Cool · medium value · very muted
Cool and muted, with low contrast between hair, skin and eyes. Greyed, gentle colours flatter; saturated ones overwhelm.
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.
Soft Summer is the most muted of the cool seasons and the most commonly misidentified of all twelve — it is the season people land in after two other systems told them something that did not work. Hair, skin and eyes sit close together in both depth and intensity, so nothing in the face is loud, and colours with any saturation take the picture over.
Muting is the property to test, and it is easier to see in what fails than in what works.
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Straight-on, even lighting, at arm's length gives the most comparable reading.
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Soft Autumn
Temperature, and it is the single most common mix-up in the system. Both are muted and low-contrast; Soft Autumn's skin has a golden cast, Soft Summer's a pink or ashy one. Compare camel against grey-taupe.
True Summer
Muting. If clean cool colours still work on you, you are True Summer rather than Soft.
The whole face works better a step down in saturation, not a step down in colour.
Cool medium brown, soft ash tones, mushroom blonde. High-contrast colouring — platinum over dark, or bright highlights — works against the season by manufacturing contrast the face does not have.
Brushed silver and matte white metals. Polished anything is slightly too bright; pewter is the ideal finish.
Muting is the property to test, and it is easier to see in what fails than in what works. Put a clean bright colour under your chin — a true red, a clear cobalt. If the colour looks great and your face looks absent, you are muted. Then a greyed version of the same colour. If your features come back into focus, that is the season. Check contrast in a black-and-white photo of yourself: Soft Summers show very little separation between hair, skin and eyes.
Blue grey, Dusty rose, Sage, Dusty lilac, Storm blue and similar tones, with oyster, ash, charcoal blue as the neutrals that carry them.
Brushed silver and matte white metals. Polished anything is slightly too bright; pewter is the ideal finish.
Cool medium brown, soft ash tones, mushroom blonde. High-contrast colouring — platinum over dark, or bright highlights — works against the season by manufacturing contrast the face does not have.
Temperature, and it is the single most common mix-up in the system. Both are muted and low-contrast; Soft Autumn's skin has a golden cast, Soft Summer's a pink or ashy one. Compare camel against grey-taupe.
Muting. If clean cool colours still work on you, you are True Summer rather than Soft.
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