What Is My Color Palette? How to Find Yours

“What is my color palette?” People ask Google this question a dozen different ways, and it’s often answered badly. Most answers hand you a quiz about vein color or a four-box chart and call it done.

Here’s the truth I’ve learned in more than 40 years and over 10,000 clients: your color palette isn’t something you pick. It’s already written in your skin, your eyes and your hair. The only way we are seen by others is through our pigment. Your palette is simply those colors, made conscious.

In this guide I’ll show you how to start finding your color palette at home, the way I teach it in my book, Dress Your Essence: what to look at, how to look, and what a complete palette actually contains.

Your Color Palette Is Already in You

Think of your palette as a portrait. If I painted you, your skin tone, your hair and the beautiful matrix of your eye color, you would recognize yourself, and so would everyone who knows you. The colors in that portrait are your palette.

When I was about six, I stood outside the house my mother had designed in Hibbing, Minnesota. The weathered pink brick was a deeper value of her skin tone. The sage green front door was her eye color. The pink azaleas along the walk were her romantic tone. Standing in front of that house, she was more beautiful than ever, because everything around her was her own palette.

That’s what you’re looking for: the colors that bring more of you forward.

Step 1: Start With Your Season

Your season gives you the family your palette belongs to. That’s what seasonal color analysis tells you.

• Spring (sunlight): clear, lively colors worn in triads
• Summer (twilight): cool, muted colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel
• Autumn (firelight): warm, rich, earthy colors, also analogous
• Winter (moonlight): black, white, metallics and saturated cool jewel tones

If you don’t know your season yet, my Seasonal Essence quiz is the quickest place to start. Answer it as the person you are when no one is watching.

Step 2: Read Your Eyes

Your eyes shape many of the key colors in your palette, even your jewelry.

Go outside into natural light. Hold up a hand mirror, or take a close photo of your iris with your phone. Look for the “lights” of your eyes: the many colors inside what you’ve always called blue or brown.

• Brown eyes might hold bronze, brass, copper, olive, amber or even violet
• Blue eyes might hold green, turquoise, gold, silver, platinum or gray

If you can’t name the color, hold fabrics or items from your closet next to your eyes. You may find that a blue scarf makes your “blue” eyes look teal or green. When you find a true match, there’s a sense of rightness you can’t deny.

Then look at the whites of your eyes. That color gives you the palest neutral in your palette: your white, ivory or light gray.

Step 3: Read Your Skin

Your skin gives you your skin-tone colors and tells you how warm or cool your palette runs.

• Find your undertone on your lips and where the skin is thinnest, around your eyes and ears. Are your lips purple, bluish or rose? Or golden bronze or peach?
• Use your makeup as a guide. Your foundation matches your skin tone; your blush shows a slightly warmer value of it. Take both to a paint store and find swatches that match.

As a rule of thumb, Springs tend to have golden or warm pink undertones, Summers and Winters cool rose or violet, and Autumns ruddy red-orange or copper.

Step 4: Read Your Hair

Your natural hair color sets your casual neutrals, and for Springs and Summers, how much contrast your outfits can carry.

Use your natural color as it is today. If you’ve colored your hair for years, look at your eyebrows, or let your roots grow for two or three months and study them. If your hair is gray, its tone (platinum, pewter, brushed or antique silver) guides your metals.

Step 5: Find Your Romantic Red

Pinch your cheek gently and notice the flush that rises. That’s your Romantic Red, the color of passion and celebration. It might be bright pink, dusty rose, coral, mauve, cinnamon, paprika, rust, burgundy or crimson.

Gather every red object in your home, anything from pink to maroon, and hold each one up to your face in natural light. Which makes your skin and eyes glow? Which makes you fade?

What a Complete Color Palette Contains

Once you have your season and your Sacred Triad, here’s what a full personal palette includes:

Test What You’ve Found

Take a full-length photo of yourself in an outfit. 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 disappears, the colors are too dull for your essence.
• If your skin looks overly pink or sallow, the color is wrong for your skin tone.

Practice in front of the mirror. In 40 years I’ve seen that clients who hold colors up to their face learn what works. Just reading about it doesn’t work. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

When to Get Help

Everything above is a real starting point. But as I wrote in my book, you’ll always get the best palette when you work with a trained color expert.

Your Power Color in particular is hard to find on your own, because it doesn’t directly match your hair, skin or eyes. And if you’ve been typed more than once with different answers, a home method may simply reproduce the confusion.

What to Do Next

• Take the Seasonal Essence quiz to find your season.
• Look at your eyes in daylight with a hand mirror and name every color you see.
• Take your foundation and blush to a paint store and find your skin-tone swatches.
• Do the pinch test and gather your reds.

Your first step today: step outside with a hand mirror and look closely at your eyes.

Your Palette Has Been There All Along

The answer to “What is my color palette?” isn’t on a chart. It’s in your mirror, in natural light. Start with your season, read your eyes, skin and hair, and you’ll begin to see the colors Mother Nature already gave you.

Discover My Seasonal Essence

Frequently Asked Questions

What is my color palette? Your color palette is the set of colors already present in your hair, skin and eyes, organized into neutrals, a Romantic Red, a Power Color, a Support Color and metals. It’s discovered, not chosen.

How do I find my color palette at home? Start with your season, then look at your eyes, skin undertone and natural hair color in natural light with a hand mirror. Hold clothing and fabric up to your face to see which colors light you up.

How do I know my color palette is right? Take a full-length photo. If you see yourself first, not the clothes, and your skin looks healthy rather than pink or sallow, the colors are working.

What’s the difference between a season and a color palette? Your season is the family your colors belong to: Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter. Your color palette is the exact set of colors within that family that come from your own coloring.