Cool · high contrast · vivid
Cool with high contrast and clear eyes. Saturated, icy-based colours match your intensity; muted ones dull you.
Three, not thirty. A palette is a prediction about which tones lift your face, not a list of banned colours — and a long avoid-list is the fastest way to make a useful idea useless.
Bright Winter is cool colouring with the highest contrast in the system: clear, often striking eyes against a distinct separation between hair and skin. Like Bright Spring, brightness is the defining property — muted colours, which flatter most people, are the ones that fail here.
Contrast is the first test and it is visible in a photograph.
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Straight-on, even lighting, at arm's length gives the most comparable reading.
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Bright Spring
Temperature. Identical brightness and contrast; coral versus fuchsia settles it in one comparison.
True Winter
Clarity. True Winter is cool at full strength but slightly less bright; if icy pastels and vivid brights both work, you are Bright.
One of the few seasons where saturated colour on both eye and lip works at once.
Dark and cool, or genuinely light and cool — but not in between. Warm brown and honey tones are the common miss; they reduce contrast, which is exactly the resource this season spends.
Polished silver, white gold and platinum, in high shine. Yellow gold is the clearest miss in the palette.
Contrast is the first test and it is visible in a photograph. Convert a photo of yourself to black and white. Bright Winters show wide separation between hair, skin and eyes. A saturated fuchsia should energise the face where a dusty rose deadens it. Then temperature: fuchsia over coral, optic white over cream, silver over gold.
True red, Royal blue, Bright teal, Magenta, Violet and similar tones, with optic white, true grey, black as the neutrals that carry them.
Polished silver, white gold and platinum, in high shine. Yellow gold is the clearest miss in the palette.
Dark and cool, or genuinely light and cool — but not in between. Warm brown and honey tones are the common miss; they reduce contrast, which is exactly the resource this season spends.
Temperature. Identical brightness and contrast; coral versus fuchsia settles it in one comparison.
Clarity. True Winter is cool at full strength but slightly less bright; if icy pastels and vivid brights both work, you are Bright.
Not sure which one you are? Measure your three axes — it runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.