I own a gold sequinned top that is not my colour, and I have worn it plenty.
I know it is not my colour because a professional colour consultant told me so, years ago. I am a winter, cool, clear, high contrast. Gold is not in the deck. And I bought the thing anyway, because it is gorgeous and I wanted it.
So let me be clear about what this post is and is not. It is not a set of rules you have to obey. It is a way of understanding why some tops make people say you look well and others make people ask if you are tired, and once you know that, you get to decide what to do about it.
What colour analysis actually is
Let me be honest about this in a way the internet usually is not.
Colour analysis is a styling tool with a long practical track record. It is not a science. The various systems (four seasons, twelve seasons, sixteen, the tonal ones) disagree with each other about the details, and if you get analysed twice you may well get two different answers.
What is real, observable and repeatable is much simpler: the colour sitting next to your face changes how your skin reads. Put a shade under your chin that fights your colouring and every shadow on your face (under the eyes, around the mouth, the little bit of redness on your cheek) steps forward. Put the right one there and the same face looks rested.
You can watch that happen in two photographs. You do not have to believe in a single word of seasonal theory to use it.
The compliment test
This is the one I have been banging on about since 2012, and it is still the best free diagnostic there is.
Next time somebody tells you that you look well, look down and note what you are wearing.
Not “that’s a nice top”, people say that about the garment. I mean the other one: you look really well, have you been away? That one is almost never about the clothes. It is about your face, and your face is being lit by whatever is closest to it.
This lilac knit is a case in point. I wore it on a school-run morning back in 2012 with a $5 Cotton On colour-block skirt, and three separate people told me I looked good. Not the jumper, me. I went home and wrote it down, and I have bought that shade of cool lilac deliberately ever since.
Same colour, singlet version, same effect. Once you have found one, buy it in more than one shape.
Keep a note in your phone. Three or four entries in and a pattern appears, and it will be more accurate than any quiz on the internet, because it is drawn from your actual face in actual light with actual witnesses.
The photo test
The compliment test is slow. This one takes twenty minutes.
Stand at a window in daylight. No makeup. It is doing a job you need to see past. Pull out ten or twelve tops in genuinely different colours, hold each one up under your chin, and take a photo. Same spot, same light, same expression, one after another.
Then put the phone down for an hour and come back to them.
The mirror lies, because you look at your outfit and your hair and whether you like the top. A photo strips all that out and you see only what the colour is doing to your skin. It will be obvious. Two or three will make you look like you have had a good night’s sleep, two or three will make you look faintly unwell, and the rest will be fine.
That is your answer. That is the entire method, and it costs nothing, which is exactly what I said to readers back when I first wrote about getting your colours right, and I have not changed my mind since.
Warm, cool, or honestly neither
If you want to go a level deeper, the axis that does most of the work is undertone: the cast underneath your skin colour, as opposed to how dark or light it is.
Warm reads golden, peachy or yellow. Cool reads pink, red or blue.
Three checks, and use all three rather than any one:
Jewellery. Hold gold against your face, then silver. One usually looks like it belongs and the other looks like it is sitting on top. Warm suits gold, cool suits silver.
White versus cream. Hold a pure white shirt under your chin, then a cream or ivory one. Cool skin looks crisp in pure white and slightly sallow in cream; warm skin looks glowing in cream and a bit harsh and grey in pure white. This one is the most reliable of the three, in my experience.
Veins at the wrist, in daylight. Bluish and purple suggests cool; greenish suggests warm. Treat this as a tiebreaker rather than gospel. It is the flakiest of the three and it does not work well on everyone.
And a genuine caveat that most articles skip: plenty of people are neutral, and look perfectly good in both. If your three checks disagree with each other, that is a result, not a failed test. You get a wider palette than the rest of us. Take the win.
Contrast is the bit everyone misses
Here is the one I wish more people knew, because it explains more misfires than warm-versus-cool does.
Contrast is the gap between your hair, your skin and your eyes.
Dark hair, light skin, dark eyes is high contrast. Blonde hair, fair skin, light eyes is low contrast. Mid-brown hair with mid-toned skin is medium.
The rule is simply that your outfit should roughly match your own contrast level.
High-contrast people can wear a black top with a white trouser and look striking, because the outfit is doing the same thing their face is. Put that same combination on someone low contrast and the clothes win, you see a stark black-and-white outfit with a person somewhere behind it.
Low-contrast people generally look wonderful in tonal dressing: shades close to each other, soft edges, one colour family. Which is a lovely thing to know when you are building outfits from what you already own, because it tells you whether to reach for the sharp pairing or the blended one.
And contrast changes. This is the single most common reason someone tells me their colours “stopped working”. They went blonde, or they let the grey come through, and their contrast dropped from high to low. Their skin has not moved an inch. The framing has, and the strong shades that used to look striking now overwhelm. If that is you, nothing has gone wrong with you, go back and redo the photo test.
Clear or muted
The last axis, briefly, because it catches people out.
Some colouring is clear (bright eyes, crisp definition) and looks best in saturated, clean shades: true red, cobalt, emerald, pure white. Other colouring is muted, softer and more blended, and looks best in dusty, greyed-off shades: sage, dusty rose, denim blue, taupe.
Put a muted person in a screaming cobalt and the colour swallows them. Put a clear person in a dusty sage and they look washed out and a bit sad. Same undertone, opposite result, which is why undertone alone does not settle it.
What this is not: your Fitzpatrick skin type
Worth separating these two, because they get confused constantly and one of them actually matters medically.
The classification dermatologists use is the Fitzpatrick scale, six skin phototypes based on how your skin responds to UV, from always-burns-never-tans through to never-burns. It is about melanin and sun response, and it is used to assess photoaging and skin cancer risk, which in this country is not a small matter. Every state cancer service has a version of it, including the Cancer Institute NSW’s skin type guide.
Undertone is a different thing entirely. It is the cast of your skin, not its sun response, and two people with the same Fitzpatrick type can suit completely different palettes.
So: use the Fitzpatrick scale for your hat and your sunscreen. Use undertone and contrast for your wardrobe. They are not interchangeable, and no colour palette has ever protected anybody from a Melbourne summer.
What to do with a colour that is not yours
Back to my gold sequin top, because this is the practical part.
You do not have to give up a colour you love. You have to stop putting it next to your face.
Three ways to do that:
- Put it on the bottom half. Trousers, a skirt, shoes. Nobody’s complexion has ever been damaged by a mustard trouser.
- Make it an accessory. A bag, a belt, a shoe. All the pleasure, none of the consequence.
- Frame it. Put a layer in one of your colours over the top, so the good colour sits at your neckline and the one you love does everything below it.
That is option three, and it is the black satin cropped jacket doing the work. Black at my collarbone, gold from the chest down, and suddenly the whole thing behaves. Same top, same jeans, entirely different result, and I still get to wear my sequins.
A jacket, a scarf, a collar, a big necklace. Anything that puts a band of your own colour between the garment and your chin.
Building the wardrobe around it
Once you know your handful of good colours, the practical use is not “throw everything else out”. It is much duller and much more effective than that.
Buy your best colours in tops. Tops sit at your face, so that is where the money should go. Save the risky, faddy, not-quite-right shades for the bottom half where they cost you nothing.
Pick one base neutral and commit. Black or navy, warm or cool, but one. This is the thing that makes everything in the wardrobe combine, and it is why the capsule approach works at all.
Have two or three hero colours and buy them repeatedly. Not one of everything. Three shades you know are right, in several shapes.
That is also the difference between a wardrobe that photographs well and one that just has a lot of clothes in it. If everything you own is broadly in one family, you can get dressed in the dark, which is rather the point of an organised wardrobe.
Is a consultation worth paying for?
If you can afford it: genuinely, yes. A good consultant with a proper set of drapes and decent north light will get you a more precise answer in an hour than you will get in a month of holding tops up at the window, and you leave with a palette you can shop from for years. Mine is why I know I am a winter, and it has saved me a great deal of money since.
If you cannot afford it, do not lose a minute’s sleep. The photo test and the compliment test will get you eighty per cent of the way for nothing, and eighty per cent is plenty.
What I would say is this: colour is the cheapest possible lever on how put-together you look. It costs the same to buy the right blue as the wrong one. That is why it turns up so often when I write about looking expensive on a budget. Most of what reads as expensive is just things that agree with each other and with the wearer.
If you want it done properly and in person, that is part of every styling session I run in Melbourne. A Refresh is $299 for two hours, a Reset is $549 for four with a full wardrobe edit and a lookbook. And if it turns out the problem is that nothing you own is in your colours at all, shopping together fixes that faster than shopping alone, at $399 for a Half Day.
The short version
- Photograph yourself at a window in ten different colours. Compare the photos, not the mirror.
- Write down what you were wearing when someone said you looked well.
- Gold or silver, cream or pure white. Two out of three agreeing is your undertone. Neither is a valid answer.
- Match your outfit’s contrast to your own. Redo it if you change your hair.
- Clear colouring wants saturated shades; muted colouring wants dusty ones.
- Best colours go in tops. Everything else can go below the waist.
- Love a colour that isn’t yours? Wear it away from your face, or frame it.
I still wear the gold. I just wear it with a black jacket now, which is the whole of colour analysis in one sentence: not a rulebook, a reason.
Go and stand at a window with a pile of tops. It is the most useful twenty minutes you will spend on your wardrobe all year.
And now you’re Looking Good Girls.
“Make sacred garments for your brother Aaron, to give him dignity and honour … have them use gold, and blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and fine linen.” Exodus 28:2 & 5.