Color Analysis Glossary: The Terms I Use, in Plain English

Skin tone is the color your skin looks: fair, light, medium, tan, deep. It tells you how light or deep the surface reads. That’s all it tells you.

Overtone is the color sitting on top, sometimes named surface tone. A tan moves it. So do redness, a flush and a long afternoon outdoors.

Undertone is the part that stays put. A golden or peachy cast reads warm. A pink or bluish cast reads cool.

Neutral sits in the middle, with neutral-warm and neutral-cool as the readings around it. Olive carries a muted, slightly green cast.

Picture two people with the same medium skin tone. After a week outdoors, both look different. Their overtones moved. Their undertones didn’t, and that is where the two may still differ.

That’s why skin tone vs undertone trips people up. The two words answer different questions. Skin tone asks how light or deep. Undertone asks which way the color leans.

Two people can share a skin tone and lean opposite ways. A fair person and a deep-skinned person can share an undertone.

A tan changes your overtone for a while. For what it really changes, see the article on whether your season can change.

For a full guide to reading yours, see skin undertone. Olive doesn’t sort neatly into warm or cool, so it has its own page: olive skin tone colors.

Yes. Colors lean the way undertones do. The lean is called temperature: a pull toward yellow reads warm, a pull toward blue reads cool.

Temperature slides. It doesn’t switch.

Take two red-pinks. Coral #FF6F52 pulls toward orange, so it’s warm. Raspberry #C73866 pulls toward blue-violet, so it’s cool. Same family, and they can do opposite things near the same face.

Beige follows the same logic. A golden-leaning beige is warm, a pinkish one is cool. That’s why two garments sold as “beige” can behave nothing alike on you.

Orange is the case that shows how it works. Every orange stays warm. You can soften it with gray or white, but you can’t turn it cool.

Some faces read neutral. They react less to temperature, so lightness and intensity do more of the sorting.

Temperature, lightness and intensity are the three axes behind seasonal color analysis.

Yes, and depth is the same thing again. Lightness is how light or dark a color is. Analysts call it value, and you’ll also see depth. One axis, three names. Lightness is the word to keep, because nobody has to translate it.

Take two warm colors. Peach #FFCBA4 is very light. Chocolate #4E2F1E is dark. Same warm lean, very different weight near a face.

Your own lightness comes from skin, hair and eyes together. A very light coloring, like Light Spring, can look overpowered by a heavy, dark color. A dark coloring, like Deep Winter, can make a pale color look faint.

Lightness is often the first thing you register in an outfit, before you name the color. So a color can be right in temperature and still feel wrong. It was simply too dark or too pale for you.

You’ll also read hue, tint, shade and tone. Hue is a color’s name: red, blue, green.

Tint is a hue plus white, so it gets lighter and softer. Shade is a hue plus black, so it gets deeper. Tone is a hue plus gray, so it gets quieter.

Good to recognize on a paint chip. For your face, lightness and intensity say the same things with fewer words. And tone already hides inside skin tone, undertone and overtone, which is enough.

Chroma is how strong or pure a color is. Analysts also say saturation. Intensity is the word to use here, because you can feel it: a color is loud or quiet.

High chroma colors are vivid and clean, with no gray in them. Low chroma colors are muted: gray has taken the edge off. Neither is better. They ask different things of a face.

Shocking Pink, Electric Blue and Lime Green are high chroma. You’ll find them in the Bright Winter and Bright Spring palettes. Slate Blue, Sage Green and Grayed Mauve are low chroma, and they live in the Soft Summer and Soft Autumn palettes.

Compare two pinks. Fuchsia #E0119D is pure and loud, the signature color of Bright Winter. Dusty Rose #C48A94 is soft and grayed, the signature color of Soft Summer.

Intensity and lightness are separate. Powder Pink #F4C2D0 is very light and soft. Bright Coral #FF5A4D is medium in lightness and vivid. A pale color isn’t automatically a soft one.

Dull describes what a wrong color does to you, never a palette. A soft palette is muted, not dull. Dull is the gray cast your skin takes on next to a color that doesn’t suit you.

If you’ve ever decided you’re “not a color person,” test intensity before you give up on color. A very loud color near a soft face can make people see the garment first.

Contrast is the distance between your hair, eyes and skin, seen together. It reads as low, moderate or high. Light hair, light eyes and fair skin sit close together, so the contrast is low. Dark hair against fair skin and light eyes pushes it up.

It’s a clue, not a rule. Contrast can point toward a season, but it can’t settle one alone, because quite different sub-seasons share it.

Look at the first two rows. Light Summer and Soft Summer are both low contrast. One is very light and soft, the other medium and very soft. Contrast can’t tell them apart. Lightness and intensity can.

The word also describes outfits. A white shirt with navy pants is high contrast. A camel sweater with cream pants is low. Test it yourself: hold a tone-on-tone outfit against a high-contrast face and see whether it flattens.

Read your contrast first, with hair, eyes and skin all in view. Then cover your hair when you hold colors up, so it stops reflecting its color onto your skin.

Here is the whole translation in one place. When you read another site, this tells you what it means.

A palette is a set of colors. One color chip is a swatch. Neutrals are the base colors of a wardrobe: black, white, beige, gray, navy, brown.

You can skip complementary, analogous and harmony. They belong to the color wheel. They help you pair two colors in an outfit, but they don’t tell you what your skin does with either one.

In my view, a color term is worth knowing only if it changes what you do in front of the mirror. My advice: read this once, then put it down and look at a face.

Pick one: temperature, lightness, intensity or contrast. Read it on yourself this week, before you read anything else.

A color word only matters once you’ve seen what the color does to a face, yours first.

When you want a likely season to test against, try my free color analysis quiz. It takes about two minutes and needs no sign-up. You get a probable season and a sub-season pointer to compare with what you saw on your own face.