Cool Winter
Unambiguously cool at medium depth, with the clarity to carry saturated colour.
Winter family · Coolness is the dominant characteristic
Measure your own seasonThe palette
Distinctly cool with clear colours. Blue-based and unambiguous.
- Royal blue #0B3D91
- Fuchsia #C2185B
- Deep teal #00695C
- Violet #4A148C
- Ice grey #B0BEC5
- Pure white #FFFFFF
- Magenta #880E4F
- True black #111111
Metals. Silver and platinum.
What works against you. Orange, warm yellow and cream, which all clash with the blue base.
Cool Winter or Cool Summer?
The twelve-season system is six pairs. Each season shares its dominant characteristic with exactly one other, and the two differ on a single axis — which is where almost every misclassification happens.
Cool Summer is the other coolness-dominant season. Both are decisively cool; clarity separates them. Cool Winter needs colours with no grey in them, Cool Summer needs the opposite, and our tool decides on iris chroma and the lightness gap between hair and skin.
What is worth knowing about it
Coolness is the dominant characteristic, which puts temperature above both depth and clarity when they conflict. A cool complexion at medium depth belongs here even if its clarity is borderline, because the constraint that binds hardest is that warm colours look wrong against it.
The test people can run on themselves is the one about silver and gold, and it is more reliable than most self-assessment. Cool colouring tends to look settled against silver and slightly jaundiced against yellow gold. It is a blunt instrument, but it is measuring the right axis, which is more than can be said for judging your season from a photograph.
The rest of the Winter family
Every family has three members, each with a different dominant characteristic. Sharing a family means sharing a temperature direction; it does not mean the palettes are interchangeable.
- Deep Winter — depth dominant. Cool and deep with high contrast. Dark, saturated colours and true black.
- Clear Winter — clarity dominant. Cool-neutral with very high contrast and bright eyes. Sharp, saturated colours against black and white.
How to find out whether this is your season
Not from a photograph taken under unknown lighting, which is what most online season quizzes amount to. The room's light changes measured skin hue by more than the difference between two adjacent seasons, so a colour reading is worthless unless something corrects for it first.
Our colour analysis tool white-balances against the whites of your eyes before measuring anything, and reports the three axes — temperature, depth and clarity — alongside the season they produce, so you can see which of them was decisive. Everything runs in your browser and the photo is never uploaded.
- Personal colour analysis — the full twelve-season reading.
- Skin undertone finder — the temperature axis measured on its own.
- Foundation shade matcher — depth and undertone as a coordinate you can shop with.
Seasonal colour analysis is a styling convention rather than a finding about anyone. What can be measured is the hue, lightness and chroma of your skin, hair and eyes; which colours anyone prefers to wear is a separate question and a matter of taste. Nothing here scores or ranks anyone's appearance.