Understanding Your Color Palette
Determining your color palette can be a challenging yet rewarding process. Many people turn to online resources and communities for guidance. For instance, the subreddit r/coloranalysis is recommended as a useful community for learning about personal color palettes [2:1]. Additionally, TCI palettes are frequently referenced as reliable guides
[1:1].
Exploring Different Methods
There are various methods to discover your color palette. Some individuals prefer DIY approaches, such as creating their own palette based on books like "Shopping for the Real You" by Andrea, which helps identify personal characteristics that align with specific colors [4]. Others find it helpful to use tools like Google's Color Picker to explore different shades and tones
[3:1].
Professional Help vs. Self-Discovery
While some people opt for professional color analysis, which can be costly, others rely on self-discovery through trial and error. It's common to experiment with different colors and notice how they complement your skin tone. One user mentioned that draping colors against the arm can help remove biases related to facial features and focus solely on skin tone compatibility [5:3].
Personal Preferences vs. Recommended Colors
A common dilemma is the difference between colors you personally prefer and those that suit you best. While some believe people naturally gravitate towards colors that flatter them, this isn't always the case. Personal preferences can sometimes clash with recommended palettes, leading to confusion [5:1],
[5:5]. It's important to remember that color analysis is a spectrum, and not everyone fits perfectly into predefined categories
[5:7].
Practical Tips for Finding Your Palette
By exploring these methods and tips, you can gain a better understanding of your color palette and make more informed choices in your wardrobe and personal styling.
i feel like i don't trust all the color palette guides online, e.g. this one seems off: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Ffascinating-color-chart-for-each-season-v0-xo776582eava1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc842edf6d6f3a7c63bf4456855250dd7ec2657a3
what's the best one?
Look up TCI palettes. Those are the ones I reference most frequently online.
Amazing resource, thank you!
The best one is the one that works for you!
I've seen a lot of videos on tiktok talking about the importance of respecting your pallete, but I'm honestly lost! How do I know what is the suitable pallet for me??
Check out r/coloranalysis !
Estou fazendo um curso e estamos estudando teoria da cor, e temos que pintar esse "yordle" como exercício. Já sei mais ou menos as matiz que eu quero usar mas não tô sabendo as tonalidades que se encaixam melhor. Para a pelagem escolhi um rosa chiclete mais com medio valor e alta saturação #D53E5A e matiz da roupa um azul, cigano, verde com menos saturação mas não sei quais pegar exatamente alguém tem uma paleta nessas matiz que combine com #D53E5A ou alguma diquinnha de como chegar em uma saturação e valor que combine com ele😭😭😭😭
Como é um coelho e parece meio mágico, então eu diria que é melhor pinta de cores pastéis, tudo bem desbotado e puxado pro amarelo
Tem o Seletor de Cores do Google onde você pode olhar e ver os códigos das cores. Pesquise o #D53E5A e você verá a cor e seus tons.
I’m reading through Andrea’s book Shopping for the Real You and just finished the section in color. I used everything mentioned in her book plus the tidbits I gathered here to put together a palette. I know Kitchener’s palettes are much more extensive but I’m really happy with how mine came together. From Andrea’s book I’m pretty sure that I am mostly Subtle Blended and Lively Bright and those were the starting point for the palette, but I want to know what you all see. All of the colors I got from Kettlewell’s shop by color section. I also used an html color mixer site to help me fill it out after I had the base colors I knew worked for me.
this has a lot of similarities with my predominantly SB palette! I think you're on the right track!
Thank you! Your palette is really beautiful.
I think these are super helpful
Thanks! It was a really fun process and I like it better than trying to fit into a seasonal box
Oops! I apparently forgot to label to last section as Understated.
Or do they conveniently overlap? For example I've been trying to figure out what colors look best on me, and while I've only taken a few online quizzes (lol) some of the colors recommended to me are things I'd personally never wear, while colors I love wearing aren't on the palette. I could be doing the quizzes wrong obviously but how do you figure this out at home?
And yeah I don't have to follow the palettes to a T and can wear what I want anyway but for the sake of figuring out my color season I'm having a lot of trouble. Quizzes typically say I'm either a Dark Autumn or a Dark Winter, and I know they share a lot of similar colors, but oddly enough the colors I enjoy wearing come from the parts of both palettes that don't overlap, like cool whites and army greens.
Another thing is that yellows and pinks are impossible to tell if they're flattering for me because I just don't like wearing those colors at all to begin with (unless they're accents accompanied by black or something)
TL;DR how do you look past personal bias to determine the best colors?
Edit: I think I figured it out but I still want to hear yalls thoughts!
I think this exact predicament is why so many people flock to this sub, and why so many people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a professional to help them figure it out!
Once you’ve learned your season and embraced it, I find it’s easy to figure out which colors work and which ones don’t. But when you’re in the early stages of color analysis knowledge, it can be nearly impossible.
I think this is a really complex question! It may be helpful to avoid drapes of colors you truly hate to try to remove bias. I also find it interesting to try draping against my arm for a couple reasons—it helps me not to be distracted by surface redness and freckles and also removes the emotional aspect of how I feel in a color and is just focusing in on what my actual skintone looks like next to a color. I think the right colors have a similarity with my skintone where neither looks warmer or cooler than the other and it’s not overly bright causing my skin to look grayish by comparison.
The arm draping is genius!! Appreciate your comment :)
I think most people are naturally drawn to colors that look good on them when they go shopping. There’s a difference between waffling in the dressing room to actually purchasing confidently. However, sometimes other factors can affect your feelings towards them, especially with black, pastels, and brights, where there’s a cultural factor.
I think a lot of people on here get really hung up on sub seasons. Color is a spectrum! I would say most people don’t fit perfectly into a little pizza slice on the color chart. For example if you’re a Dark Winter with green/hazel eyes, I bet army greens would look good on you; first that they bring out your eyes and second if that color is already there on you, it’s probably harmonious. Related, I like how some systems like House of Colour gives “wow colors” or custom palettes because there will be colors in your generic palette swatches that are just nice and then some that are really great. Different example, someone can be cool and muted overall, therefore Summer, but their best colors in their palette are poppy red, primrose yellow, and mushroom brown. They might not like wearing blue, and they wouldn’t be totally wrong. It could also just be finding the right types of blue that would work for them or that would go with the other colors they like wearing.
I like to say that subseasons are starting point. You get matched as best people can with a unified palette of colors then users get to start testing from there.
It's definitely a spectrum! I'm a true winter but I can borrow a lot more easily from the dark winter palette than the bright winter palette despite both being sister seasons to true winter, so while I'm clearly a true winter I lean more towards dark winter than bright. When it comes to dark winter it's like "I don't live here, but I have the wifi password saved in my phone" but with bright winter it's that person you only visit once every two years 😂
I often see people say you’re naturally drawn to the colors that suit you. That hasn’t been my experience at all. I’ve always gravitated toward bright pinks, corals, warm reds, and bold patterns—turns out, as a soft summer, those are basically the worst possible choices for me 🤦♀️
Funny thing is, I worked in fashion in my 20s—an environment where you’d think I’d have figured out my “best” colors. But nope. It wasn’t until well into my 30s, when I started wearing makeup regularly, that I began to really notice what clashed with my skin tone. I knew those bright warm colors brought out my redness, but I stayed in denial for years.
Same except opposite seasons lol I always dressed soft summer and wore makeup in that range. Never would’ve touched yellow or coral until I was draped as a bright spring. Now I can’t unsee it!
I've seen people keep a reference of their best colors in their purse or whatnot, but the nerd in me would rather just practice and see how good I am at identifying my color palette. I'm trying to see if there are any quizzes online that maybe show you colors and you have to identify the season, or something along those lines. Thanks!
I really like I Love Hue for testing my ability to perceive color. If you can do the advanced stages of that game, you likely can see color accurately enough to create your own palettes.
Oooh thank you! Gonna try it out :)
Hey everyone!
I found this website that generates color palettes. You pick, if I remember, 50-ish colors from a long list, and you have to pick a certain number of colors from specific types of colors (warm colors, shades of pink, dark colors, etc). At the end, it generates basically infinite (mostly 2-color) color palettes which you can view in various ways, like as text or on different pictures.
I don't remember what it's called, and trying to search for it always comes up with other color palette websites, like colourlovers. Anyone know it?
UPDATE: found it myself! The website was Khroma
It helps to start by figuring out your skin undertones; cool, warm, or neutral. You can do this in 3 ways.
I will admit that one thing I don't like about this skin undertones business is that it doesn't take into consideration darker completions, so I'm curious of other input or wisdom for dark skin.
Anyway, The more you practice this and are thoughtful about it, the more it'll become intuitive for you and less of an effort :)
I don't know if I'd 100% agree with the red/burn=cool. For me the most important part of colors is vibrancy. I look terrible in pastels but can get away with jewel tones on both sides of the spectrum, but I might be an exception. I'm a pale redhead.
What do I do if I'm cold, warm, and neutral according to those tests?
Trial and error, mostly!
It's probably easier to do in person than to try and work it out online, but you want colours that compliment you rather than ones that make you look drained.
For example - I'm really pale, but have neutral undertones - I LOVE mustard yellow, but when I put anything mustard on it just washes me out and makes me look sick.
I don't follow any of the "you're a summer" or taking hair/eye colour into account, you just kind of instinctively know when something makes you look ill.
I feel like I miss this intuition. I have a lot of trouble matching clothes and have never felt like I have a color that stands out as looking better than others.
Honestly I think this is true for a lot of people. Sometimes the most important thing is knowing your WORST color and not your best. If you have any idea what your undertone is (i.e. cool or warm? pink or yellow or olive etc?) that helps a lot. I’m cool and pink so warm earth tones look super bad on me (burnt orange and mustard especially). For someone who is warm, icy blues and blue-tinted pinks and reds are probably not the best.
R/coloranalysis
It helps to determine if you have a cool or warm skin tone first!
I tried to figure out am I warm or cold and I couldn't lol. My veins are blue green, I am naturally pretty pale (with pink undertone) but can easily tan in the sun and get that warm bronze color and then I don't seem to be pale pink anymore but rather golden. So I can easily go from Kat Dennigs tan to Eva Longoria. So to figure out what colors look good on me I had to try them and see. I also want to add that that changes depending on do I have tan or not. But I think you can wear almost any color you want, the key is to pick a right shade of that color and that can be tricky if you don't have a good eye for that. I for example should wear some colors with cold tone to look good and some other with warm to look good but if I put something on and it looks off, I look off then I know it is probably because the shade of that color doesn't suit me. So don't dich the color, ditch the shade and find a proper one!
Hello!
In one of my capsule wardrobe/one bagging subreddits, someone once mentioned that french women learn their colors,and stay with them, forever.
To me, that sounds incredible. To just know everything goes with everything and it looks good on you. I'm in the midst of drastically reducing my clothing clutter, and I thought it may help if I had a better ballpark of colors/a season, to help me start feeling better about my clothes and what actually works on me.
I saw in a few other posts that having a picture of all of them together helps determine where the colors really pop, but unfortunately, despite being able to see it on others, or on fabric matching, I see almost no difference in myself. I've also provided a picture of my veins/ hand, since it sees alot more sun than my face, in case that's valuable in anyway.
I'd love any and all suggestions or thoughts on this! If there's anything else I can provide, or experiment with,I'd love to know. Once I have a handful of colors I can drape to really get it down, but currently I have every single one of these colors in my wardrobe, and it just needs to go somewhere else because the clutter is killing me.
I used the Vivaldi Color Lab website, for anyone wondering.
Any and all suggestions or advice are welcome! Thanks for your time and expertise.
It's hard to say for sure from a single image (sometimes white balance can be adjusted automatically and make you look warmer or cooler than you really are) but from what you've posted you look either like a cool summer or (more likely) a winter, probably cool winter.
The test for differentiating between cool summer and winter is how much color saturation you can tolerate, so you'd want to try different cool shades from more to less saturated, and test which ones flatter you more.
Thank you! I'm going to put a few slides off drapes together and try to give more to compare.
I know that I'm generally olive toned, when compared to other people.
I think you are muted and so it's summer or autumn. I am leaning towards autumn, although you look close to neutral. Play with summer, especially soft summer, and autumn and see how you feel. I think your eyes lean warm while your hair looks cooler, so... it's hard to tell, but I liked the autumn slides the best in the individual frames.
Will do! I'm going to make a few slides of drapes I think, for the seasons suggested, and see if that doesn't help.
I'm not sure what to be white balancing to, but I know folks talk about that a lot.
- Hello u/RonnieRozbox You can now lock the thread if you like.
- Make a comment with the SINGLE WORD LOCK anywhere on the thread.
- LOCK must be its own comment without any punctuation or spaces.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
How to know to your color palette
Key Considerations for Choosing Your Color Palette:
Understand Color Theory:
Identify Your Purpose:
Consider Your Audience:
Start with a Base Color:
Use Color Tools:
Limit Your Palette:
Test and Iterate:
Takeaway: Start with a clear understanding of your goals and audience, choose a base color, and use color theory and tools to create a harmonious palette. Testing and iteration are key to finding the perfect combination that resonates with your vision.
Get more comprehensive results summarized by our most cutting edge AI model. Plus deep Youtube search.