Deep Winter
Deep and cool — the darkest of the cool seasons, and the one that carries true black best.
Winter family · Depth is the dominant characteristic
Measure your own seasonThe palette
Cool and deep with high contrast. Dark, saturated colours and true black.
- Midnight #1B1B2F
- Deep berry #7B1E3A
- Emerald #14453D
- Aubergine #3A2A4D
- Navy #0F3057
- True black #111111
- Burgundy #6E1423
- Pure white #FFFFFF
Metals. Silver, platinum, white gold.
What works against you. Muted earth tones and anything dusty, which dull a deep cool colouring.
Deep Winter or Deep Autumn?
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.
Deep Autumn is the warm version of the same depth. Skin hue is the only thing separating them: above 62° in Lab lands in Autumn, below 54° lands here. Depth dominates in both, so the two have more in common with each other than with any other season in their own family.
What is worth knowing about it
Black is genuinely a Deep Winter colour rather than a universal default, and this season is the reason the rest of the system spends so much time warning against it. Most colourings are competing with black rather than wearing it; this one is not.
The pairing worth knowing is with Cool Winter and Clear Winter, the other two in the family. All three are cool. Deep Winter is decided by darkness, Cool Winter by temperature, and Clear Winter by clarity — same family, three different dominant characteristics, which is the structure of the whole system in one place.
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.
- Cool Winter — coolness dominant. Distinctly cool with clear colours. Blue-based and unambiguous.
- 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.