What Season Am I?
By the Skintonic team · SKINTONIC LLC · Updated
There are four self-checks worth doing before you measure anything. None of them is conclusive on its own, and that is not a flaw — each one tests a single factor, and your season is the combination of four. Done together in daylight they will usually get you to the right family.
Do all of these by a window, in natural light, with no makeup, no filter and nothing strongly colored near your face.
1. Wrist veins — tests undertone
Look at the veins on the inside of your wrist. Greenish suggests a warm undertone; blue or purple suggests cool; a mix, or genuinely not being able to tell, suggests neutral.
The limit. This is the weakest of the four. Vein color depends on how thick your skin is and how close the vessels sit to the surface, not only on undertone. A clear answer is a hint; an unclear one tells you nothing.
2. Gold against silver — tests undertone
Hold a gold item and a silver item against your face, one at a time, and look at your skin rather than the metal. One of them usually makes your skin look more even; the other can make it look slightly gray or slightly ruddy.
The limit. Better than the vein test, but it needs decent light and an honest look. If both genuinely work, you are probably neutral — which is a real answer, not a failure.
3. White against cream — tests undertone and clarity
Put a sheet of optic white paper under your chin, then a sheet of cream or ivory. Watch what happens to the skin under your eyes and around your mouth.
Optic white tends to flatter cool and clear coloring and can drain warm or muted coloring. Cream tends to flatter warm coloring and can make cool coloring look slightly sallow.
The limit. This is the most useful of the four, because it maps directly onto a decision you actually make — which white shirt or tee to buy.
4. Hair against skin — tests contrast and depth
Take a photo of your face in daylight and look at how far apart your hair and your skin are in lightness. Dark hair with fair skin is high contrast. Mid-brown hair with mid skin is low to medium. Then ask whether your overall coloring is light, medium or deep.
The limit. Depth and contrast are different things and people routinely conflate them. Someone can be deep overall with low contrast, or light overall with high contrast, and those land in different seasons.
What the self-checks cannot do
Three of the four factors — undertone, depth and contrast — can be judged reasonably well by eye. The fourth, clarity, is the one almost nobody gets right on themselves, because it asks whether your coloring reads clear and saturated or soft and blended, and you are too familiar with your own face to see it.
Clarity is also the factor that decides between neighboring seasons: it separates Soft Summer from Cool Summer, and Bright Winter from Deep Winter. Getting undertone and depth right and clarity wrong still leaves you with the wrong palette.
A faster version of these checks
The four checks above are the thorough way. If you would rather answer six questions and get a family in under a minute, the color analysis quiz scores the same signals for you — it runs in your browser and stores nothing.
The accurate step
The scan reads all four from the actual color values in one photo — your skin, your iris and your hair — and compares them against all twelve season profiles rather than walking you down a branching quiz. It takes about 30 seconds, your photo stays in your browser, and the season is free.
If the lighting in your photo is too warm or too dim to be trusted, it tells you instead of guessing.
Questions
Is the vein test reliable?
Only loosely. It is a reasonable first hint about undertone, but vein color is affected by skin thickness and how much blood is near the surface, and plenty of people genuinely cannot tell. Treat a clear answer as useful and an unclear one as meaningless.
What if gold and silver both look fine?
That usually means a neutral undertone, which is common. It does not leave you without a season — it shifts the weight onto depth and contrast instead, which is exactly what the scan measures.
Can I tell my season from a mirror?
You can usually narrow it to a family — warm or cool, light or deep. Pinning the exact one of twelve by eye is hard, because clarity is the factor people are worst at judging on themselves.
Why do online quizzes give me different answers?
Because most ask you to describe your coloring in words, and the words mean different things to different people. Reading color values off an actual photo removes that step.
Sources and further reading
Four references, each one checked against what it is cited for. Where a claim on this page rests on published color science rather than on our own measurements, this is where it comes from.
- A perceptual color space for image processing — Björn Ottosson, 2020 Defines the Oklab color space and its polar lightness–chroma–hue form. This is the space every distance, verdict and color combination on this site is computed in.
- CIELAB color space — Wikipedia The CIE 1976 space Oklab was built to improve on, with lightness and two opponent axes. It also records that CIELAB is not as perceptually uniform as intended, particularly across blues — which is the reason we do not use it.
- Munsell color system — Wikipedia Albert H. Munsell described color by hue, value and chroma in 1905. The depth and chroma readings used here descend from that framing.
- Color analysis — Wikipedia Seasonal color analysis as a practice, and the four-season division it starts from. It also notes that the field has no standard training or qualification, which is the honest context for any result — including ours.
Related
All 12 seasons · Color analysis for men · How the four factors work