Warm Spring color palette: the True Spring shades, and the ones that dull you

Depth is the wrong place to begin. What decides this season is the color sitting underneath - and on a Warm Spring that color is gold, on ivory skin and on deep brown skin alike.

The undertone is golden, peach or light apricot, and the skin above it looks translucent, as though lit from behind. It is not the dense matte finish of an autumn and it is not the cool porcelain of a winter. The depth itself is unconstrained: lightness and undertone are independent properties, and confusing the two is the commonest route to the wrong season.

Two quick contradictions are worth knowing before you run the tests, because either one on its own is usually enough to send you elsewhere: freckles that come up gray rather than ginger, and a bare-skin flush that is pink-lilac rather than peach. Neither belongs to a golden undertone. The full range of this skin - its shades, how it behaves in sun, what its freckles and flush actually look like at four depths - is catalogued in the next section.

Three checks for the undertone

Test 1 What color are your wrist veins?

Daylight only, and turn the underside of a wrist upward. Bulbs throw yellow into this and cold LEDs throw blue, so an answer found under either is worthless. Judge the vessels as a group - one vein that runs bluer than its neighbors proves nothing.

• Green or olive - a warm undertone, which keeps Warm Spring and the other warm seasons in play.
• Blue or violet - cool, and the springs drop out entirely.
• Nothing decisive - probably neutral. The next two tests carry more weight anyway.

Caveat: of the three, trust this one least - it breaks at both ends of the range. Deep skin often will not show the vessels at all, and very fair thin skin exaggerates them toward blue. When yours are hard to make out, treat test 2 as the real answer; it behaves the same way on every complexion.

Test 2 Plain white paper against the jaw

Makeup off, hair back off the face, daylight from a window. Bring ordinary copier paper up against the jaw - it has to be properly white, because anything cream or ivory carries its own warmth and will simply tell you what you hoped. Give the border between paper and skin a second or two of attention; the rest of the face is a distraction.

• A golden or peach cast comes up - warm, and the Warm Spring answer.
• The skin turns pink or bluish - a cool undertone.
• Everything goes flat and grayish - a neutral undertone, and often an olive one.

Caveat: this one holds at every complexion depth, which is why it outranks the other two here. Just wait ten minutes if you have come in from the cold - a weather flush reads as a pink undertone and costs you the answer.

Test 3 Yellow gold beside silver

Two plain pieces, no stones - one yellow gold, one silver - held against the wrist one after the other. Ignore the shine entirely and read the skin next to it: does it settle and lift, or does a yellow cast come up with shadow under the eyes?

• Gold wins - the skin looks lit from underneath. Light bronze and copper do the same job here.
• Silver wins - the face looks fresher beside it, which is a cool undertone.
• Neither clearly wins - neutral, and temperature will not be the axis that decides your season.

Caveat: keep the two pieces similar in width, since a broad cuff wins against a thin chain on sheer area before color enters into it. Deep complexions frequently carry both metals well at the wrist - in that case read the under-eye, which registers the difference earlier than anywhere else.

Once the paper and the gold both come back warm, every cool season is off the table. All that remains is which warm season you are, and that is settled on clarity in block 4.

Warm Spring eyes are light-filled rather than light-colored. The iris looks as though a lamp sat behind it, whichever color it happens to be.

There are nearly always warm sparks gathered around the pupil - gold, amber or ginger. Those sparks are the most useful thing on this page to look for, because they survive at every eye color and every complexion depth, where the color name does not.

The outer edge of the iris is soft. A hard graphic dark ring drawn around it belongs to a winter; here the color fades out into the white rather than being outlined against it.

Four descriptions cover most Warm Springs: a clear blue-green or turquoise, a warm green flecked with olive and gold, a light hazel that runs golden-amber at the pupil and green at the rim, and a warm amber or golden brown. A light blue with a green note also fits. A steel or icy blue does not.

Brown eyes are no disqualifier, provided they are light and warm - golden brown, hazel, amber. A dense dark brown that reads almost black, with a cool cast to it, is winter or deep autumn territory instead.

Two things decide it, and neither is the color: warm sparks at the pupil, and an outer edge that fades rather than cuts.

Depth varies widely inside this season. The pigment does not - it is warm every time, and sunlight is where it admits it.

Natural Warm Spring hair runs golden or wheat blonde, honey and caramel, light warm chestnut with a gold sheen, and natural copper red. In daylight it lifts and throws copper, which is the quickest separation from the ash tones of a summer: those go gray-beige in the same light.

What does not occur here is weight. Near-black hair, a deep muted chestnut, dark chocolate, burgundy-wood - all of them outbalance the rest of the face, and all of them are autumn or winter depths. The deepest natural shade this season reaches is a light warm chestnut, and that shade is the one most often filed as Warm Autumn by mistake.

Texture decides nothing. Fine and straight, thick and waving, or tight coils - none of it changes the answer, which is why the strip below holds the same gold across four very different heads.

If your hair is colored, read the roots or a childhood photograph instead. And one thing worth knowing before the next appointment: ash formulas fight this coloring. The face grays underneath them and the color turns brassy within weeks, because the warm pigment below keeps pushing back up through it.

The level is not the test - the sheen is. Copper in sunlight belongs here; gray-beige in that same light does not.

The hair sits a clear step or two away from the skin, the eyes stay bright, and none of it cuts. That middle setting is a real finding, not a hedge.

Contrast is the difference in lightness between hair, skin and eyes. On a Warm Spring it lands in the middle: the hair is usually lighter than people expect, the skin is clear, the eyes are bright, and the steps between the three are visible without being sharp.

That places the season between two neighbors. A winter face is drawn in hard lines; a soft summer blurs into a single tone. This does neither - you can name three separate tones and none of them is dramatic against the others.

The comparison that matters, though, is Warm Autumn, and contrast alone will not make it: both sit near the middle. What differs is the quality of the color. A spring's tones stay clear and sunlit; an autumn's are deepened and dusted, as if pigment had been added rather than light. That is the clarity axis, and it is the one this page turns on.

Medium contrast rules out both extremes but not Warm Autumn. Take that question to the drape test below.

The black-and-white test, run for you

A Warm Spring in color on the left. On the right sits that same shot with its hue stripped away, so lightness becomes the only property left to compare - and her hair turns out to sit a short way beneath her skin rather than a long way.

Hair Skin Ramp runs black to white

Read the distance between the two markers, not the height they sit at. Height on the ramp is depth; the distance between hair and skin is contrast, and that distance is not a score to rank faces by. Notice what the deep Warm Spring does: her hair lands at almost the same height as the Winter's, and she is still nothing like the Winter, because her skin comes down to meet it. The Winter's does not - her skin stays up at the light end while her hair drops to the floor.

The most direct check here, and the one that settles the autumn question. Hold each color up in daylight without makeup, and watch your face rather than the fabric.

Black is the one shade this test cannot show you honestly. Photographed against skin it stops reading as cloth and turns into a flat patch, so judge it on a real garment at a mirror instead - and if you want the depth without the drain, a warm dark brown or bitter chocolate does the same job.