The Summer color season

Breathtaking Summer colors.

Summer colors exude gorgeous tranquility.

While the Spring color season gets bright, warm tones, Summer colors shift to a more muted, cooler palette.

The Summer season embodies the beauty of relaxation, vacation, and serenity.

Summer’s vibe can feel dreamy and surreal. Muted color evokes the bleary feeling of waking and sensing a dream’s hazy contents fading from your mind.

Summer color can also feel elegant, since gentle color easily appears refined and graceful.

The vibe of Summer colors depends on their context, like whether the colors are in a beachy maxi dress (which might read as more dreamy) or a pantsuit (which might read as more elegant).

It also depends on your subtype—see below!

Summer Subtypes

Light Summer is Summer influenced by Spring. Since both seasons are characterized by generally light colors, Light Summer colors overall appear quite light. With the addition of Spring’s warmth and brightness, Light Summer colors are neutral-cool and will be brighter and more high-energy compared to other Summers.

True Summer is the coolest, purest Summer subtype. True Summer’s colors are generally muted and very cool. They exude the quintessential gentle Summer vibe.

Soft Summer is Summer influenced by Autumn. As the name suggests, Soft Summer’s colors appear even more muted compared to the other Summers. With Autumn’s warming influence, Soft Summer colors are neutral-cool and can have a hazy or dreamy quality, reading as very laidback and understated.

Summer Color Season Celebrities

Below are celebrities I’ve virtually draped as having the Light, True, and Soft Summer color seasons.

Light Summer Celebrities

Light Summers and Light Springs tend to have the lightest coloring of all the 12 seasons—so it makes sense that these subtypes are commonly confused.

Determining whether someone with a Light color season is cool or warm can be difficult, especially because a person’s coolness can seem to change dramatically depending on the lighting:

Above—two pictures of Naomi Watts wearing the same dress, earrings, and hairstyle, presumably on the same day.

But her skin tone looks so different in both. On the left, in what seems like natural outdoor lighting, she has an overall cool, fair complexion. In this photo, many people would probably see her as Light Summer.

On the right, the brighter lighting gives her skin a warmer, more golden appearance. (It’s also possible these colors have been manipulated, although I didn’t see anything indicating this in the original file source, and I didn’t do anything to alter these photos.)

This is part of why it can be so hard to type celebrities’ color seasons. These pictures of Naomi Watts could have been taken just minutes apart—but her skin looks so different in both.

The takeaway? We can’t assume that any given image accurately depicts a celebrity’s skin tone, and we really can’t type people just by looking at them. It’s crucial to actually take the time to compare a celebrity’s skin tone systematically to color swatches representative of each color season, to see which season best harmonizes. This is the process I use for every celebrity I include in my color season posts and on Pinterest.

Above, Light Summers Sasha Luss and Sienna Miller. You can see how overall they have very light coloring, and how Sasha’s black jacket doesn’t connect to her gentle skin tone.

Sasha’s hair here is also really interesting—the dyed color appears cool and bright, probably a Winter shade. And there’s a disconnect between its brightness and her more muted coloring. But arguably, the dyed hair kind of works on her, because Sasha is a dominant Ethereal (with Dramatic and Classic), and very pale, cool-toned hair flatters the otherworldly Ethereal vibe.

That said, I don’t think this is her ideal color, since it clashes with her skin. Future posts will discuss how to harmoniously combine your color season with your style type (even if they seem like opposites).

Critically, while Naomi Watts, Sasha Luss, and Sienna Miller have coloring that appears notably light, you can absolutely still be a Light season even if you don’t have obviously light hair, skin, or eyes.

And while Light Summers and Light Springs often dye their hair blonde, many (probably most) of them have naturally brown hair. From Sasha’s roots, we can see that her real hair color appears brown. Same with Sienna Miller and Naomi Watts.

The only thing that ultimately matters in determining your color season is how your skin reacts to different colors—not how your skin appears to the naked eye.

True Summer Celebrities

Above, True Summers Jessica Szohr, Logan Browning, and Bella Hadid.

With Jessica Szohr, we can how she’s more flattered by the cooler hair color at her roots than the warmer tones toward her ends. And we can also see that the vibrant background colors overpower her gentle skin tone. Virtual draping reveals her best colors to be muted and very cool.

If there’s any color season that’s generally hardest to type, it might be True Summer.

This is because people often use bronzer, warm light sources, and other products and methods that can make cool-toned skin appear warmer.

This would in theory also make it harder to type True Winters, the other purely cool season. And to some extent it probably does. But Winter skin has an intensity that can make it easier to recognize, even if the person has gone all-out on the bronzer.

With Summer, the beautiful coolness and subtlety of their coloring can make them especially susceptible to camouflaging as a different season, or to being typed as the wrong Summer subtype. True Summers in particular may be often typed as Soft or sometimes Light Summer—mistakenly thought to have warmer skin than they do.

With that said, I know many people think Bella Hadid is a Soft Summer, but based on virtually draping her in several different photos that appeared to be makeup free and in natural lighting, I’m confident she’s True.

Below, she is wearing some makeup (though not too heavy—see a couple freckles still visible on her neck, which looks similar to her face’s skin tone).

I think especially when she uses bronzer, it makes sense that people don’t think she’s purely cool. To the naked eye, she doesn’t seem extremely cool toned.

But look what happens when she’s draped in a Soft vs. True Summer green:

Which image of Bella Hadid do you prefer? On the left, in Soft Summer, what I see is that the color is too faded for her skin, making the whole image rather bland and somewhat hard to look at. On the right, in True Summer, it’s like a relief—the True Summer green is cool enough for her, it’s not dulling her skin, she can relax, she’s free. And then if you pan back to the left, again she’s trapped in a color prison. Overall, the left image has an unpleasant, almost muddy quality.

This unpleasant quality won’t occur on a person who actually has Soft Summer coloring. Soft Summer colors are beautifully muted and smoky, and you can see this when they’re worn by a real Soft Summer.

I’ve also draped Bella’s father, Mohamed Hadid, as True Summer. One of my latest thoughts about color season, as I type more and more biologically related celebrities, is that a way to provide evidence for typings of female celebrities could be to type their male relatives, because men tend to wear less makeup than women, so it’s theoretically easier to discern men’s real skin tones.

But I think it’s actually pretty common for men in Hollywood to use makeup and/or fake tanner, and even if you’re not wearing any makeup, lighting can still dramatically change how your skin appears to the naked eye, so—I don’t know.

Based on virtual draping, Mohamed Hadid is also a True Summer, despite that like Bella, he doesn’t necessarily read that way at first glance.

Soft Summer Celebrities

Above we have Alexa Chung, Leona Lewis, and Leona Lewis in different lighting. The first Leona Lewis, on her album cover, is more obviously a Soft Summer, and she looks pretty harmonious in the soft and smokey makeup and hair color. (You can see how beautiful very soft, muted colors are on a real Soft Summer!)

In the second image, her skin looks really different, likely due to strong, unnatural lighting. If you Google her, you can see that without makeup and in more natural light, Leona Lewis’s skin looks much closer to how she appears on the album cover.

Like so many celebrities, she can easily look much warmer than she really is depending on lighting and makeup.

Gisele Bündchen is another Soft Summer who doesn’t necessarily look like a stereotypical Soft Summer:

Here the combination of lighting, golden blonde hair, and potentially foundation/tanner could make Gisele pass as a warm season, maybe a Soft Autumn or a Spring. But virtually draping without makeup reveals that she’s primarily cool-toned, with a bit of warm influence from Autumn.

Here she’s pictured when younger, giving you a better idea of her real skin and hair color.

Conclusion

Summer celebrities are hard to type. From bronzer to highlighted hair to bright lighting, many forces conspire to make us think that Summers are warmer (and brighter) than they are.

The takeaway is that just because a celebrity looks like they have a warm skin tone in a particular photo, doesn’t mean they actually do—virtually draping celebrities is key to understanding their real color seasons.

The next color season post will be on Autumns. Subsequent posts will further explore how color seasons are inherited, and how this can make celebrity color analysis more accurate.