The Seasonal Color Palette

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How our seasonal color analysis works

The Seasonal Color Palette is a free resource for learning the 12-season system and applying it to real clothes. This page explains exactly how our tools reach their answers and where they fall short.

Clothing analysis

  • Your photo is shrunk to about 180 pixels on its longest side, entirely in your browser.
  • We estimate the background from the image border and ignore it when the border is fairly uniform. The center of the frame is weighted more heavily.
  • The remaining pixels are grouped into up to five dominant colors (k-means clustering in CIELAB, a color space designed to match human perception).
  • Each color is compared with all 192 palette swatches using CIEDE2000, the standard formula for perceived color difference. A difference under about 2 is hard to see; above 10 is clearly different.
  • Palettes are ranked by their closest swatches, and we show the top three with the matching swatch and distance.

Personal season estimate

  • You tap your skin, hair and optionally your eyes. We average each spot while discarding the darkest and brightest pixels to avoid shadows and shine.
  • If you tap something white, we use it to correct for the color of your lighting.
  • Undertone comes from the hue of your skin, blended with your answers to the vein, jewelry and white-versus-cream questions. The answers get slightly more weight because photos are easily tinted by light.
  • Depth comes from the combined lightness of skin, hair and eyes. Clarity comes from the contrast between hair and skin plus the saturation of your eyes.
  • Your scores are compared with each palette's position on those three scales. If your photo and your answers disagree about undertone, we tell you.

Accuracy and limits

Phone cameras, filters and lighting change colors, sometimes a lot. Our tools give an informed estimate, not a professional draping. The selfie estimate has been checked against test profiles, not validated against a panel of professionally analyzed people, so treat it as a way to narrow your options.

Where our palettes come from

There is no single official set of seasonal colors. Our 16 swatches per palette are an editorial compilation that follows the widely used 12-season structure, chosen to represent each palette's undertone, value and chroma. You can download the full dataset as palettes.json.

How we recommend products

We choose products by how well their color matches a palette, not by commission rate. Product links go to Amazon, and as an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Every paid link is labeled. Our guides and palette pages are written to be useful with or without buying anything.

Privacy

Photos never leave your device and are never saved. The only thing we store is the season you choose to save, kept in your own browser. Read the privacy policy.