As as long as people were able to dress in colour, we wanted to do better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dye technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to produce a rainbow of new hues. The problem was that people started wearing really terrible outfits, driven by clashing maximalism this revolution in color.
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The press caused a small moral panic (“An scandalous optics”, a French magazine called it), which then tried to solve it. An 1859 edition of Godey’s Ladies’ Bookthe most widely read American women’s magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help “poorly dressed and gaudy-looking women” by calling on a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors are most “becoming” on several (presumably white) women. Chevreul advocated ‘delicate green’ for fair-skinned people ‘deficient in dandruff’; yellow for brunettes; and ‘glossy white’ for people with a ‘fresh complexion’, whatever that means.
Bright winters often have sparkling eyes and dark hair and look great in jewel tones.
Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but if the platform had been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades suit them best. They do this through seasonal color analysis, a quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that posits that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that doesn’t – that washes us out, makes us look ruddy. or green, emphasize our flaws and minimize our beauty.
According to this method, everyone belongs to a ‘season’ and a ‘sub-season’, determined by the color of their skin and facial features. For example, Bright Winters often have sparkling eyes and dark hair and look great in jewel tones; true fall colors are defined by their golden undertones and should carry earthy colors.
The theory first became popular in the US in the 1980s, before resurfacing in South Korea golf on the English-speaking Internet in recent years. Today, Reddit’s seasonal color analysis community has 167,000 members, putting it in the top 1 percent of the site. Search seasonal color analysis on Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest, and you’ll find seemingly endless results: posts that “type” celebrities like Mindy Kaling (a dark winter) and Sabrina Carpenter (a light summer); give advice to people who are in the fall but wish it were winter; and showcase the ideal jewelry, eyeshadow palettes, prom dresses, Halloween costumes, and virtually any other piece of clothing you can think of for any color season. Seasonal color consultants, with or without degrees, are amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and charging hundreds of dollars for personal sessions.
The smartest among them film their sessions for social media. In a typical video, a client sits, without makeup, facing the camera, with a cute white hat over her hair. A color consultant drapes her in a sequence of colored fabrics and rates each fabric for its ability to make her complexion pop. In one TikTok, a young woman with high cheekbones and gray eyes is identified as a summer star and is shown a range of shades that make her look like the color consultant says Tatum Schwerin approvingly“like a baby doll.” (To me, the difference was noticeable but disappointing. The video has been viewed more than 32 million times.) In another video, a young woman describes her experience flying to South Korea for color analysisthe results of which, she says, were “shocking”: a vibrant spring.
This seasonal approach goes back to Carole Jackson’s 1980 book, Color me beautiful. In it, Jackson promised that “color is magic” and claimed that “women – and men – have discovered its power to make the world look at them in awe.” She used seasons to describe her readers:
Because just as nature has divided itself into four distinct seasons: autumn, spring, winter and summer, each with its unique and harmonious colors, your genes have given you a type of color that is most complemented by one of these seasonal palettes.
(Like Chevreul, Jackson wrote primarily with white readers in mind.)
The book was a sensation. It spent seven years on the New York Times bestseller list and spawned what we might now call a lifestyle brand: Jackson published a follow-up specifically for men and began licensing the Color Me Beautiful system and name to other consultants. People across the country came together to get their colors done at events described by the Times as “halfway between a Tupperware party and group therapy.” Women kept color samples in their wallets, in case of a shopping emergency. Reader’s Digest subsidized the cost of consultations for employees, under a benefit policy that covered self-improvement.
Color analysis is distracting and narcissistic, promising an unchanging, essential self-knowledge.
More than forty years later, Color Me Beautiful is still around and still selling certifications for consultants, although it has added AI color analysis to its product range. And its wisdom has escaped to social media, where teens and twenty-somethings are discovering it. The modern version of color analysis, like so many modern versions of so many things, is both more advanced (color analysis now recognizes the existence of a wide range of skin tones) and more complicated. Jackson’s four seasons are split into 12 and sometimes 16 subseasons, depending on one’s philosophy. The nuances are detailed in lengthy blog posts full of images of color wheels and terms like chroma.
The appeal to today’s audiences is clear. First of all, draping videos are great to watch, just like a cooking video is: simple process, noticeable results. But the concept also, I think, fills a real need created by the collision of technology and the fashion and beauty industry. Today’s young women are probably photographed more than any other cohort in history, but they live on the Internet, a firehose of rapidly changing trends, targeted advertising, cheap fashion, conflicting advice and color correction software. It’s never been more important to know what looks good on you, and there’s never been more sources of information to sift through to find out.
Like astrology memes and internet quizzes – two of the most enduring online products of the past decade – color analysis is distracting and narcissistic, promising an unchanging, essential self-knowledge that can be put into practice. It offers a small sense of belonging in a tribal society (online you can find groups for people who identify with each of the sub-seasons) and guarantees simplicity in a complex world.
The fashion and beauty industry seems to be embracing a kind of faux empiricism these days. A person’s hair can be classified into one of twelve types, based on texture, density and thickness. If ten years ago your average bottle of skin goo advertised with vague terms like moisturizingToday’s skin care products are showcasing their formulas front and center, inviting customers to “cosplay as cosmetic chemists,” according to the beauty reporter Jessica DeFino wrote. Smart influencers of seasonal color analysis respond to this; some even wear lab coats in their videos. Jenny Mahoney opened a seasonal color consultancy in New York in 2023 and has already expanded to Orange County, California and the Washington, DC area. The first thing she told me about color analysis is that it is “logical, systematic and based on science.”
Sure, sort of. Color theory is truly a science, in that it is an organized approach to observing the natural world. Color can be measured, categorized and studied; Chevreul was on to something when he proposed that the eye responds to certain color combinations in specific and sometimes surprising ways. However, the color consultation industry is ‘scientific’ in the sense that the wellness industry is; some principles may be based on truth, but the market that has grown up around them trades in something else. Often it feels less like a solution than part of the problem: more vocabulary, more rules, more ways to go astray, more reasons not to trust your own eyes. Winter is a cool season, but so is summer – perhaps despite what you might think the word cool resources. Yellow like a marigold is warm, but yellow like a daffodil is cool, or at least suitable for people with cool seasons. According to one website, if you’re a soft fall guy like Tyra Banks, you should wear “lots of nut, rose, and wheat colors,” and if you’re a true spring guy like Blake Lively, you should dress in shades. reminiscent of colored pencils.”
Online, people talk about avoiding colors they love or throwing away favorite pieces of clothing. A Reddit user, who said she had spent 26 years and nearly $1,000 on color analysis, recently posted that she was about to leave the business altogether. She has been identified as several different types over the years and had changed all of her clothing, jewelry, and makeup each time, but “I have never felt 100% comfortable in any of these items of clothing,” she wrote. It’s enough to drive anyone a little crazy.
I know this because seasonal color analysis drove me a little crazy. Although I hate being told what to do, I’m always looking for ways to look good with little sustained effort. But I can’t seem to find myself in any season. My hair can be fairly described as blonde, red, or brown depending on the light and time of year, and due to a benign genetic disorder, my left eye is the muddy color of a New England pond, while my right is a bright, cool blue. I’ve read tens of thousands of words about what this could mean, and paid for two different color analysis apps. They alternately called me a soft autumn, a warm autumn, a cool winter, a bright spring and a soft summer, which means that black is either one of my strong colors or the quickest way to look pale and maybe even very sick to see. And so I walk this earth knowing that every day is another missed opportunity to make my features stand out. I usually sleep well.
*Main image sources: Plume Creative / Getty; Belterz/Getty; Reading Room 2020 / Alamy; Historical illustrations / Alamy
This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline ‘What Not to Wear’. If you purchase a book through a link on this page, we will receive a commission. Thank you for your support The Atlantic Ocean.