030. Seasonal Color Analysis: Part 1
What Is It, Why Are People Obsessed, and Why I Think It Can Transform Your Wardobe
Regardless of whether you’re a devoted TikTok scroller, Instagram junkie, Pinterest enthusiast, or Youtube aficionado, it’s unlikely you’ve been spared color analysis content. Videos of enchanted women getting draped in multi-colored flags in front of brightly-lit mirrors, and vlogs from believers flying to Seoul just to get color-analysed have been trending. The hashtag #coloranalysis was used in 1.3 billion videos on TikTok alone.
This is a hot topic. I have never received more messages than the day I posted about it on my story. From chatting about it with some of you, I can say that those who haven’t done it yet are very curious, and those who have are unanimously positive about it. The words ‘life’ and ‘changing’ were used together a lot. Evidently, I became obsessed myself. I spent hours trying to ‘self-diagnose’ using filters and reading everything that’s ever been written about it on the internet. I eventually decided to get color-analysed professionally, and I will finally be receiving my results next week.
In this week’s newsletter, I explain what seasonal color analysis is, focusing on what I found most interesting about it. I discuss why people are obsessed with it, what it changed for them, and my personal motivations for doing it and writing about it. I also share some fun facts and interesting tidbits I learned during the process.
What Is Color Analysis?
Color Analysis, also known as Seasonal Color Analysis or Personal Color Analysis (PCA), has its roots in the development of different color harmonisation systems in the fields of art and textiles, dating back to the 19th century. In the 1960s, these systems were linked to the four seasons - Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter - for the first time. This connection carries no meaning other than sounding more poetic than calling it ‘Group A’, ‘Group B’, etc., so don’t be offended if you get associated with a season you don’t like. In the 1980s, a color consultant named Carol Jackson published a book called ‘Color Me Beautiful’, intended to -
cover your ears - teach women how to obtain optimal harmony between their skin tone and the clothes and cosmetics they used. The equivalent, for that generation, of watching a Kardashian-Jenner swatching an eye shadow palette on the inside of her arm? It sparked a frenzy, and soon every fashion magazine featured a ‘Which Season Are You?’ quiz.
In recent years, PCA has experienced a resurgence driven by long-form video content on social media. Its association with South Korea, significant enough to boost post-COVID tourism, comes from prominent k-drama and k-pop celebrities organically promoting it as the latest k-beauty craze. Jisoo from Blackpink shared her PCA results with her 4.8M Youtube subscribers (she’s a Dark Winter). Turns out you don’t need to fly across the world to get color-analysed; you can even do it online.
Seasonal Color Analysis involves analysing your skin tone, and to a lesser extent, other characteristics like the patterns in your eyes, and categorising it into a season and sub-season that represents a set of colors meant to look best on you. This set of colors applies to your clothes and make up. During a digital or IRL color analysis session conducted by a professional color consultant, colored flags are draped under your chin and against your face, observing which colors bring out redness, yellowness, or greyness in your skin, emphasize dark circles and shadows, and which colors make you glow, emphasize your jawline, bring out your eyes, etc. Depending on the system the professional works with, you will be categorised into one of 4 seasons, or 12 and 16 ‘sub-seasons’.
The most interesting thing to learn from PCA is that every color sits somewhere on the spectrum of three key dimensions:
Undertone: from cool - containing blue tones - to warm - containing yellow tones. If you have ever shopped for a red lipstick, you might have been recommended to go for a red with blue tones (e.g. here) if you are better fit for cool colors, and a red with orange tones (e.g. here) if you are better suited to warm tones. Undertones apply to every color, including blue and yellow.
