Alright Ottawa. Let's talk Colour Analysis: Do You Actually Need It?
All I've been hearing lately is all about Colour Analysis, what season am I and do I offer this service? and we think it's about time to have a full conversation about it.
The other day I was in a clients' closet and she said to me, "I haven't had my colours done but my sister has and she and I are very similar. She said she's a 'winter'."
I looked at her, brought her into her own closet filled with black, white, bold cool pinks and bright blues and told her what every colour analysis has told me, "Inherently we know our colours but do you realize that you're actually more drawn to details and texture?"
But if you'd rather watch than read...
So what is a colour analysis?
Colour analysis is where an analyst uses swatches to figure out which season you fall into, spring, summer, autumn or winter, and tells you which colours to build your wardrobe around.
They use words like "analysis" to indicate that there's a bit of a science to it, whereas in fact, it's more about training your eye to look for certain indicators and those I can teach you in this blog post... mainly because I did, in fact, read all of those colour analysis books but more importantly, I have a background in fine art.
Here's what we're looking for to determine your "colours"
The undertone. This is what would determine if you're cool, warm or neutral. For this, trust Sephora. What does your foundation say?
This is the easiest one to determine and most people already know if they lean more warm or cool in their complexion.
The test you can do at home: Put on or look in your closet. Do you have more true yellow/red (warm) or true blues (cool). This is the easier to see version of holding white vs. ivory up to your face in daylight see which colour brings your face to life.
What you're looking for: clear bright skin (even if you don't have perfect skin), bright under the eyes vs. looking tired, rember that we shouldn't see the colour first we should see you.
If both look equally good you're probably a neutral.
Once you've determined your undertone now we're looking for your Value/Contrast.
The easiest way to do this at home, take a photo of yourself that was taken in daylight with no filters and turn it into black and white.
How much contrast do you see? If your features and hair all blend together in the same sort of shade range, you're one of the lighter seasons, summer or spring, and if you have higher contrast you're one of the deeper ones, winter or autumn.
The last part of the puzzle is the Chroma or sometimes called, "Intensity". This is the part where personal preference comes in. But instead of getting you to try on all the colours of the rainbow there are 4 colours I want you to try.
Now, here's the funny part, only one season across all of the books I've read has 1 consistent. Autumn and a true orange.
The rest of the seasons, depending on who taught you, overlap in colours. Which means, you can't REALLY get it wrong.
But here's the test to do at home, try on a:
True orange - Autumn
True Black - Winter
Warm Coral - Spring
Dusty Rose - Summer
But I'm willing to guess that colours aren't actually the problem
Here's the thing nobody tells you: colour analysis tells you what shade of a garment to buy. It does not tell you what garment to buy, whether it fits you, whether it matches how you actually live your life, or why you've been standing in front of a full closet feeling like you have nothing to wear.
You can hand someone a flawless 36-colour Autumn palette and they will still get dressed on a Tuesday morning, stare into a closet full of technically-correct-toned clothes, and feel exactly the same low-grade dread they felt before. Because the dread was never about undertones.
Most of the people I work with come to me after they've already done the colour analysis. They've got the palette. They've maybe even done a small colour-coded shopping trip. And they're still stuck. Here are the questions I've heard,
- I don't feel cool. How do I look cool and put together?
- I still think getting dressed is hard, what am I missing?
- I don't like these colours. What do I do?
- I still don't feel put together.
A colour fan can't answer a single one of those. That's not a failure of colour analysis, this is how they were taught.
Transformational styling - This is what makes getting dressed easy
This is the part where I tell you what I'd actually recommend instead and it's not "skip colour analysis, it's useless." It's absolutely your time and your money to do with as you like. Just treat it like a tool in your toolbelt but now that you're holding a hammer don't start looking at everything like a nail.
What I call Style as Strategy though is treating your image the way you'd treat any other business or life asset: with a framework or a formula. Not a uniform, a formula. That's how we keep things from getting boring.
I built this around two tools:
The Anchor Point Method. This is how you're going to feel put together in every outfit.
The Five Fashion Theories. Colour, print, texture, details and shape.
Which 2/5 do you resonate with the most? What strategies could you use to make your outfits feel put together and modern and still feel like you?
Neither of these ignores colour. Colour absolutely still matters! But the transformation isn't "now I know my season." It's "I open my closet and every single thing in it works, on my body, for my actual life, and I stopped negotiating with myself every morning."
That's the difference between a data point and a strategy.
A little additional learning,
So, Should You Still Get a Colour Analysis?
Honestly? If it sounds fun and you can afford it, sure! Go enjoy the experience, especially if you've never had someone break down warm versus cool undertones for you before. It's genuinely interesting information about yourself, and Ottawa has some talented analysts doing that work well.
Just go in with the right expectation: this is one piece of the 5 piece puzzle.
If you take one thing from this post, take this: stop asking "what colours should I wear" and start asking "why do I feel like I have nothing to wear when my closet is full."
That second question is the one worth solving. It's rarely about colour. It's almost always about fit, function, and whether your wardrobe is still dressing the person you were instead of the person you are now or the person you're becoming.
If that question landed for you, that's exactly the work I do with clients in Ottawa: closet audits that find your anchor pieces, decluttering what's quietly draining your mornings, and building a wardrobe strategy, using the Anchor Point Method and the Five Fashion Theories, so getting dressed stops being a decision and becomes a system.