How online color analysis works.

Seasonal color analysis sorts coloring into 12 seasons, three each in spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each season is a group of colors that share three qualities, and you are placed in the season whose qualities are closest to your own:

• Undertone. Is your skin cooler and rosier, or warmer and more golden?
• Depth. How light or deep are your hair, skin and eyes together?
• Contrast and clarity. How much do your features stand out from your skin, and do clear colors or soft, muted ones sit better next to them?

It grew out of how stylists work, not out of a lab. Researchers who studied clothing colors wrote that these categories have no exact definition, that the advice varies from stylist to stylist, and that formal tests of it are scarce. In the same study, observers shown women’s faces tended to choose cool blues for fair skin and warm oranges and reds for tanned skin.

1. Short questions, about four minutes. Six of your answers carry most of the weight: your hair now, your natural color before any gray, your eye color, how your skin takes an hour in the sun, which jewelry looks better on you, and the decade you are in. Your natural hair color is one of the clearest clues to your undertone, even when your hair is colored or gray.
2. A screen about your photo. Before any photo, the app says what it will do with it and waits for you to agree. You can choose to answer questions instead.
3. One photo in daylight. On a phone you take a selfie or pick one from your photos. On a computer you can upload one, or scan a code and take it with your phone. If the photo is too dark, lit from one side or taken from too far away, the app tells you before it goes on.
4. A free preview. You see your undertone and a first look at three of your colors before you pay. Your season stays locked.
5. Your full result, after you pay. Your season, your 36-color palette, the colors to avoid, lip, blush and eye shades, hair color and gray guidance, and metals, glasses and your best white.

Your full result opens again on any device: choose “Already paid?” and use the email you paid with.

A photo can help, but it should not decide alone, and in Back in Color it does not.

On your own device the page finds your face and measures the color of your skin, eyes and lips. It also checks how bright the photo is, how even the light is across your face, and how much of the frame your face fills. Then:

• Your answers carry the most weight. Your natural hair color, your eyes, how you take the sun and the metal that suits you do not change with the lamp in the room.
• The photo is a second opinion. The hue of your skin can move your undertone a little in either direction, and your eyes are measured as a check on the eye color you gave. Together they can shift your result a little, and near the edge between two seasons that can be enough to change it.
• A poorer photo counts for less. When the light is dim or uneven, or your face is small in the frame, the measurements count for less and your answers for more.
• Some things are never read from the photo. Your hair color comes from your answers. How light your skin looks is not used at all, because it changes with the exposure: a brighter or darker picture of the same face does not change your season.
• The same input gives the same result. The same answers and the same photo always give the same season.

Rather not use a photo? Your result then rests on your answers, and the preview says so. You can add a photo later for a closer read.

There is no agreed accuracy number for color analysis, online or in person. There is no lab test to check a season against, and we know of no published study that measures how often trained analysts agree on the same woman. So we do not give one.

What a photo can show is the color of your skin and eyes in the light you took it in. What it cannot show:

• how your skin reacts to the sun;
• your natural hair color, once it is colored or gray;
• your skin as it is, under a lamp, with a filter, or under makeup. Many household bulbs give a warm, yellowish light, and yellow light can make skin look warmer.

That is why daylight matters, and why your answers lead.

The reference is draping in person: a trained analyst holds fabrics under your face in steady light and you both watch what changes. In the US a studio session costs about $250 to $350, and you book an appointment. What each kind of analysis costs is on our color analysis cost page. Back in Color offers something different: no appointment, your answers as a steady base, one daylight photo as a check, and a preview before you pay. It is guidance about color, not a verdict.

• Face a window. Daylight, not a lamp, and no direct sun on your face.
• Bare face if you can. Makeup changes what the page reads.
• Hair off your face, so your hairline and jaw show.
• No filters, no glasses. A filter changes your real coloring.
• Come close. Your face should fill a good part of the frame, lit evenly on both sides.

The app checks the photo before it goes on, and tells you if it is too dark, if one side is in shadow, or if you should move closer.

In more detail:

• On your device. Your browser first redraws the photo as a new image, which leaves out the location and camera data in the original. The page then measures the colors of your skin, eyes and lips. The photo is gone when you close or reload the page.
• What our server receives. The color measurements, the three quality numbers and the six answers above. It works out your result from them and stores none of it. Your first name and your other answers stay on your device. When you go to pay, we keep a random reference, the plan, your season and the date, so you can open your result again.
• The one exception. If you start on a computer and take the selfie with your phone, the phone sends the photo to our server so the computer can fetch it. It can be collected once and is deleted at that moment, or when the code runs out after 15 minutes. It is not analyzed there, copied or used for anything else.

The full details are on the privacy page. Who runs Back in Color, and how to reach us, is on the about page.