Bright vs soft
The chroma split in color analysis: does your coloring suit clear, saturated color or muted, greyed color.
Bright versus soft describes where a person's coloring sits on the chroma axis, from highly saturated and clear, bright, to heavily muted and greyed, soft, independent of hue or value. This split defines four seasons directly: Bright Spring and Bright Winter are both dominant-bright despite opposite hue leans, while Soft Summer and Soft Autumn are both dominant-soft. A bright-chroma person's eyes and natural coloring tend to have a lit-from-within clarity that lets them carry genuinely saturated color and higher contrast without looking harsh, while a soft-chroma person's coloring reads as gently blended, and the same saturated color that flatters a Bright season can look jarring or costume-like on them. Chroma is often the dimension people misjudge most, since a color that is technically bright can still look soft if it is also very light in value, which makes side-by-side comparison more useful here than almost anywhere else in color analysis.
Why it matters
Getting bright-versus-soft right decides whether a whole wardrobe should lean toward vivid, saturated color or gently muted, blended tones instead, arguably the single biggest visual difference between two people who otherwise share the same hue and value range entirely.