How to Find Your Color Season: A Color Expert’s Guide

“What season am I?” may be the question I’ve been asked most in more than 40 years of color work. And the honest answer is that most people already know. They’ve just been looking in the wrong place.

They look at the colors they love. Or they look at the person they’re trying to become. Sometimes they look in a bathroom mirror under a warm bulb. Every one of those can lead you to the wrong season.

In this guide I’ll show you how to find your color season the way I teach it in my book, Dress Your Essence: by reading your energy and your coloring together, and by avoiding the traps that send so many people to the wrong answer.

Your Season Is Both Energy and Coloring

Your color season is the seasonal harmony you were born with, and it shows up in two places at once: in your physical coloring and in your essence, the energy you carry.

That’s what seasonal color analysis looks for. Here are the four seasons as energies:

• Spring is sunlight: buoyant, playful, enthusiastic, the spark that starts things. “What can I do to uplift and inspire myself and others today?”
• Summer is twilight: gracious, reflective, tender, a deep listener. “What can I do to help myself and others experience more grace today?”
• Autumn is firelight: warm, strong, complex, a natural leader. “How can I support myself and others to produce results today?”
• Winter is moonlight: discerning, elegant, visionary, never settling for less than the best. “Where can I enhance my own and others’ experiences with my perspective today?”

Read those four questions slowly. One of them probably sounds like the way you already think.

Step 1: Take the Quiz the Right Way

The quickest way to find your season is a quiz. My Seasonal Essence quiz is free, and there’s a 38-question version in my book. But a quiz is only as good as the way you answer it.

Answer as the person you are when no one is watching. Not your public face, not your on-stage persona, not the image you want to present. The “you” at home on a Sunday morning.

Separate what you are from what you’re drawn to. There’s often a difference between what’s true for us and what attracts us. We tend to seek the qualities of the season we believe we lack.

Go with your first instinct. If you’re uncertain, choose the answer that feels closest to the truth.

Step 2: Watch for the Three Traps

These are the reasons people land in the wrong season, and I see them constantly.

Trap 1: Choosing the season you’re attracted to. We’re often drawn to our opposite. Springs may be drawn to Winter’s drama because they want to be taken seriously. Summers may reach for Autumn’s commanding energy to be seen as strong. Autumns may long for Summer’s softness. Winters often love Spring’s playfulness. In every case, dressing the opposite season leaves you feeling disconnected from yourself.

Trap 2: Answering as the personality you’ve adapted. Temperament is how you’ve learned to survive in the world. Essence is who you are. My mother, a Spring, was always the life of the party, and I learned to act like a Spring to please her. I’m a Winter. My client Sara, a Summer, took on commanding Autumn tendencies to be taken seriously in her academic life. A quiz answered from adaptation gives you the wrong answer.

Trap 3: Wearing someone else’s colors. I often find a husband’s colors in his wife’s closet, or the colors of a parent, a close friend or a colleague. If your wardrobe is full of someone else’s palette, it can feel like evidence of your season when it isn’t.

Step 3: Check Your Coloring in Natural Light

Once you have a likely season, look at your coloring. Go outside into natural light and bring a hand mirror.

• Your eyes: Eyes are never one color. Look for the lights in your irises: bronze, brass, copper, olive or amber in brown eyes; green, turquoise, gold, silver or gray in blue eyes.
• Your skin’s undertone: Look at your lips and the skin around your eyes and ears, where it’s thinnest. Springs tend toward golden or warm pink undertones, Summers and Winters toward cool rose or violet, and Autumns toward ruddy red-orange or copper.
• Your hair: Look at your natural color as it is today. If you’ve colored it for years, check your eyebrows or your roots.

Then hold up clothing in your likely season’s colors. A color that belongs to you makes you look lit from within. One that doesn’t leaves you washed out, sallow or faded into the background.

Step 4: If You’re Between Two Seasons

It happens often, and it’s not a problem. Here’s what I suggest.

1. Read both seasons’ descriptions carefully and choose the one that feels like your true essence, not the one you wish you were.
2. Ask a good friend to take the quiz with you and give honest feedback. Sometimes those who love us see us more clearly than we see ourselves.
3. Think back to childhood, before you learned to adapt. How did you play? What did you love? That’s often where your essence shows most clearly.

When a Quiz Isn’t Enough

My client Jana is the clearest example I know of how far self-typing can drift. She came to me certain she was a Winter, like me. She saw the big picture, often felt like an outsider and dressed mostly in black and white with silver accents.

But the moment I did her color analysis, I knew she was a Spring. The triad of her hair, skin and eyes told the story. Jana had taken on heavy responsibility young, and her joy hadn’t felt safe to show, so she’d been dressing the serious woman she’d had to become. Today her palette is a Blooming Spring: deep teal, peacock blue, bright iris and ruby red.

As I wrote in my book, a quiz is a starting point, a compass to guide you toward your essence. It isn’t a science, and it isn’t a substitute for a consultation with a color expert. If you’ve been typed more than once and the answers didn’t agree, it’s worth having a trained eye look at your coloring.

What to Do Next

• Read the four seasons’ questions above and notice which one sounds like you.
• Take the Seasonal Essence quiz as the person you are when no one is watching.
• Check your eyes, undertone and natural hair color in daylight with a hand mirror.
• Look for borrowed colors in your closet: whose palette are you wearing?

Your first step today: ask yourself which light describes you best. Sunlight, twilight, firelight or moonlight?

You Already Know More Than You Think

Finding your color season isn’t about matching yourself to a chart. It’s about recognizing the light you already carry, in your coloring and in your energy. Answer honestly, look in natural light, and you’ll be surprised how quickly the answer comes.

Discover My Seasonal Essence

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find my color season? Look at your energy and your coloring together. Take a season quiz, answering as the person you are when no one is watching, then check your eyes, skin undertone and natural hair color in natural light to confirm.

Why do I keep getting different color seasons? Usually because the answer came from what you’re attracted to, from a personality you’ve adapted, or from coloring judged in poor light. Before I trained with Suzanne Caygill, I’d had my own colors done ten times, with ten different results.

What if I’m between two seasons? Read both descriptions and choose the one that feels like your true essence, not the one you admire. Asking a close friend to take the quiz with you often settles it.

Is a color season quiz accurate? A good quiz is a reliable starting point, a compass. It isn’t a substitute for a consultation with a trained color expert, especially if your results have been inconsistent.