A common way of explaining the twelve-season system goes something like this: first, find your main season — Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter — and then narrow it down to a sub-season. Light Spring. True Summer. Soft Autumn. Deep Winter. You find the category, then you find the sub-category within it.
This approach is intuitive. It is also, as a method for finding your colours, a reliable way to arrive at the wrong answer.
Where the misunderstanding comes from
The four-season system — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter — was the original framework, popularised in the early 1980s. It was built on three variables: undertone (warm or cool), value (light or deep), and chroma (clear or soft). Each season corresponded to a combination of these three, and each came with a palette.
The system worked. It also had limitations. Grouping everyone into four types meant that two people with meaningfully different colouring could receive the same palette, one that suited one of them well and the other only approximately. Refinement was needed.
The twelve-season system expanded the original four by dividing each season into three, producing types like Bright Spring, True Spring, and Light Spring in place of the single Spring category. This is where the sub-season framing originates — and where the misunderstanding takes hold.
Why the sub-season framing fails
If the twelve seasons were genuinely sub-seasons of the four, then finding your main season first would be a useful preliminary step. But the relationship between seasons is not hierarchical — it is spatial.
The twelve seasons sit on a matrix, arranged according to their three axes. Seasons close to each other on the matrix share similarities and borrow from one another's palettes. But the closest neighbours of a given season are not always within the same original four-season grouping.
Deep Winter and Deep Autumn, for instance, share as much with each other as Deep Winter shares with True Winter. They are adjacent on the matrix because they share a high contrast level — even though Autumn is warm and Winter is cool. Treating Deep Winter as a sub-type of Winter, and working outward from there, misses the relationship with Deep Autumn entirely.
The practical consequence: someone who begins by identifying as a Winter and then narrows from within that category may miss their season completely if their colouring sits at a boundary — which a significant number of people do.
The correct approach
The twelve seasons are more accurately understood as twelve distinct colour types, each defined by a specific combination of undertone, contrast level, and chroma. They are related to one another by proximity on the matrix, not by membership of a parent category.
Finding your season means working from the three axes outward, not from the four seasons inward. What is your contrast level? What is your undertone? What is your chroma? The answers to those three questions locate you on the matrix — and the season you land on may or may not be the one you would have guessed by starting with Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter.
What this changes in practice
This reframing has one significant consequence for the draping process. If you are testing colours to confirm your season, you should be testing across adjacent seasons — which may span more than one of the original four — rather than only within what you think your main season is.
A person who suspects they might be a Soft Autumn should also test Soft Summer shades, since these seasons are neighbours on the matrix. If they restrict their testing to Autumn types only, they may find a reasonable fit and stop before finding the best one.
The names of the seasons carry a certain romance, and there is nothing wrong with that. Light Spring and Deep Winter are evocative labels for real distinctions in colouring. But the names are not the system. The system is the three axes — undertone, contrast, chroma — and the matrix they produce. Everything else follows from that.
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.
Further reading
→ Book a consultation What happens in an appointment Back to the journal