Four-season system

The four-season system is the original version of seasonal color analysis, popularised for a mass audience by Carole Jackson's 1980 book Color Me Beautiful, which sold more than 25 million copies and introduced Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter as the four palette categories. Springs and Autumns were defined as warm, yellow-undertoned seasons, Summers and Winters as cool, blue-undertoned ones, with Spring and Winter reading brighter and clearer and Summer and Autumn reading softer and more muted. House of Colour still uses a version of this four-palette model today, deciding primarily from skin tone via drape run-offs in natural daylight and adding optional subseasons rather than moving to a fixed twelve-category system. The four-season system is simpler and faster to teach than the twelve-season model, but it is also less precise, since a person's actual coloring often sits between two of the four categories rather than squarely inside one.

Why it matters

The four-season system is still the fastest entry point into color analysis and the direct ancestor of every later refinement that followed it, but its simplicity means two genuinely different-looking people can technically land in exactly the same season.