No. Once you are past adolescence, your colour season does not change. If you are a True Spring at twenty, you will be a True Spring at seventy. What does change — gradually, predictably, and in ways worth understanding — is which colours within your season do the most for you. The distinction matters, because it is the difference between a colour analysis being a snapshot and being an investment.

What is fixed

Of the three dimensions that determine your season, undertone is the bedrock. It does not shift with age, season, sunshine, or fashion. The underlying temperature of your skin — cool, cool-neutral, warm-neutral, or warm — is set by your particular formula of melanins, and that formula stays put. Nobody returns from holiday a different season, and nobody ages from a Summer into an Autumn.

Contrast and chroma are more mobile, but not mobile enough. They drift; they do not jump categories. The drift is real, though, and it is worth naming precisely.

What age actually changes

From adulthood onwards, two slow movements happen. Your chroma decreases — the natural luminosity of skin and the saturation of the iris both soften over the decades. And your contrast level eases downwards as brows and lashes thin and the iris becomes less defined. Someone with a very high contrast level in their thirties may sit closer to high contrast in their seventies.

Neither movement reassigns your season. What it does is reweight your palette. A True Autumn in her sixties may find the deepest, richest end of the True Autumn palette slightly heavier than it used to be, while the gentler shades that lean towards Soft Autumn work better than ever. Same season, same palette — different centre of gravity within it.

Grey hair

Going grey does not change your season either, but it deserves its own paragraph because it is the change people worry about most. Fully grey or white hair harmonises with the rest of your colouring — it grew out of the same biology, and it sits comfortably against your skin. What grey hair does change is the evidence available to an analyst: it tells us little about your original contrast level and, being very low in chroma, little about your undertone. An analysis is still entirely possible with grey hair; it simply leans more on the skin and eyes.

One genuine shift: people with an obviously warm undertone often find that once their hair has gone fully grey, the warm-neutral end of their palette serves them better than peak warmth. And a caution for the salon: dyeing your hair back to its pre-grey shade will not restore your original contrast level. The rest of your colouring has moved; the old hair colour can sit on top of it like a wig.

Tanning

A suntan raises the chroma of your skin — it becomes more saturated — and in light-skinned, cool, low-chroma colouring it adds a little warmth too, which is why some fair Summers find they can briefly carry warmer, clearer shades in August. In medium and deeper skin tones, a tan increases saturation without changing the skin's hue at all. In neither case does your undertone change, and in neither case does your contrast level. The season holds; the edges of the palette flex slightly, and settle back.

Self-tanner is a different matter entirely. It is a layer of pigment that has nothing to do with your biology, and it will sabotage any attempt at analysis — which is why it has to be fully gone before a draping session.

Children are the exception

Everything above applies from roughly mid-adolescence. Before that, colouring genuinely transforms — the blond five-year-old becomes the dark-haired adult — and a child's colouring tells you very little about their adult season. Analysing children is, for that reason, a waste of everyone's time.

What this means practically

It means an analysis done properly is done once. Your season is a fact about you that holds across decades, hairstyles, and holidays; the refinements that come with age happen inside a palette you already own. The snapshot is the investment.

Rebecca Sells is a certified colour practitioner and the founder of The Colour Doc, a personal colour analysis studio in Battersea, South London. She practised as a clinical medical doctor before opening the studio in 2025.

Can your colour season change?