The twelve seasons, briefly explained.

Most people have been told, at some point, which colours suit them. A parent who pulled certain shirts off the rack and not others. A friend who insisted that yellow was unflattering. A magazine that promised the best colour was navy. Most of this advice was kindly meant. Most of it was also wrong.

The system that began to correct it is called seasonal colour analysis. It has been quietly refined for nearly fifty years, and its modern form recognises that every face – every skin, every eye, every strand of hair – sits within a specific palette of twelve colours that genuinely flatter it. Twelve, not twelve hundred. Twelve.

What follows is the maison's brief account of the twelve seasons: where they came from, how they work, and why the right reading of yours is the difference between a wardrobe that lifts the face and one that competes with it.

A short history

The idea that some colours flatter the face more than others is older than fashion magazines, but the modern system has a clear lineage. Johannes Itten, the Swiss colour theorist at the Bauhaus, was among the first to suggest in the 1920s that human colouring fell into four broad seasonal categories: spring, summer, autumn, winter. Each season described a particular harmony of skin tone, hair, and eye colour, and each had its own complementary palette.

Itten's four-season framework reached the wider public in 1980, when the American consultant Carole Jackson published Color Me Beautiful, which sold over 26 million copies and made seasonal analysis a household concept.

The four seasons were elegant but, in practice, too few. A person whose colouring sat between two of them – soft and warm, or deep and cool – had no clear category. Practitioners began to subdivide, and by the mid-1990s the most refined system identified twelve seasons rather than four: each of the original four divided into three sub-variants. This is the system the maison reads.

How the twelve seasons work

A season is not a fashion choice. It is a description of three properties of a person's natural colouring:

Hue – whether the colouring is warm-toned (with gold or amber undertones) or cool-toned (with blue or pink undertones).

Value – whether the overall colouring is light or deep.

Chroma – whether the colouring is bright and clear, or soft and muted.

Each of the twelve seasons is a particular combination of these three. A True Autumn, for example, is warm-toned, deep, and clear. A Soft Summer is cool-toned, medium-value, and muted. The names of the seasons evoke the colour qualities of the natural year – the clean brightness of spring, the cool softness of summer, the warm depth of autumn, the sharp contrast of winter – but the underlying analysis is precise.

The twelve, briefly

Light Spring – warm, light, clear. The palette of first morning. Peach, soft coral, butter yellow, fresh mint.

True Spring – warm, medium, clear. Colour at noon. Clear coral, warm turquoise, bright yellow, fresh green.

Bright Spring – warm-leaning, medium, very clear. Saturation taken seriously. Vivid coral, clear emerald, lemon, warm cobalt.

Light Summer – cool, light, soft. Cool light. Powder blue, soft rose, lavender, cool mist.

True Summer – cool, medium, soft. Cool clarity, unhurried. Slate blue, dusty rose, soft sage, muted lavender.

Soft Summer – cool-leaning, medium, very soft. A palette that recedes so the face emerges. Dusty rose, slate, muted lavender, cool stone.

Soft Autumn – warm-leaning, medium, very soft. Gold held quietly. Camel, sage, dusty rose, warm taupe.

True Autumn – warm, medium-deep, clear. Earth held warm. Camel, terracotta, olive, deep mustard.

Deep Autumn – warm-leaning, deep, clear. The depth of stained glass. Burgundy, forest, rust, deep teal.

Bright Winter – cool-leaning, medium-deep, very clear. Brilliance against true black. Fuchsia, cobalt, emerald, ruby.

True Winter – cool, deep, clear. Clear contrast, no compromise. Pure white, true black, ruby, ice blue.

Deep Winter – cool-leaning, deep, clear. A season carrying its own depth. Midnight, ruby, true black, deep purple.

Each season has its own twelve-colour palette, its own metals (gold or silver, brushed or polished), its own stones (the colours that read true in jewelry against the skin), and its own way of meeting the world.

Why the system fails – when it fails

Seasonal colour analysis is precise, but it is not infallible. It fails for two reasons.

The first is the limit of selfie-based tools. Apps that promise to analyse a season from a single photograph are working with compressed colour data: a flash, a screen, a phone camera's automatic adjustments. None of these can read the relationship between skin, eye, and hair the way a careful reading can. The result is often a verdict that feels approximately right but never quite resolved.

The second is the limit of single-perspective readings. A stylist looking at a face for thirty minutes brings real expertise, but also their own colour bias – the seasons they themselves wear, the palettes they have been trained to see. Even three stylists, working together, can drift toward consensus rather than truth.

The maison reads differently. Thirteen questions, asked with care, produce a more reliable verdict than a single photograph or a single observer's eye. The questions ask about hair as it appears in natural light, about veins at the wrist, about the cool or warm cast of the eye's whites, about how the skin responds to gold versus silver. The reading emerges from the answers, not from a snapshot.

What the right season delivers

The wrong palette does specific things to a face. It makes the skin look tired when it should look rested. It pulls shadows under the eyes that were not there a moment before. It adds years that the wearer has not lived. It competes for attention with the face it was meant to flatter, and it wins.

The right palette does none of these things. It simply recedes. The colour becomes a frame; the face becomes the picture. The viewer's eye is drawn upward, to the eyes themselves, to the expression, to the person. Strangers stand straighter when spoken to. Photographs that used to disappoint quietly begin to satisfy.

This is what the maison reads, and what the dossier delivers: not a styling lecture, but a quiet correction. Twelve colours. The right metals. The right stones. The right fragrance for the season. The right fabric for the climate. A document to take to a tailor, a shop, a wardrobe.

A season cannot be changed, only revealed.