DON’T LET COLOR ANALYSIS TIE YOU DOWN: THE SUBJECTIVE TREND OF COLOR ANALYSIS
BY OLIVIA LEGGANS ILLUSTRATION BY KENDALL WIFF
As children, we announce our favorite colors with zeal. With this declaration, we begin to pridefully claim our growing identities. We gravitate towards certain shades without objective understanding. We think orange looks good with our skin tone or blue brings out the color in our eyes. Our recent fixation on seasonal color analysis, however, has nothing to do with color.
YouTube and TikTok accounts actively post seasonal color analysis content, yet the dust has mostly settled on the controversial and subjective trend. The novelty has worn off and our rapid trend cycle continues.
The 2023 revival of the 1980s classification system birthed clips of clients — usually women — with an array of colored fabric swatches draped around their necks. These videos typically showed a color analyst switching between color swatches and describing why specific tones may or may not be flattering for the client. One session could cost the client upwards of $250.
The result was not just a simple prescription of favorable colors, but a determination of what styles, shades, and items were detrimental to the client’s image. The client is then categorized into a spring, summer, autumn, or winter palette based on how flattering colors are against skin, eye, and hair color.
Vogue and The New York Times published commentary, along with traditional, daytime news channel segments, and YouTube houses pages of commentary videos.
Most media surrounding the frenzy reinforced the original system’s lack of consideration for black and brown skin tones, as well as the subjectivity of “flattering” colors. Several companies have now expanded on the original framework to include previously excluded groups.
Apart from businesses and influencers that financially rely on the illusion of seasonal color analysis, the public opinion of the tactic is generally negative. Experts, however, cannot seem to universally agree on one’s seasonal color assignment. Subjectivity runs rampant and clear, and consistent patterns are nowhere to be found. This prevented the system from establishing deep usability and reliance on Generation Z.
On the surface, the explosion of microtrends, niche aesthetics, and the mixed bag of “cores” (i.e. worm-core, dead-leaf-core, or retro-fairy-core), seemingly indicates an obsessive labeling addiction. Some may look at these overly specific labels with contempt and wonder why Gen Z jams every aspect of their personality and style into a box. But what if these multi-hyphenate phrases are not labels, but identities?
Social media gives users unlimited access to cultures, media, and experiences different from their own. Users sift through the daunting vat of information to construct their identities and unnecessarily precise identities emerge. As a result, niche references and unpredictable combinations form. Gen Z does not squeeze themselves into labels but constructs new labels for and around their identities. The 2023 seasonal color analysis resurgence was a brief rebuttal to the untetherable web of personality tags floating around social media.
The seasonal categorical system has four clear labels with warm and cool variants for each season. Although few people fit neatly into these categories, the clear-cut classifications provide a rare sense of certainty. “Cool Summers” can find their tribe with other “Cool Summers.” “Autumns” find solace in knowing exactly what color clothing to buy. Seasonal color analysis appeals to our subconscious and conscious desire to categorize ourselves. The system, however, falls short in application, for the sorting of all humans into four visual categories is bound to leave outliers, not to mention right-out absurd. An ideology that lumps all darker skin tones into a singular category is a deeply flawed thought system. Even the light skin tones the system is based around, cannot be categorized into such narrow divisions.
While many design fields use color analysis to evoke specific emotions or connotations, personal and seasonal color analysis targets our instinct to categorize the complex and messy. The consistent reliance on personality-precise identifiers and the trickling abandonment of the seasonal color analysis system reveals Gen Z’s long-term desire to shed restrictive labels. Maybe niche classifications are the stepping stones to a wholly label-less society. Maybe the most recent seasonal color analysis blip exemplifies a less dominant push for increased categorization in specific circles or demographics.
The rise of the trend centered around the anticipation of garnering a label, and not the result’s genuine accuracy, highlights the human fascination with labeling. The subsequent resistance to widely implement the seasonal color analysis indicates Gen Z’s subversive views of a traditional orderly social categorization, and, more importantly, gives a glimpse into the the future of a socially fluid and label-less society.
