The Truth About True Autumn
As mentioned previously, after leaving you with the fact that Seasonal colour palettes are not supported by colour science, you might want to ask the obvious question. Don’t seasonal colours occur in nature? The colour science I’ve presented might debunk the seasonal palettes, a couple times over in fact. However, if these colours consistently occur together in nature, that likely indicates the science is wrong, and not the Seasonal palettes.
It is true that colours that occur together in nature are often harmonious. But that goes for a singular organism, like a plant or animal. So how about colour palettes that take their inspiration from an entire period of the year?
Since we have four seasons throughout the year, I’m going to simplify and consider only the 4 major Seasonal groups in their total, rather than separately as 12 Seasons.
Starting with Spring, what are the natural phenomena that are associated with this warm, bright and light colour palette? Sunshine, springtime flowers, especially bulbs, new growth in plants, tropical beaches and fruits are what come to mind.
Among these, we can immediately discount tropical beaches – they are not a springtime phenomenon. Tropical regions don’t even have four seasons the way temperate regions do.
The fruits that are associated with Spring don’t qualify either. Generally speaking, seasonal/temperate regions of the planet don’t have fruit during springtime. Raspberries, for example, are a summer fruit. Watermelon is tropical. Citrus fruits ripen during winter time. Ironically, many citrus fruits are cooler oranges anyway, which would actually confirm this seasonal theory for the cool and bright Winter palette – except that orange is not supposed to occur in Winter at all.
Continuing with springtime flowers, crocuses come in a warm bright golden yellow, warm bright purple and warm and light creamy white. Crocus pistils are a bright warm orange. All of these are classic Spring colours, and thus confirm the seasonal theory.
On the other hand, daffodils are a cool acidic lemon yellow, and whenever they have orange in them, it’s a cooler orange too. While the brightness lines up well with Spring’s qualities, but the temperature does not.
Springtime’s new plant growth does concur with the lime and sap greens classically found in Spring.
Sunshine, meanwhile, is more typical for Summer than Spring, as is warm weather. In addition, the colour of the sunlight gets more golden the lower the sun is in the sky, but during Spring the sun sits at intermediate to high levels in the sky. By that logic, Winter should have the most golden colours, because the sun is lowest during that season.
The day lengths are long in Spring though, so the lighter quality of the Spring palette does agree.
Moving on to cool, soft and light Summer, there are the summer florals, blue skies, green foliage and a large amount of daylight that are associated with the summer palette.
The temperature is an obvious clash: the summer season is warm, the summer palette is cool.
The temperature of the light does agree with the summer sun being highest in the sky, which causes a larger amount of blue photons to pass through the atmosphere and therefore the light is cooler. The amount of daylight checks out too: the Summers are lighter palettes.
The blue skies are cool too (it’s the same blue photons scattering in the atmosphere), while the summer greens have a variety of temperatures – cool ones are among them, but so are warm ones.
Summer flowerings are often from plant families that flower with white, pink, purple and blue. An example is Hydrangea. However, there are many others that have colours from outside the palette. Eonymus, commonly called spindles, have a cool and bright magenta flower with (yet another) cool bright orange centre, which blooms in July but the colours are Winter (minus the offending orange, of course).
As an aside, do all flowers of the same species consistently stick to a temperature or tone? No, I’ve seen snapdragons for example, can vary quite a bit in brightness between individuals, while nasturtium plants can vary quite a bit in temperature. All of these are summer-flowering, by the way, but rarely part of the typical summer palette.
Continuing with warm, soft and dark Autumn, when deciduous trees lose their leaves, this actually makes the strongest case for seasonal palettes. Most leaf colours do land in the Soft and Soft-Dark (= Autumn) tones during the yellow and red phases, as well as the warmer palettes. However, does the brown phase of dead leaves of all species exclusively belong to the warm, soft and dark palette? I’m not sure, I’d have to look next October to see what temperatures are among them.
There is less daylight in Autumn, so the dark quality of the palette agrees with that. As far as the warmth goes, the weather (moderately cold) nor the angle of the sun (halfway) give any convincing argument that the autumn palette should be warm.
In addition, Autumn has its harvest colours, fire (hearth, stove) and warming spices. Many of those spices are again tropical, so not an argument for Seasons. Obviously, the colours of fire have very little to do with the time of year: summer campfires have the same colours. Many harvest colours, apples etc, do in fact agree with the Autumn palette.
Finally, the cool, bright and dark Winter palette is associated with snow, ice and general cold weather; bare trees, aurora, and evergreens. Evergreens and tree trunks are practically the same colour year-round, so don’t make any argument towards any specific palette. I do suppose these colours stand out more in Winter. However, the actual colour of most evergreens is a warm green.
Snow and ice are a bright white and have have a cool blue cast to them when in shade, so that does agree with the palette.
I’ve never seen aurora in person, so can’t really speak of its hues. On video though, it does have the light iciness you expect for Winter.
From this whirlwind tour of anecdotal examples, we can conclude:
- When it comes to characteristic hues and ‘undertones’ from palettes, it’s just as easy to find examples of seasonal colours in nature that concur as well as contradict the seasonal palettes.
- The supposed reasons for temperatures are different for each seasonal palette: Winter is cool because of the weather, Summer is cool because of the angle of the sunlight, Autumn is warm because browning foliage and pumpkin soup feels cozy, and Spring is warm because of a renewed appreciation for sunlight after the cold months, even though you still need a coat (both the air temperatures and the angle of the sun are still halfway).
- The Bright and Soft qualities of palettes: are all over the place. Summer flowers can be bright, while the palette is soft. Spring hyacinths are soft, while the palette is bright. Winter is the most colourfully contrasting palette, while winter landscapes are the most drab.
- Light-Dark qualities of palettes: are fully consistent with the seasons.
All in all, while Seasonal palettes certainly mimic how colours behave in nature during the year, they are not consistent in doing so. What’s more, nature is complex and varied, and the seasonal palettes are simplistic. (Examples are no cool orange anywhere, and every dark brown must be Autumn). Perhaps because of that simplicity, the storytelling is phenomenal. But we shouldn’t take these palettes literally.
Reason 10: Seasonal palettes are not consistent with observations from nature.
Now, I have another note about seasonal colour palettes not being dictated by the natural world. If seasons were real, colour analysis at large would be apparent for everyone, and would generally be taken more seriously. Most people treat it as a whimsical, rather fanciful thing you might consider if you feel like it. From what I’ve learned in the past three years, they are right. Seasonal colour analysis is not the scientific discipline it was pretending to be.
Particularly with makeup, it would be obvious that certain shades of makeup don’t work for the majority of people. Take for example brown eyeshadow.
If Seasons were real, then that brown would belong to Autumn only and no-one else, because none of the other Seasonal palettes can convincingly absorb an Autumn brown. Their tolerance for that brown would be non-existent. We would then only have people that look really good in it, and people that looked ridiculous. And crucially, no in-between group for whom the colour is almost wearable, but not quite there.
Now, real-life results prove the opposite. We have indeed people for whom the brown works brilliantly, and those who try it, it turns out horrible and they take it off the next second. And we will also have people for whom it’s not perfect but still wearable, or for whom it’s close but not quite wearable, others for whom the brown is a stretch but fashion, hey?, and those that would rather not wear it, but there are still worse options. In short, there will be varying degrees of success, not just the two extremes.
Knowing what we know now, we will have people that resonate with the colour effortlessly, and those for whom the tonality is right but not the temperature, or the other way around, or a bit of both, or a lot of both. Temperature and tonality are independent variables, after all.
To complicate matters, brown eyeshadow isn’t just one colour – it comes in many versions, of all temperatures and tonalities. It’s merely a matter of chance if the shade with the temperature and tonality that you need, is going to be the one that you end up buying.
Therefore, it’s not a simple as saying ‘you don’t look good in this dark brown, so you can’t be an Autumn’. The brown that you may be testing may actually be a Cool-Neutral Bright-Dark (B3), rather than the Warm Soft-Dark (E8) that Autumn is supposed to be. Without proper colour science to understand what brown you are testing, how would you tell?
Which is going to be the topic of the next article: what colour analysis really is testing.