her when.

How to Tell Which Palette You’re Dressing From

Try this, from my book. Take a full-length photo in an outfit you wear often. What do you see first: you, or the clothing?

• If you only see the clothes, the colors are overpowering you.
• If you see your face but your body seems to disappear, the colors are probably too dull or drab for your essence.
• If your skin looks overly pink or sallow, the color is wrong for your skin tone.

Then hold your clothes up to your face in natural light. A color that’s yours makes you look lit from within. One that isn’t leaves you washed out or faded into the background.

If you find yourself wearing black because you were told it’s chic or slimming, look closely. Black is a wonderful neutral for many Winters, but on more delicate coloring it conceals rather than reveals.

What to Do Next

• Do the photo test above with three outfits you wear most.
• Look for your eye color in your closet. Is it there? Most women are surprised by how rarely it is.
• Notice where your closet holds someone else’s colors. I often find a husband’s colors in his wife’s closet, or a mother’s in her daughter’s.
• Book a short conversation with my team when you’re ready for a palette built from you.

Your first step today: stand by a window with a hand mirror and find the lights in your eyes.

Your Palette Should Look Like You

A season chart is a neighborhood. A personal color palette is your address. One tells you roughly where you belong; the other tells you exactly which colors bring you forward, and when to wear each one.

You were designed with your own palette. It’s time to see it.

The first step is a short conversation about your goals. Book a Call with Jennifer’s Team.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a personal color palette? A personal color palette is a set of colors drawn from your own hair, skin and eyes, including your neutrals, Romantic Red, Power Color, Support Color and metals. Unlike a season chart, every color in it comes from your pigmentation.

Is a custom color palette the same as a personal color palette? Yes, when it’s built from your own coloring. A “custom” palette that simply assigns you a season and hands you that season’s standard chart is still a generic palette.

Can I create my personal color palette myself? You can make a strong start. My book walks you through reading your eyes, skin and hair in natural light. But I’ll tell you what I tell my readers: you’ll always get the best palette when you work with a trained color expert.

How is a personal color palette delivered? With me, your palette arrives as a beautiful book of swatches, so you can hold your colors next to anything you’re considering buying.