Questions, answered.

A full Colour Doc consultation runs to 150 minutes — two and a half hours, in person, at the Battersea studio. That is the length needed to do undertone, value, and chroma in turn, talk through the resulting palette, and walk you through the printed profile without rushing any of it.

Some London studios offer 60- or 90-minute "colour analyses". The drape work alone takes longer than that to do properly, so what you are paying for in those is essentially a guess.

The fee is a flat £250. There is one service, with no tiers and no up-sells. The fee includes the full 150-minute consultation, a printed and hand-bound colour profile, a digital copy by email within 48 hours, and an optional fabric-swatch booklet to take shopping.

The full £250 is paid at booking by card, through the calendar. Cancellations more than 48 hours in advance are refunded in full; cancellations within 48 hours forfeit the fee.

The studio is at 78B Chatham Road, Battersea, London SW11 6HG. It is a quiet home studio with north-facing daylight, by appointment only. The nearest stations are Clapham Junction (10 minutes) and Wandsworth Town (15 minutes). On-street parking is available.

No. Please arrive without makeup, self-tan, or recently dyed hair. The work depends on observing your skin truthfully against the drapes; foundation, blush, and tinted moisturiser all interfere with that observation. There is a clean cotton wipe at the studio if you’d like to remove makeup on arrival.

Something neutral, comfortable, and easy to take a cape over. Black, white, and grey are all fine — the cape covers your clothing entirely during the drape work. Avoid strong-coloured tops or anything that reflects onto the face.

This happens occasionally. A client expects to be a Winter and turns out to be a Spring; or expects warm gold and turns out to be cool silver. The drapes are objective — they show you what they show — and so my job is partly to help you see what I’m seeing, and to explain why. Most clients leave reconciled to the result. A few want time to sit with it; that is fine.

What I will not do is "give" you a season because you’d prefer it. The point of the analysis is the truth of it.

For most clients, yes. The 12-season system is the contemporary standard in the trade because it strikes a sensible balance between rigour and practicality. The older 4-season system is too coarse for many people; the more granular 16- and 36-season systems tend to confuse rather than clarify.

That said, the underlying axes — undertone, value, chroma — are the same across all serious systems. What you take home is a palette, not a label.

No. The work depends on observing your skin against drapes in correct neutral daylight. No camera, screen, or remote setup has yet matched that, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The Colour Doc is in person only.

Yes — gift vouchers are £250 and posted in a hand-addressed envelope. They are valid for twelve months from purchase. Voucher purchases are arranged by email; please write to studio@colourdoc.co.uk, or see the gift-vouchers page for details.

Arrive without makeup or self-tan, wearing something neutral, with hair in roughly its everyday state — cleanly washed, no fresh dye job. Eat beforehand. Allow yourself the full 150 minutes; the appointment doesn’t run over but it does run its course.

Yes. The Colour Doc is open to men and women equally. Colour analysis works the same way regardless of gender — the drapes observe your skin, hair, and eyes, not your wardrobe choices. Appointments for male clients tend to focus slightly more on suiting, shirting, and knitwear than on makeup, but the method and the output are the same.

Some of the most memorable results at the studio have been for male clients who arrived sceptical and left with a clear understanding of their wardrobe for the first time.

It can, and it is worth knowing about before you arrive. The drape work assesses skin tone and eye colour as the primary axes; both are entirely unaffected by hair dye. Hair contributes to the overall picture, and heavily processed or dramatically recoloured hair can introduce a slight distortion to the value and chroma readings.

If you are able to arrive with your natural colour grown in, even partially, that is ideal. If not, the analysis still proceeds on skin and eyes, and I note the situation in your profile. Most clients with coloured hair get a fully accurate result.

AI colour analysis tools — including the various ChatGPT prompts and apps that derive a palette from a photograph — are a useful starting point for learning the vocabulary and forming a first hypothesis. They use genuine colour theory and are improving. But they cannot observe what draping observes.

Skin behaves differently in person than it does in a photograph. The subtle changes that make draping legible — the way a cool fabric deepens the jaw, the way a warm ground shifts the eyes, the way the skin lifts or drops against a given undertone — are visible in person in neutral daylight and almost entirely invisible through a screen. The better AI analyses tend to confirm what people already suspected. In-person draping reveals what they did not know.

If you have an AI result and want to verify or refine it, a consultation is the most reliable next step. Bring the result — it is useful context, right or wrong.

Colour analysis determines which colours flatter you, based on the objective properties of your colouring — undertone, value, and chroma. It is a diagnostic process, and the result is a palette.

Personal styling is a broader service covering silhouette, proportion, lifestyle, and wardrobe planning — and may or may not include a colour component. The Colour Doc offers colour analysis specifically, not full personal styling, because colour is a deep enough subject on its own and because precision in one thing is worth more than breadth across several.

The fabric-swatch booklet is an optional add-on: a small concertina-folded booklet of woven fabric swatches in your palette colours, sized to fit in a handbag or jacket pocket. It is designed to be taken shopping — held next to a garment in a shop, it tells you immediately and precisely whether the colour is in your palette.

Clients who take the swatch booklet consistently describe it as one of the most practically useful things they own. Most find that the number of returned or unworn purchases drops noticeably in the months after their analysis.

Yes — and gift-driven bookings often produce some of the most memorable sessions, because the recipient arrives without fixed expectations and is genuinely surprised by what the process reveals.

The one practical note: the recipient needs to be willing to arrive without makeup, in their natural hair colour, or as close to it as they can manage. The session itself is unhurried and conversational — not a test and not an interrogation. The analysis is the result of what the drapes show; the client has nothing to perform or decide correctly. There is nothing to fail.