Summer color palette

Below is what that means, how to tell if it fits you, and a starting palette of summer-like colours with hex codes you can open in the colour tool.

What makes a palette "summer"

Seasonal colour analysis sorts colours along three scales:

• Hue (temperature): warm colours lean yellow, cool colours lean blue.
• Value: how light or dark a colour is.
• Chroma: how clear and bright, or soft and greyed, a colour is.

Each season is a combination. Summer is cool + light, and the system treats that combination as muted. Its opposite is autumn (warm + dark, also muted). Spring is warm + light and bright; winter is cool + dark and bright.

So a summer colour isn't just "pastel". It has a blue undertone, sits at the light-to-medium end, and has some grey in it. A bright baby pink is too clear; a dusty rose is summer.

How to tell if you're a summer

The system looks at your skin, eyes and hair together. Summers usually show:

• Cool undertones. Skin with a pink, rosy or blue cast rather than golden or peachy.
• Low to medium contrast between hair, skin and eyes. Ash blonde or light-to-mid ash brown hair is common.
• Soft eyes, such as grey-blue, grey-green or soft hazel, rather than very clear or very dark ones.

Many colour analysts split summer into three sub-types, depending on which quality is strongest:

• Light summer: lightness first, then coolness. The palette is pale and airy.
• True (cool) summer: coolness first. The palette is the bluest of the three.
• Soft summer: mutedness first. The palette is the most greyed and smoky, and it borders on autumn.

A quick test you can do at home: in daylight, hold a soft blue-grey and a warm camel under your face. If the blue-grey makes your skin look even and the camel makes it look sallow, you may be a summer. A professional analysis drapes dozens of fabrics, so treat a home test as a starting point.

A summer palette with hex codes

These eight colours come from the colour names CSS defines. We picked the ones that match summer's three qualities when measured in OKLCH: cool hue, high lightness and low chroma.

| Colour | Hex | |---|---| | Lavender | #e6e6fa | | Thistle | #d8bfd8 | | Light steel blue | #b0c4de | | Light blue | #add8e6 | | Powder blue | #b0e0e6 | | Sky blue | #87ceeb | | Cadet blue | #5f9ea0 | | Light slate grey | #778899 |

The tool on this page opens with them loaded. Click any swatch to see lighter and darker steps of it, so you can find a deeper shade for trousers or a coat that still keeps the same cool, soft feel.

Building a summer wardrobe from it

• Neutrals: soft white rather than stark white, blue-grey, taupe with a cool cast, and a softened navy. Colour consultants describe summer's navy as slightly greyed (often called French navy) rather than the deep navy that suits winters.
• Main colours: dusty blue, periwinkle, soft teal, lavender, rose.
• Accents: raspberry or soft plum, used near the face.
• Metals: cool silver and pewter tend to sit better than yellow gold.

Use the lighter steps of a colour's scale for shirts and tops and the deeper, still-greyed steps for trousers, jackets and bags.

A note on the system itself

Seasonal analysis became widely known through books such as Carole Jackson's Color Me Beautiful (1980), and it has had a revival on social media. It's a styling framework, not science, and different schools draw the lines differently. There's no standard training for colour analysts, so two analysts can give you two different seasons. Use the palette as a guide to what flatters you, not a rulebook.