Discover your color palette and your style type.

True Summer Yellows and Light Summer Yellows

11/20/2017

I think a great way to distinguish a True Summer palette from a Light Summer palette is by using the yellows.

True Summer gets almost no yellows; the yellows it does get are pale and dusty but also totally cool -- like lemon chalk.

True Summer yellows are elusive in fabrics, so a typical True Summer almost never finds a yellow that looks good on her and thinks it's one of her worst colors.

Light Summer, though, can handle a range of cheerful, buttery yellows. On a Light Summer, yellow often picks up yellow in the hair or in the eye.

This difference is part of the reason why Light Summers are often convincing blondes but True Summers seldom are. Blonde hair is essentially a big swatch of yellow hovering around one's face, you know?

If you're not sure of your season, try at-home draping.

28 Comments

Desiree Lafaut

11/20/2017 01:26:33 pm

As a light summer, I find yellow to be one of my best colours. And, yes... I was a blond child.

Alex

11/20/2017 07:39:24 pm

Oh, fascinating! A friend of mine is (I think) a Light Summer, and he looks wonderful in many yellows.

What about Soft Summer? My sister is (I think) a Soft Summer, and she also looks good in many yellows, though her yellows are greyer than my Light Summer friend's. Light Summer yellows are sunny and creamy. Soft Summer yellows are more like flowers seen through mist in a gentle summer rain.

11/20/2017 07:44:31 pm

Some of the SSu yellows I've seen look surprisingly greenish.

Rachel

11/21/2017 12:55:33 pm

They really do. Which makes sense if you think about fact that, to grey or mute a color, we add bits of its opposite.

11/21/2017 11:44:53 pm

Rachel, what colors are useful for choosing between True and Soft Summer? I think my sister might be one of those two.

Rachel

11/23/2017 03:27:03 pm

Hi, KC!
Soft Summer has some really beigey pinks and some really browny greys that just look way too warm on a True Summer. I would focus on those!

11/23/2017 11:22:46 pm

Come to think of it, "beigey pink" is how she describes her best natural lipstick (which I actually found on one of your LSp lippie lists, but no way my sister is quite *that* warm or light). Very helpful, thanks!

Katja

11/22/2017 02:51:23 am

KC, True Summer is all cool. Soft Summer is a neutral season. It is mainly cool with some warmth in it. Soft Summer is more muted and deeper than True Summer.
If your sister is a True summer she should wear only cool colours. If she is a Soft Summer she can also wear colours with some warmth .
Is your sisters hair, eyes and skin all cool or can you detect
some warmth in either of those?
You can try if she is able to wear both silver and gold. If that is the case she is probably a Soft Summer. True Summers should only wear silver.

Katja

11/22/2017 03:02:16 am

According to Lora Alexander the Soft Summer season is divided into 4 sub seasons. The same goes for Soft Autumn. According to her Winter and Spring can also be muted seasons. http://www.prettyyourworld.com/

11/22/2017 04:18:21 am

Yeah, so to be more specific, I guess I'm trying to decide whether my sister's a True or Smokey Soft Summer :). It'd be so much easier if she shared my color analysis hobby and did amateur draping with me, but I have to be super-diplomatic about color choices with her or she bites my head off! (So shh, don't tell her about this! Our little secret.)

11/22/2017 03:37:55 am

Hi Katja--

Gold jewelry doesn't really flatter her, and she has a strong antipathy toward the color orange, which would normally indicate TSu. However, some SSus can "lean" quite cool. Our mom seems to be one of them--gold jewelry doesn't flatter her either, but her skin and eyes look fantastic in this medium-light violet-gray shirt that looks more SSu to me than TSu (similar to this shade: http://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Pastel/Sennelier/Oil/Violet-Gray/Violet-Gray.html). My sister can also pull off some fairly dark charcoals and blues, and she looks surprisingly good in red, but that might be influenced by her predominant Style ID, which is Dramatic. We've also discovered that true purple/violet hues aren't that great on her, and her best shade of purple has a very strong wine red tone to it (don't know if that's at all helpful, but I'll put it out there anyway).

Basically, I'm at a loss, hence I'm looking for a different way of approaching the question like Rachel provided for LSu vs. TSu in this article.

Katja

11/22/2017 04:01:37 am

There is a season called Smokey Soft Summer. It is all cool. http://www.prettyyourworld.com/the-smokey-soft-summer.html
Maybe it will suit your sister.

Katja

11/22/2017 04:09:12 am

Dusty Soft summer is an all cool soft Summer.
http://www.prettyyourworld.com/the-dusty-soft-summer.html

Rachel

11/23/2017 03:24:02 pm

How is this possible, though, logically?

11/24/2017 12:20:25 am

"Leaning" within your season, I think. I've heard individuals within a given season have more room for variation on the color dimensions that aren't their Most Important Thing. So for Soft Summers, for example, they would all still be soft and muted above all, but some individuals might lean cooler, others more neutral, and the same for darker vs. lighter.

I also suspect that even very cool SSu colors would still read as warmer compared to TSu colors because they're inherently more muted, similar to how TSu colors read as warmer next to TW colors.

Nancy

11/22/2017 03:17:45 am

Lora Alexanders new seasons are necessary. Take me for instance, I am a muted Spring. True Spring, Light spring and Bright Spring are all wrong for me.

11/22/2017 04:13:17 am

Sunlit or Dusty, Nancy?

Lora's new sub-seasons are a fascinating subject. I don't think she has as good a grasp on the traditional 12 seasons as, say, Rachel or Christine Scaman--Lora still relies overmuch on hair and eye color when diagnosing people's seasons, her clothing examples for the Light seasons look more icy than pastel, and she includes some questionable browns in her Clear Spring palette. However, I do think she's onto something with her expanded Soft seasons. Quite a few people seem to have found their true home in these new color spaces after falling through some mysterious cracks in the 12 season system.

I think it's telling that all of Lora's new sub-seasons seem to be depth- or temperature-specific variations of each parent season's softest sub-season: Soft Summer, Soft Autumn, Dark Winter, and Light Spring. I've been wondering if maybe this ties into an observation on 12Blueprints that people often have varying hierarchies of saturation-temperature-value within their season (https://12blueprints.com/the-blueness-of-true-summer-and-a-1-2-3-idea/). I guess it would make sense for the softer sub-seasons to have more inherent variation, since they cover the vast expanse of in-the-middle colors while the brighter sub-seasons and True seasons live on the narrower extremities of the color spectrum. Or maybe there are Brights out there wishing for a more specific variation of their sub-season--who knows?

Anybody else have an opinion or a hypothesis on this subject?

Rosetta

11/23/2017 05:30:26 am

On the subject of Lora Alexander's new seasons? To be honest, I find them unnecessary and what's more, very confusing. (And I know I'm not the only one ;)) There seems to be very little difference between those smokey and toasted seasons, for example. Christine Scaman has said that she doesn't know what colour space all those extra seasons would occupy, and I agree with her. I feel everyone can and do fit inside the 12 season system, which imo is the "gold standard" of seasonal color, they may just lean different way, as all women are different, even those of the same season, i.e. they may not embody it in exactly the same way. Adding several extra seasons just quite randomly (as Lora Alexander has done) is just unnecessary and confusing (especially to those new to seasonal color), like I said.

Rachel

11/23/2017 03:22:07 pm

I would switch to a 16-season system if I thought it made sense. But I just don't see what color space is occupied by the new seasons. And I've never met a person in real life who wasn't suited by exactly one of the 12 seasons.

11/24/2017 12:03:36 am

I actually agree with you guys about the 12 seasons covering natural human coloring between them, which is why I've come to interpret Lora's twelve expanded soft seasons as variations *within,* not in addition to, the existing seasons of Soft Summer, Soft Autumn, Dark Winter, and Light Spring. This isn't how she explains it on her site, of course, but I think it makes sense if you think of, say, a "Smokey" Soft Summer as a SSu who strongly favors the darker and cooler colors within her palette, while a "Sunlit" SSu would strongly favor the lighter and cool-neutral colors of the palette. They're both still SSus, which is where you get the overlap Rosetta observed, these two individuals just "lean" in different directions within the palette.

Yes, this would be confusing for a lot of people, and most don't seem to need the extra guidelines to be happy in their season. It can also be argued that once you learn the concept of "leaning" within your season, you can figure out your own individual coloring quirks. But I've heard from a few people who felt like they fell through the cracks of the standard 12 season system--perhaps they or the person who draped them just didn't realize how flexible the seasons, the soft ones in particular, can be with regards to individual coloring--and the expanded soft seasons have been helpful to them. I've seen a website by a woman who was professionally draped a SSu, but didn't look her best in many of the darker and cooler shades recommended for that palette; she looked better in the lighter cool-neutral options, and found the "Sunlit" SSu palette useful for reliably finding her most flattering clothes while screening out other SSu colors that just didn't have the same magic.

So to sum up, I agree that the 12 season system on this site (Sci/Art, right?) is the best one out there so far, it's just that Lora's expanded Soft seasons seem to be helpful for some people with extra-picky color needs :).

Alex

11/24/2017 03:20:18 pm

I find the idea that you can mute a color by adding grey OR you can mute a color by adding brown to be a revelation. I'm a Deep Winter, but some colors in the palette are just not right on me, but the Toasted Soft Deep Winter palette - Deep Winter muted with a touch of brown - really works for me. I still consider myself a Deep Winter, but the idea of "toasting" is very, very helpful, for me.

Katja

11/27/2017 03:12:25 am

In my opinion there is a need for more than 12 seasons and I guess Lora Alexander felt the same way when she developed some new seasons.
For instance, if a Winter woman is somewhat muted and can't handle so much colour as the rest of the Winter seasons, would you force her into a season where she doesn't belong? She is a Winter, but she isn't a True Winter, a cool Winter or a deep Winter. She is a soft Winter.

Amke

9/20/2018 05:27:28 pm

I'm still quite new to color analysis, so I can't tell whether or not 12 seasons are enough. However the "range" of soft season types (if that's what you want to call it, to me that seems to make the most sense) helped me understand them a lot better. I know I'm a summer type but I had (have?) a hard time figuring out which one. I thought to be a soft summer, but the celebs I found to be typed a soft summer (here on the site) just looked so different from me, that it always made me unsure. With the variety of soft summers, showing how differently soft summers can look, it gave me a lot more confidence in my opinion, that I am, after all, a soft summer.

Trisha

10/20/2018 03:38:53 am

Lora Alexander has been the only colour analyst to consistently place my colours correctly as they have changed with age. I also think she is much further forward in her ideas. Looking back to the eighties, we only had 4 colour groups. We might have equally said then, that anyone who wanted to extend it to 12, simply did not understand the 4 sufficiently! I also believe that she is correct is saying many analysts overlook the obvious by not taking hair into consideration by covering it for a consultation. Sure, it may be heavily coloured by dye, but many times it is not and will be more accurate than just diagnosing from skin reaction. This happened to me on one consultation, my skin revealed me as one group, but I was then told to dye my hair back to very dark to go with the correct colours I should wear - at 64, this is kind of odd, to have dark hair, which didn't look right on me, just because my skin said so! I believe we can get far to hung up on what people should look like, instead of actually looking at them as they are now, in real life, yes the nuanced variations are necessary, I feel, I for one have gone from a dark autumn to a smokey soft autumn with age. This makes sense when you consider my eyes have gone from deep, new black olive green to grey/ green and my hair from darkest warm brown to mid warm/gold brown, dyed of course. I took my hair lighter and softer as my eyes had already gone that way and look better against pale ivory skin as I age. Soft autumn alone would be too pale, as I am still fairly deep but more greyed and muted; the new colours work perfectly!

Nancy

11/22/2017 04:21:45 am

I'm a Sunlit.

11/22/2017 03:33:16 pm

Cool :)

11/22/2017 12:44:32 pm

Great post. The yellows of LSu were the thing that clued me in to this season bring the right one for me & also the 'surprising seasonal deal-breaker' of coral-pink.

I love your approach, BTW: find the colors that suit best and then find the common thread to lead you to other suitable colors. Thank you for breaking down what each season should be keeping an eye out for!

Mariana

11/28/2017 06:31:52 pm

I've been curious if I'm a soft summer or true summer in this 12 color system for awhile. This post and the comments helped me realize I'm probably True. I don't think beigey pink has ever flattered me.

On the other hand, it's so right that the right yellow rarely presents itself, but I'm starting to see it more, surprisingly in activewear brands. The pale, clear yellow that looks good on me could pass for white, but it is not the flat, chalky white. It looks like a white that has a glow emanating from it, like a star. It has an intensity that a true white white does not have. I think pearls that are slightly yellow have a similar effect. People might also think on first glance the color is a white, off white, ivory, or cream.

Some examples are the color "Angel Wing" from Lululemon, "Pristine" from alo yoga, or "Vanilla Ice Cream" from Benjamin Moore. Compare those colors to white. That's what looks good on me. Any more yellow doesn't seem to flatter me.

Truth is Beauty

True Summer Yellows and Light Summer Yellows

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