Blog / History
From the Bauhaus to your camera roll: a short history of seasonal color analysis
How a tapestry chemist, an art teacher, an American designer and a bestselling book built the system millions use today.
Seasonal color analysis feels like a social media invention, but its roots go back almost two centuries, to a chemist trying to fix a complaint about dyes.
1839: the tapestry problem
Michel Eugène Chevreul ran the dye works at the Gobelins tapestry manufactory in Paris. Weavers complained that some dyed yarns looked dull. Chevreul found the dye wasn't the problem. The colors next to each yarn were changing how it looked. His 1839 treatise on what he called simultaneous contrast showed that neighboring colors shift each other's appearance, and he applied the idea to everything from carpets to clothing.
1920s–1960s: Itten and the four seasons
Johannes Itten, a Swiss painter who taught color at the Bauhaus, noticed that students given a free choice tended to pick colors that echoed their own coloring. He called these "subjective colors" and grouped them into four types named after the seasons. His ideas were published in The Art of Color in 1961.
1950s–1980: Caygill takes it into the wardrobe
Suzanne Caygill (1911–1994), an American designer, turned Itten's observation into a method for choosing clothes. Her 1980 book Color: The Essence of You described many sub-groups within each season, with names like "Early Spring" and "Metallic Autumn." Her papers are now held at Cornell University Library.
1980: the boom
Bernice Kentner's Color Me a Season appeared in 1978, and Carole Jackson's Color Me Beautiful followed in 1980. Jackson's simpler four-season version became a bestseller and was in its 31st printing by 1983. "Have you had your colors done?" became a common question.
The boom had a blind spot. Critics have noted that the original book focused mostly on white women and tended to place people of color in Winter by default.
2000s to now: twelve seasons
Four boxes left many people in between. Kathryn Kalisz, who had worked as a colorist with the Munsell color system, developed the Sci\ART method, which split each season into three and added "neutral" seasons between warm and cool. Modern 12-season systems read undertone separately from depth, so any skin tone can land in any season. After a quieter stretch, interest surged again in the 2010s, and social media turned terms like "Soft Autumn" into everyday vocabulary.
See how the modern system is organized in our complete guide, or compare all 12 palettes.