Cool Winter · Colors to avoid
Cool Winter colors to avoid, and what to wear instead
By the Skintonic team · SKINTONIC LLC · Updated
"Avoid" is a stronger word than this deserves, and Cool Winter is not forbidden from owning anything. What the shades below do is specific and small: worn near a Cool Winter face, in daylight, they make the skin do something you would rather it did not — go gray, go ruddy, go flat, or step back.
Cool Winter is cool, deep and clear, and every shade that fails does so for a reason that follows directly from one of those three. Knowing the Cool Winter categories beats carrying a list of Cool Winter names, because a category is something you can apply to a garment you have never seen before.
The categories, and why each one fails
Shades that are too warm
Golden and orange-based color on Cool Winter's cool skin brings up whatever redness is already there and turns the rest faintly yellow. The usual symptom on Cool Winter is looking flushed in photographs for no reason you can point at.
6 of Cool Winter's 6 listed shades fall here.
Three of them by name
Orange, Mustard and Camel. Three is enough to calibrate your eye. If you can see why those three fail on Cool Winter coloring, you can recognize the fourth and the fifth yourself in a shop, which is more useful than carrying a list.
The complete Cool Winter avoid list — every shade, its exact value, and the reason it works against you — is in your report rather than on this page, which is deliberate.
What Cool Winter should wear instead
Take the same color and move it toward blue: a cool red, a cool green, a cool brown — on Cool Winter the family is usually fine and the direction is what is wrong.
These eight are the safe Cool Winter direction, and they are the same eight the free result hands you:
- True Red
- Royal Purple
- Deep Emerald
- Deep Navy
- Black
- Royal Blue
- Emerald
- Fuchsia
Any of them near your face does the opposite of the shades above: they clear Cool Winter skin rather than reddening it, and they agree with one another, so any two of them pair without thought.
Check a specific color
If you are holding a garment and want an answer about that exact shade rather than about its category, the free color checker takes a hex code or a color picker and says where it falls against Cool Winter specifically, in your browser, storing nothing.
Are you Cool Winter?
A Cool Winter avoid list is worse than no list at all if you are not Cool Winter, because it will talk you out of colors that suit you perfectly well. Settling whether you are Cool Winter takes one photo and about thirty seconds, and it is free.
Questions
What colors should Cool Winter avoid?
As categories: too warm. By name, Orange, Mustard and Camel are three of the Cool Winter ones. The rest of the Cool Winter list, with exact values and a reason each, is in the report — which is the part worth paying for and the reason it is not printed here.
Does "avoid" mean never wear it?
No. It means keeping it away from a Cool Winter face, and nothing more than that. A shade on the Cool Winter avoid list is perfectly fine as trousers, as a bag, as a coat you take off indoors, or anywhere below the waist. What the list is about is the light bouncing off a garment up into a Cool Winter face, and that is a much smaller part of a wardrobe than it sounds.
What if I love one of the Cool Winter colors to avoid?
Then wear it below the waist, or find the version of it that belongs in the Cool Winter palette. Take the same color and move it toward blue: a cool red, a cool green, a cool brown — on Cool Winter the family is usually fine and the direction is what is wrong.
Is black on the list?
Not for Cool Winter. Black is not universally bad; the question is whether a person's own coloring goes deep enough to meet it, and deep coloring does well enough that black stays off the Cool Winter list.
More for Cool Winter
Cool Winter hair color · Cool Winter makeup · Cool Winter outfits · Cool Winter in full