The three Spring subtypes—plus how you inherit your color season

While Winter colors are bright and cool, Spring colors shift to bright and warm.

Spring’s vibe feels high-energy, optimistic, and alive. If you’re drawn to people with warm, lively personalities, you may also be entranced by the warmth and liveliness of Spring color.

Spring subtypes

Bright Spring is Spring influenced by Winter. Since Spring and Winter are both characterized by bright colors, Bright Spring colors are very bright. With Winter’s cooling influence, Bright Spring’s colors are neutral to warm.

Bright Spring

True Spring is the warmest, purest Spring subtype. So True Spring’s colors are bright and very warm. True Spring skin often appears to radiate a warm, golden glow.

True Spring

Light Spring is Spring influenced by Summer. As the name suggests, Light Spring’s colors will overall appear lighter compared to the other Spring subtypes. With Summer’s cooling influence, Light Spring’s best colors are also neutral to warm.

Light Spring

Spring celebrities

Below are examples of celebrities I’ve virtually draped as Bright, True, and Light Spring.

Bright Spring celebrities: Phoebe Tonkin, Jessica Paré, Lucy Liu

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Phoebe Tonkin and Jessica Paré are both flattered by highly saturated Bright Spring colors, like the shimmery red backdrop in their photos.

Springs are commonly confused with Autumn, and I’ve seen Phoebe Tonkin typed as Dark Autumn. But if you drape her virtually, you’ll see that any degree of fading in color washes her out, while very bright colors bring her to life.

Lucy Liu is often typed as Dark Winter, but you can see here how much more harmonious she is in very bright, clear colors.

Skin with a golden glow is most associated with True Spring but can sometimes be seen on all the Spring subtypes, including the Bright Springs above.

True Spring celebrities: Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Dichen Lachman

I’ve seen Taylor Swift typed as Light Spring. Based on virtual draping, I’m confident she’s True—but as we’ll explore below, the difference between True and Light Spring can be extremely subtle.

Rihanna I’ve seen typed as a Summer, but based on virtual draping, her skin appears very warm and bright.

A theme of this post—people often disagree on celebrities’ color seasons!

And the lighting in Dichen Lachman’s picture doesn’t appear natural, but she’s flattered by True Spring colors, and in better lighting, her natural skin tone often still has the golden Spring glow.

Light Spring celebrities: Alicia Keys, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gigi Hadid, Jon Voight, January Jones

As noted, the difference between Light Spring and True Spring can be extremely subtle.

So how can we distinguish them? The best method is to drape a person in colors representative of all 12 seasons and to make direct comparisons—for example, by putting a virtual Light Spring drape on one side of their face and a True Spring drape on the other, and visually analyzing which drape harmonizes. The more you practice this virtual draping process, the better you’ll get at detecting small differences in color.

I’ve also been experimenting with an additional method of providing evidence for celebrities’ color seasons:

How you inherit your color season

As noted previously, we inherit our style types in a predictable way.

The same seems true for color season, except that the way we inherit our color season may be even more predictable.

Specifically, while I need to type more biologically related celebrities to be sure, right now my hypothesis is that you’ll likely have the exact same color season as one of your biological parents (or both, if they both have the same color season).

So above I included Gwyneth Paltrow, because I’ve typed her as Light Spring, and I’ve also typed her mother Blythe Danner as Light Spring (and I’ve also typed Gwyneth’s daughter, Apple Martin, as Light Spring). And I included Gigi Hadid, who I’ve typed as Light Spring, along with her mother Yolanda Hadid.

I included Jon Voight because I plan to do a post on my controversial typing of his daughter Angelina Jolie’s color season. I don’t think Jolie is a Light Spring—I think Jolie inherited her color season from her mother Marcheline Bertrand—but I do think many people get Jolie’s color season wrong.

More on how color season is inherited in future posts!

Why color season is so hard to determine

Part of why color analysis is so hard is that there’s no real template for how each season should look.

People with the exact same color season can have very different skin tones, and people who don’t have the same season (e.g., True Spring and Light Spring) can seem to have nearly the same skin tone.

And a person’s skin tone can look markedly different in different lighting. Plus, people often dye their hair and wear foundation and other skin makeup. And photos of celebrities can be heavily edited.

That’s why I always type celebrities in lighting that appears natural and in makeup that appears absent or minimal. And I never assume a celebrity’s color season just by looking at them—I always carefully virtually drape them in colors representative of every season.

Does virtual color analysis work?

In my view, virtual color analysis is highly accurate—but only when specific conditions are met.