Summary: This article shows you how to find your season by looking at your energy, and where contrast belongs when you get dressed.
How Do You Find Your Season?
You find your season through your energy. You can identify your seasonal energy with my free Find My Season quiz or by talking it through in a profiling session.
Your season tracks your energy, and contrast is how you combine the colors in your palette.
Winter is where the confusion shows up most, so that is where we begin.
Why Winter Gets Tied to High Contrast
Winter carries a strong reputation for high contrast: black hair, pale skin, black and white outfits. Someone with that coloring often gets called a winter, even when black overpowers her. Someone with low contrast coloring assumes she must be a different season.
Contrast is the difference in lightness and darkness between two colors. People often conflate saturation, how vivid a color is, with contrast. Contrast is inherent to the person, and you replicate it in the outfit. The season tracks energy.
The Coworker Who Was Definitely a Winter
Back in the Color Me Beautiful era, I was in college and working at JCPenney. My friends and I were all reading Color Me Beautiful. My hair was still almost black and my skin was snow white. I used to get teased and called Casper.
A woman who worked in an adjacent department was definitely a winter. All she ever wore was black and white, and I think I saw her in red maybe once. I casually mentioned to her that I couldn’t be a winter, and she said, “What? With all that contrast?”
I have always been overpowered by black, and my seasonal energy is actually spring.
Each Season Holds Five Palettes
In my system, each season has five palettes. There is some flexibility with adjoining seasons, and all five palettes carry the energy of the season.
Choosing the Palette Within Your Season
A woman identifies her seasonal energy through the quiz or a profiling session. It’s a very simple process. She tells me how she experiences herself in her energy, and I choose the palette from among the five that best supports her coloring, her temperature, her value, and her resonance.
I can give the muted winter palette to a woman with any value and contrast pattern. The palette name says nothing about contrast.
The Blonde, Blue-Eyed Winter
This year I worked with a woman who went through the Congruence Code and identified her seasonal energy as winter. She was blonde, with blue eyes and low contrast. I gave her a muted, misty, soft winter palette, and she loved it. It expressed her energy. Because she had always heard that winter was high contrast, she needed time to live with the palette and let her understanding of color catch up with her.
How Contrast Helps You Combine Colors
A palette leaves open how to combine the colors. Getting a palette doesn’t tell you how to put the colors together in an outfit. Contrast answers that. The contrast within your outfit should be similar to the contrast between your own inherent colors, the colors of your personal features.
Find Your Season on Your Own Authority
Sometimes just naming a season gives you energy to move in a positive direction. A lot of people picture that to find your season, you need to be color draped. Draping puts the decision, and all the power, in the hands of someone else. You are the buck-stops-here expert on yourself, and I’m here to support you.
You can find your seasonal energy through the free Find My Season quiz, in a profiling session, or with a document I send you that you answer and send back.
What One Season Name Did for a Friend
While I was working on the quiz, I texted a friend the worksheet the information came from. She texted back, “So I’m an autumn?” and I agreed, because that’s the energy she has. The last time I saw her, she had gone shopping and was wearing a stunning jacket in a color that made her eyes look absolutely luminous. In her case, just knowing the name of the season gave her a little spark of confidence to go shopping and make fantastic choices for herself.
Find Your Season, Then Choose Your Palette
Most people think winter means high contrast, but actually contrast is how you combine your colors, not how you find your season. Knowing your season and how contrast works in your own color combinations lets your clothes carry your energy into a room, and people see what you have to offer.
The free Find My Season quiz names your seasonal energy and gives you a little direction besides. The name is the starting vocabulary for everything else. The palette within your season comes through several of my offers that include a Seasonal Energy Palette, and a custom palette skips that step entirely.
Here’s something simple you can do this week: take the quiz, then pull one thing from your closet that feels to you like the season’s energy you got, and wear it.
After reading this article, you may be wondering how season and contrast apply to the clothes hanging in your own closet. A free 30 minute style system synthesis call bridges that gap, because we look together at what you already know about yourself and figure out what is missing. If you would like to explore it together, you are welcome to book the free conversation here.