Seasonal color analysis (SCA) is a wardrobe planning system. It helps you improve your appearance by surfacing your most flattering colors. Not all of the color analysis systems are created equal! Many hack color analysis systems advocate for “analyzing vein color.” This is honestly a rather fruitless endeavor. If you had the ability to accurately assess the color of your veins, you wouldn’t need SCA. You’d already have found your most flattering colors by now. There’d be no need to consult a color palette chart that someone else made.
This hack assumes you can already adequately perceive color… which likely isn’t true!
If you could perceive the color in your veins with sufficient accuracy, you wouldn’t be trying to figure out which season you belong to. You would be able to adequately see which particular shade of gray brings out the best in your skin. Likewise, you’d know which particular shades of pink make your complexion dull. You’d already know which blush colors make your eyes glow, and which colors make your hair appear lank and unwashed. You would, in fact, be so adept at this that you could seamlessly select your absolute most flattering hair color. Everyone would think it was a return to your natural hair color if they didn’t know better. You’d be able to wear nearly any color, because you’d be a genius at color correcting makeup. You would know exactly where to place which pigment to correct the darkness, sallowness, redness, or yellowness appearing in the skin.
Seasonal color analysis is all about how you visually react in proximity with colors of different hue, value, and chroma. It’s about how color influences the skin, the hair, the lips, the eyes, and the overall essence of your appearance. Assessing your vein color as a fast track to determining your best color palette is just not fair to yourself. It’d be like asking a five year old to read a book in order to grasp the alphabet.
There’s much more to color than this hack suggests!
Sure, you might be able to say your veins have a blueish tint or seem more purple than green. If so, bravo! Unfortunately, this tells you nothing about your undertone. It tells you nothing about how much color contrast exists in your features. There’s no formula that equates vein color to the levels of saturation you can carry. It tells you nothing about the level of depth inherent in your coloring. Neither does it tell you how much value contrast you naturally possess. You can’t infer which of the four undertones you have based on vein color. Vein color can’t even reliably tell you if your undertone is warm or cool.
Color is reactive… especially the coloration in our skin!
The entire SCA system functions on the premise that there are different hues, values, and saturation levels in every base color under the rainbow. You can have a warm blue, and a cool blue. There are saturated greens and low contrast greens. There are dark purples and light purples. A simple color analysis of the veins isn’t only extremely incomplete information, it relies on your ability to truly see what color they are. How tan you are, the lighting you are in, if you’re flushed from heat or exercise, and the colors surrounding you all affect this greatly. These things can make your actually “blue” veins appear purple.
It’s this that most baffles me about the vein color test! The truth of seasonal color analysis lies in the shared hue, value, and chroma between ourselves the the colors that best suit us. Why on earth would a system structured around that concept simultaneously posit that vein color can independently predict season?
This is the only context in which vein color makes sense as an indicator of season.
In context of everything else about your natural coloring, then the color of your veins might be informative. If combined with the specific qualities of your eye color, the nuances of your complexion, and other indications about the identifiable elements of your coloring, vein color might make some sense. But its simply not enough on its own, and it must be precisely defined… like all the colors on any seasonal palette.
For more of my ideas, recommendations, and rants about wardrobe planning, stay tuned! This is the first of many posts on the topic of seasonal color analysis (which is only one of the numerous wardrobe planning systems I am passionate about.) Be sure to leverage my content on other platforms for more insights! I post tips on Instagram and have a collection of boards on Pinterest as well!
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