Color analysis quiz
Find your colour season and the palette that goes with it. Most online colour analysis quizzes ask you to describe yourself in words and then hand back a season, which means the answer is only ever as good as your self-description. This one drapes you instead. Twelve of the eighteen questions show two swatches matched on every quality except the one being tested, so choosing between them isolates a single trait rather than blending three.
At the end you get one of the twelve seasons, its full palette with hex codes, your neutrals and metals, three colours that fight you and why, and the two seasons you sat closest to. Free, no signup, no email.
Eighteen questions, about three minutes. Six are about your own colouring, and twelve are drapes: two swatches matched on everything except the one quality being tested, so your preference actually means something. At the end you get one of the twelve seasons, the palette that belongs to it, and the two seasons you sat closest to.
Do it in daylight if you can, and answer with what looks right rather than what you like in a shop.
Three scales, twelve answers
Seasonal colour analysis looks complicated from the outside because twelve season names is a lot to hold in your head. The underlying model is much smaller. Every season is a point on three independent scales, and once you know where you sit on all three, the name is just a label for that spot.
Undertone runs warm to cool. This is the one people know, and it decides your family. Warm colouring has yellow or golden at its base, cool has blue or pink. Spring and Autumn are the warm families, Summer and Winter the cool ones.
Value runs light to deep. This is how dark your overall colouring is when you strip the colour out of it. A greyscale photo of your face makes it obvious. Light Spring and Light Summer sit at one end, Deep Autumn and Deep Winter at the other.
Chroma runs soft to bright. This is how clean the colours in your face are. Some people have blended, low-contrast colouring where every clean colour looks loud on them. Others have clarity that makes muted shades look like dust. Soft Summer and Soft Autumn are the muted extremes, Bright Spring and Bright Winter the clear ones.
The quiz scores you on all three, then finds the nearest of the twelve points. It also reports the next two nearest, because in practice a lot of people land between sisters, and knowing that is more useful than a false certainty.
All 12 color seasons and their palettes
Every season below shows its wearable palette. If your result came back borderline, compare your season against the two either side of it and see which strip you would actually reach for.
Spring
Warm and clear. Spring colours have yellow at their base and keep their freshness, running from peach and apple green through to poppy and vivid turquoise.
Light Spring
Light WarmLight Spring runs on colours that have had milk stirred into them without losing their warmth. Everything in the palette is pale, but none of it is dusty: the tint stays sunny rather than powdery. Depth is what overwhelms this colouring, so a heavy charcoal or a true black reads as a hole where the outfit should be.
Palette: peach, butter, warm coral, light aqua, apple green, warm pink, light periwinkle, apricot.
True Spring
Warm SpringTrue Spring is undertone-led: warmth is the point, and everything else follows from it. The palette is golden, fresh, and saturated without tipping into neon, which is the line that separates it from Bright Spring. Cool colours are the real problem here, and a cool grey suit will do more damage than an over-bright orange ever could.
Palette: poppy, golden yellow, turquoise, grass green, coral, jade, apricot, warm red.
Bright Spring
Clear SpringBright Spring is the crossover season between Spring and Winter, and chroma leads it. The palette is intense and clean, warm enough to keep it out of Winter but bright enough that muted colours look like a mistake. Softness is the enemy: a sage or a dusty rose will drain this colouring faster than any wrong undertone.
Palette: bright coral red, vivid yellow, bright turquoise, hot warm pink, bright green, bright orange, clear blue, warm fuchsia.
Summer
Cool and soft. Summer colours are blue-based with grey folded through them, which is what separates a Summer rose from a Winter fuchsia.
Light Summer
Light CoolLight Summer works in tints with a cool base and a little grey folded in. Think of a colour seen through morning haze rather than one mixed with white. The colouring has low natural contrast, so the palette works best worn tonally, several close shades together, instead of a pale top against a dark bottom.
Palette: soft rose, powder blue, soft lavender, soft mint, blush, cadet blue, seafoam, light orchid.
True Summer
Cool SummerTrue Summer is the coolest of the soft seasons and the mirror image of True Spring. The palette lives in blue-based rose, cornflower, and teal, all with enough grey in them to stay calm. Warmth is the failure mode: an orange or a golden yellow will turn this colouring sallow in a way that no amount of lipstick fixes.
Palette: raspberry, cornflower, amethyst, soft teal, cool rose, denim, periwinkle, plum.
Soft Summer
Muted SummerSoft Summer is chroma-led, which makes it the Summer that most often gets misdiagnosed as Autumn. Every colour in the palette has grey mixed through it, and the undertone sits just on the cool side of neutral. Anything clean and saturated separates from the face and starts wearing the person instead.
Palette: dusty mauve, slate blue, sage, rosewood, pewter blue, dusty lilac, muted teal, soft plum.
Autumn
Warm and muted. Autumn colours are the earth end of the warm half: rust, olive, mustard, and chestnut rather than coral and lemon.
Soft Autumn
Muted AutumnSoft Autumn is Soft Summer's warm twin, and the two get confused constantly because muting matters more than undertone in both. The palette is earthy and low in saturation, built on clay, wheat, and moss rather than rust and pumpkin. The colours want to sit close together in depth, because strong contrast breaks the softness that defines the season.
Palette: soft caramel, moss, dusty terracotta, wheat, sage green, clay, khaki, soft tan.
True Autumn
Warm AutumnTrue Autumn is the warm anchor of the deep half of the wheel, the same way True Spring anchors the light half. Rust, mustard, olive, and brick all sit naturally here, and the palette has enough saturation to stay rich without ever looking clean or icy. Cool pastels are the worst offenders, turning the whole face grey.
Palette: rust, mustard, olive, brick, pumpkin, forest, bronze, chestnut.
Deep Autumn
Dark AutumnDeep Autumn is the crossover between Autumn and Winter, and depth is what decides it. The palette is rich and dark with a warm base, running through espresso, deep olive, and burnt garnet. Pale colours are the problem: a pastel next to this face looks like it belongs to someone else entirely.
Palette: deep brick, chocolate, deep olive, cinnamon, pine, sienna, dark gold, burnt garnet.
Winter
Cool and saturated. Winter is the only family that wears pure black, pure white, and true red without any of them looking borrowed.
Deep Winter
Dark WinterDeep Winter takes the depth of Deep Autumn and swings it cool. Aubergine, black cherry, pine, and midnight blue all sit right, and true black finally becomes a friend rather than a weight. The palette handles strong contrast well, which is why a crisp white shirt against a dark jacket works here and nowhere in the Summer family.
Palette: deep aubergine, deep teal blue, deep berry, deep pine, black cherry, midnight blue, garnet, dark violet.
True Winter
Cool WinterTrue Winter is the coolest colouring on the wheel and the one that can wear pure black, pure white, and true red without any of them looking borrowed. The palette is saturated and blue-based throughout, with no golden undertone anywhere in it. Warm earth tones are the failure mode, and beige in particular tends to look like illness.
Palette: true fuchsia, royal blue, emerald teal, true red, violet, sapphire, magenta, deep cyan.
Bright Winter
Clear WinterBright Winter is the other end of the bridge that starts at Bright Spring, and like its opposite number it is chroma that decides the season rather than undertone. Electric, jewel-clean colour is the whole palette, worn against black or white for contrast. Anything dusty reads as dirty here, which makes muted neutrals the one real trap.
Palette: hot pink, electric cyan, scarlet, bright royal, bright emerald, bright violet, lemon, bright jade.
How to answer so the quiz works
Take it in daylight, near a window, with no makeup and your hair off your face. Warm bulbs push everything toward Autumn and cool LEDs push everything toward Winter, which is enough to move your result by a whole family. If you only have artificial light, at least keep it consistent for all eighteen questions.
On the drapes, answer with what happens to your face rather than what you think of the colour. The question is never which swatch is prettier. It is which one makes the shadows under your eyes recede and your skin look even. If you catch yourself picking a colour because you own a jumper in it, that is the wrong instinct.
Answer quickly. First impressions on drapes are more reliable than considered ones, because the effect you are looking for is strongest in the first second and your brain adapts to a colour cast within a few more. Analysts swap drapes fast for exactly this reason.
If two swatches genuinely look the same on you, that is information rather than a failure. It usually means you are neutral on that axis, and the quiz handles it: a run of near-random answers on one scale pulls your score toward the middle, which is where the neutral seasons live.
Train the eye that answered these questions
Everything in this quiz rests on one skill: telling two close colours apart and saying which way they differ. That skill improves with practice, and the rest of this site is built to drill it. The name that colour game trains vocabulary, the hue sort trains ordering by undertone, and the colour matching game trains raw discrimination.
For the theory behind the palettes, warm and cool colours explains what temperature actually measures, and the colour theory guide covers how the schemes in your palette fit together. If you are curious whether your colour vision itself is typical, the colour blind test takes a minute.