Are Seasons The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems?
June 22, 2012 by Christine Scaman
Rephrase
Seasons are NOT The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems
Many are asking this Q in different formats lately. Here’s my take on the A.
What should I do if System A said I was Dark Autumn and System B says Soft Autumn?
Pick the one you trust the most because they’re not the same. Choosing is easier if you could see what the analyst was seeing. It’s much harder, maybe impossible, if you couldn’t. This is partly why we so much want YOU to see it.
If you decide that System A resonated best with you, then stick with their products. Whatever they call the Season, if those were your most harmonizing colours, then stay with those colours. Buy their swatch book and hope it repeats the colours of their drapes very faithfully. Don’t be analyzed by A’s drapes and buy B’s Colour Book, it may not contain the same colours. In fact, you should assume that it will not contain the same colours. Stay with A’s makeup recommendations too because those are calibrated to go with the palettes of the individual system.
I cannot over-emphasize to what degree the whole result and outcome and every decision you make thereafter hinges on those drapes, and they in turn on how exact the palettes themselves are.
Neither analysts nor clients can succeed with drapes from one system, the swatches from another, and the makeup recs from a third. Every little difference gets magnified to become big differences when you’re choosing lipstick.
What are the differences between PCA Systems’ drapes? How can one company’s True Autumn be so different from another’s?
I don’t know what other PCA companies’ drapes look like. I’ve never seen their original colours other than in books. If you can be analyzed in one system and can get the colours from another system to fit into the result, you’re lucky. Some can, usually in the True Seasons, but for some it’s just a colour-by-colour minefield.
What if System Y’s Light Summer drapes, or even just a few of their Light Summer drapes, were actually found in Sci\ART’s Light Spring collection? I think this is probably what really happens. Not my place to say wrong or right, but if you try the makeup for Light Summer suggested by Sci\ART analysts, you will feel uncomfortable.
Why the differences in the first place? Because it happens in every industry that’s unregulated and many that are. Initial philosophies, theoretical basis of the colour groups, desired endpoint, working materials, all different.
Lorraine, who asks the Q below, has always felt close to Soft Summer but couldn’t get the Season to fit just right. She lives too far from a Sci\ART analyst and has done some figuring on her own. She says,
‘I was really lost…until I read the theory of 16 Seasons. I recognized myself in the season ”soft deep winter” on this website (http://www.coloressential.net/2012/04/and-12-seasons-became-16.html) They say that Ginnifer Goodwin is soft deep winter and I find the comparison with Penelope Cruz quite good. [My friend] and me (dark winter VS soft dark winter) can wear the same colors, with some exceptions.”
Those Colour Books were most interesting on that website. They look similar to True Colour Australia’s in design, and it’s a very usable design, but the colours are not the same for the closest Sci/ART 12 Tone (or TCA 12 Tone) I can match it to, which is Light Spring. I couldn’t enlarge the photo so maybe I’m way off. Here is a perfect example of being draped or otherwise identified as Light Spring but another company’s Light Spring swatches won’t be the same, leaving you questioning and dissatisfied when it’s time to use them.
And always, the question remains of what one analyst sees as harmony, or you at your best, while another analyst wouldn’t feel the same way. One person might see Natalie Portman as a Dark Winter, while another feels that palette is too cool and has reasons to prefer Dark Autumn. I’m undecided about her Season.
To Lorraine’s Season conclusion: Very colour perceptive, this is a woman who is probably seeing the right things as much as anyone could. It’s hard to analyze yourself, like giving yourself a really complicated haircut. Yes, a darker Soft Summer could be a ‘Soft Deep Winter’ in some ways. The Seasons share many similarities. Both begin fully cool and add one step of Autumn’s type of heat. The upper end of S Su’s darkness could be the lower end of DW’s.
Now what? How is the palette called “Soft Deep Winter” assembled? Does it borrow from S Su and DW? And whose version of S Su and DW is it borrowing from, because they’re not all the same? Does it use Color Me Beautiful’s Deep Winter and just drop the saturation of every colour? Does it offer up new colours that didn’t exist before in either parent palette, which that would really be the best, so that each Season is distinct from every other? Are the palettes even based in deliberate scientific measurement of colour dimension for all 760 colours (hue, value, saturation (chroma)) or were they eyeballed from a Pantone catalog?
I don’t know the answers here. These are just the Q the consumer should ask herself. Let’s be real and admit that the consumer can’t be expected to sort through all the dialects out there. I’m just trying to move the logic one step further, beyond the theory and into the store. For most consumers, the colour theory discussions sounds like PCA companies are saying the same thing using different words. Sometimes we are, sometimes not at all. The comparison is as hard to judge correctly as it is to know what’s going on behind the scenes in two different hospitals.
The point is this: will the consumer be enabled to make right or wrong shopping decisions? That’s the only layer of data she wants or needs.
There is room for everyone. What I’m saying is to pick a company and stick with it. Don’t put Dell parts in your iMac and wonder why it won’t turn on.
And, Lorraine also said,
I know you are a ‘deep winter’, have you ever thought about being a ‘soft winter deep’? I always thought your colors seemed a little bit hard on you (but very good too… a little like me in dark winter colors) so I don’t know, I am simply asking ! 
And I agree with that too and think Lorraine has a very discerning eye. I also have big respect for her, that she felt she could voice that truth, taking the risk that she’d be held emotionally accountable. We train others in how to treat us, what lines not to cross, where to tiptoe, the result being that few of us ever hear other people’s truths about us – so I thank you, Lorraine, for taking the risk.
Darkness matters most to Dark Winter, while the saturation and heat of each colour can move up or down a little. (What’s a little supposed to mean? It means all 3 colour dimensions for each Season are fairly tight before the harmony and flattering effect you want is compromised or lost, not just the most important dimension (TMIT). So you need to hope that whoever put your colours together knew about a little.) Many colours between 760 colours of the 12 Tones/Seasons appear very close when compared side by side. What makes them finally belong among the others of their Season IS the others, the harmony they achieve together. Did every colour from another system’s swatch books get measured in terms of its value, hue, and chroma? I have no idea. I know that Sci\ART’s did so I stick with it.
Lorraine’s point is very valid. I own 3 colour Books from 3 companies, to fine tune my knowledge of my colour space. I don’t look as dark as Penelope Cruz. But I can make S Su lipsticks disappear entirely to gray unless the colour is at the high end of S Su darkness (since S Su sat must stay low) and at the low end of DW saturation, as Mercier Dry Rose. It’s not the name of the Season that matters, it’s the colours in it. Lorraine is right that I look too sharp in over-saturated colour. I wear a layer of Lauder Double Wear Mauve under lipstick to keep it in place, and lighten and desaturate the colour a little, without getting anywhere near S Su.
You know, maybe wearing too much colour is my obnoxious side wanting to be heard, and believe me when I tell you that it exists. I don’t know what I look like any more than anyone else does. I don’t look at me all day long, others do. I probably dress beyond my best saturation edge now and again. I go beyond my truth borders in what I say at times too. If I can’t decide what I think about something, I’ll try saying it and feeling whether I can align with it. Makes me say quite a lot that I don’t believe, a lot that exaggerates my beliefs, makes me sound more absolute and abrupt than I am. So, overdoing it with colour is a way of dressing that feels very congruent with how I behave.
I’m not really looking for perfect hair colour. I’m looking for how to explore my highest self and potential and translate that into the language of appearance, a powerful and universal human communication about a whole lot besides wealth. All that happens outside of us is happening inside. If wearing different jewelry makes me behave differently, then can I use that to approach the person I want to be? Yes, as it turns out, I can. That’s change from the outside in. Change can also happen from the inside out – which is why I barely advertise my services. The woman whose colours I love to uncover finds me when the time is right. She is at a crossroads in her life. She knows the past doesn’t hold her answers and she is receptive to the many wheres and hows through which her true path might find her. I get clients that I adore and that teach me more than I could return. That I have had to grow into my clients has been a privilege I cannot describe.
The world is simply our mirror. What we see is exactly what we are sending out there. I use colour to speak truth. Not everyone will or should or cares.
Under the article about the very lovely swatch plumes at Indigo Tones, Denise asks how I shop with more than one Colour Book.
This is a woman by woman decision. Some will find it a confusion. Without a doubt, you have to begin with one accurate Book. You might use only that one for the first year, like I did. Which one to buy is a conversation to have with your analyst. If using your palette best for you means sticking tight to one set of colours forever, then that is exactly what you should do. I don’t want you wearing less colour, safe colour, unflattering colour, or wasting money for one more moment of your life.
I went shopping. Lo and behold, stores didn’t hand me my 60 colours. Well, after a PCA, the freedom of knowing what to never look at again is nearly euphoric. You are in the mood to shop! So, you buy things that look about right because, by all the gods, you’re not going home empty-handed. What you pay attention to gets bigger (like black on light people 
) The colours of our world suddenly exist in relation to you, a feeling you go after like a high. It takes on three dimensions, maybe four, maybe more. You want to be in stores and play with your new skill set.
But stores, ay…vendors are suspicious and negative, and not without some reason to be. Women get so literal about the interpretation. This is partly why it fell apart back in the 80s. I don’t want that to happen again so we need a new way for consumers to use their palettes, not meaning allowing wrong colour but simply knowing when it’s safe to relax a little. Also, if you know me from visiting here, I’m very rigid about technique and standards for identifying colours, more so every day, because I’ve seen it go wrong too many times and how easily that can happen. On the other hand, I work at being really fluid and plastic about how we use colour in our lives.
My Colour Books are three interpretations of Kathryn Kalisz’s original Sci\ART 12 Tone palettes, some near identical and some quite arguably outside the borders – which helped define the borders. That exercise has value to a colour analyst, but not necessarily to a consumer. Most people have no reason to own wrong colours. If you want to become a student of colour analysis, exposing yourself to many opinions, inside and outside Sci\ART, is necessary to know where your position will be and why.
The various Books open my mind to new voices about myself. The more voices we listen to, the better our understanding of any topic. Not saying I purchase every colour in every Book, not at all. After a year with the original Sci\ART palette, I knew the limits of my colour dimensions (hue, value, chroma) and you will too. You really will feel your way into it, as many women will attest. You’ll also define and refine your personal taste. Doors upon doors will open.
As usual, it takes me four paragraphs to get to answering the question. How do I shop with three Books? The same way others shop with one. By comparing colours to swatches. By gathering several items of similar colour to the one I’m considering, doesn’t matter if in my Season or not, and comparing to swatches. Colour is so dependent on what surrounds it that we never really know what a colour is without comparisons. And then, how we see it will shift between one comparison and the next. The more comparisons I make, the better I get what colour I’m really looking at. I don’t bring out all 3 Books in stores. I do the comparing at home. I have always learned something from it.
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{All photography: Sonja Mason}
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A reminder that I will not be shipping the book, Return to Your Natural Colours, in the month of July. If you’re in the US, Kerry at Indigo Tones may have some copies. Otherwise, best to wait till August.
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8 Responses to “Are Seasons The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems?”
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yes, different systems are not very close, because they use different approaches. If to speak about the 16 seasons I can fit there in Soft Autumn Deep, but in Sci Art, as you know, I have problems with it.
I know that the point of your posting that website was not so we could sit around and gripe about it, and I applaud that it has explained the 16-season theory in a very understandable way. What I question is the concept behind the new seasons. With these women, it is “Soft Autumn or Light Spring”, “Soft Summer or Deep Winter”, “Soft Autumn or Deep Autumn”, as if they must fall within that spectrum; when they fit neither, instead of asking whether another, less stereotypical season might fit these ladies better, new categories are created. In short, I feel like the wrong boundaries are being questioned. (And yeah, I’m preaching to the choir here.)
Mmn. Interesting. I had an analysis through a well known British group – which was a really great experience, I’d recommend the lady who carried it out in a heartbeat, she knew her stuff – and was most interested later when I had a sci-art analysis out of pure curiosity that both analysts in many ways spotted the exact same thing, and were looking at the same properties of colour, and there are definite crossovers between the two palettes they gave me although they named those palettes as two different seasons. The difference is the other colours linked to the colours they saw as best fit.
I was particularly interested in the lighter/more muted soft summer and the darker/higher clarity soft summers in the pictures above. My sci art season is Light Spring, and I notice the wide variance in Light Spring women’s colouring having struggled at first to come to terms with how I ended up in a season popularly seen as fair haired and ‘obviously’ light when I’m dark enough to have been identified as a winter in other systems! It’s the right palette, it’s the best of the 12 for me, I got past the question of ‘would another palette work better’ (no) and got onto – ok, is my uncertainty here to do with how I use my palette? There are the warm Light Springs, the bright Light Springs, the very fair Light Springs, and the quite dark and cool Light Springs. I know I don’t do well with the most warm and the most muted colours of the palette, I know the light yellow for example looks great as an accent or an earring, but not as a t shirt unless I wear a jacket in a second colour that’s definitely at the cool end of my palette. So at the moment I am fascinated by – would every single Light Spring woman (or any other season woman) look just as good in exactly the same make up and clothes from the palette, or do their choices within their palette need to reflect their darkness, their degree of warmth (neutral palettes often giving you warm/cool variants of a colour), their contrast level etc to work best? And if I get that the yellow in my palette is the best option of all the yellows in the 12 palettes for me, does that cancel out my suspicion that even this best of the yellows doesn’t make yellow a good colour on me? (But looks amazing in large blocks on another Light Spring family member who leans towards True Spring.)
Musing happily on
Hi All! What a fascinating post! The subject of 16 vs 12 is certainly a hot debate these days! But the absolute best part about all this? PCA is growing in popularity. At this rate, and with the way things spread a lot more quickly thanks to the internet, I hope that PCA in general will gain wider recognition! I went shopping yesterday and so many people looked bland and boring, not their best, and you could tell for a lot of them it was because of their colours. Then I saw a girl in Soft Autumn colours, and I could see HER. She was so beautiful, it was like a light was shining down on her. Amazing. She definitely understood colour harmony, certainly with that outfit.
We have only just begun, but Sci/Art has really layed down the foundation for better understanding it all. Judging from the photos in that link, I certainly see the point that is being put across, but I don’t agree with it AT ALL. Ginnifer Goodwin is the best example, because she does suit the deeper colours softened at the end there, but is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the colours at the end there that suit her, they’re not “Deep Soft” colours at all. They are Dark Winter colours, that have been translated into softer materials. Her hair is also in a soft style, as are her makeup colours. Black pencil, but smoky and diffused. I think there is some confusion here about “Softness” in the munsell sense, and “Softness” in the texture sense. No need to create a whole new season for that ! Are dark winters not allowed soft textures now? Softness in the Munsell sense means muted, as in closer to grey. A person who can balance very dark purple or black eyepencil is a winter. Ginnifer does not need muted colours. She needs to soften her textures. That seems fairly obvious to me. You can’t underestimate the effect that material has on colour. But you also can’t start slipping down the road of over greying colours that need intensity. Those smoky eyes, they’re intense. They’re dark winter. Let’s not split hairs about seasons. It’s a bit like the signs of the zodiac: I’m a Leo, and I have a natural affinity with other Leos, a sort of deeper understanding. But all Leos have infinite variations in their personality.
Christine, you have a really sensible explanation and approach to using (and not mixing up) the various systems. I confess that I don’t know whether it’s ever possible to incorporate the various color systems together. However, of all the calibrated systems, Sci/Art and True Tone remain my favorites, by far.
I learned from John Kitchener’s examples to look for the lightest, darkest, most saturated and least saturated versions of my colors to see how far I can take them. I’ve also learned to look for the bluest, yellowest versions of those colors to see where the parameters lie. Originally, I thought I was very close to SS’s line with SA. Now I find that I’m actually slightly closer to TS than to SA. I can cheat slightly to TS, but fall off the edge precipitously in SA’s slight warmth. Just learning what the colors of my thumbnail do against SS colors and comparing it to other seasonal colors gives me a good idea of what’s happening in my face (which I can’t see, of course.)
Thanks so much for a well written article. I was one of those people very excited about the 16 seasons, feeling a bit like a ‘Ginnifer Goodwin’. But Nirwala is so right, it’s about the texture of the colour, the smugde of the eyeliner, dark winter colours are fine. Unfortunately in an online colour analysis, I think it’s hard for a consultant to pick these things up, and the analysis can head in slightly the wrong direction. Even if they do notice, you don’t necessarily get this feedback. If the analysis is done ion person I hope it would be much more accurate. In saying that I think I should book an in-person analysis!
Thank you very much for your article ! You make me think more about 12 and 16 seasons…
I now think that an analysis in person is the only solution to know the season because we are too influenced by eye and hair color. It’s amazing how people in a same season may not resemble each other at all and so, it is dangerous to make associations by similarities, because it is only a question of reflection of the skin. I was too influenced. Now I think the 12 seasons can group everyone, because each season have many colors. There may be many more seasons, more than 16, but then, each season would contain fewer color choices. I think the theory of 12 seasons is enough, and I think that I’m not a soft deep winter…so, sorry for my e-mail, I’m excited too quickly !!
Thanks as always, Christine, for your careful analysis and patient explanation. You are so appreciated.
I want to put in my two cents on the issue of seasonal consistency between systems. I have palettes of multiple seasons from, gosh, probably six or seven systems, and to my very humble and certainly fallible eye, the differences from system to system are usually pretty darn small. I think overall there’s a *rough* consensus about what colors comprise each season, at least among the 12-season systems. And to my eye, many systems that go beyond 12 seasons (like Fujii’s) contain seasons that are easily identified as matches to one of our 12, again IMHO.
For example, I have at least five different Bright/Clear/Vivid Winter palettes, and the colors from each to each don’t perfectly align, but they’re all saturated and coolish and deepish. None has dusty rose or terracotta. Shopping with any one of them would keep a BW well away from her worst colors and have her looking miles better than she did in the colors she used to wear.
I feel the need to mention it because it makes me sad to imagine someone (say, a Soft Autumn like myself) obsessing over whether her fan’s terracotta is the absolutely perfect terracotta.OK, we’re all perfectionists – that’s why we’re here. But I’m afraid emphasizing the differences between systems will have some women panicking unnecessarily, and obscure (what I see as) the general agreement out there between systems.
I guess that was more than two cents.