Think about your favorite top or lipstick: the one that makes you feel unstoppable. Now try to describe its color the way you'd describe the sky to a friend. Is it warm or cool? Bright or soft? Light or dark?

Those three questions (stylists call them temperature, brightness, and value) are the entire engine of color analysis. Every color you'll ever pick up in a store can be described by them, and colors that share the same answers flatter the same faces.

A "color season" is just a group of colors that share two of those traits. Soft Autumn colors are warm and soft. Bright Winter colors are cool and bright. There are four familiar seasons (winter, spring, summer, autumn) and three versions of each, for a total of twelve seasons. One of them is yours.

Telling a warm shade from a cool one is the trickiest part of using a palette, so here is the cheat sheet.

• Reds. Orangey-red and brick run warm. Cherry and purplish-red run cool.
• Pinks. Salmon and coral-pink run warm. Magenta and purplish-pink run cool.
• Yellows. Mustard and orangey-yellow run warm. Lemony or highlighter yellow runs cool. Handle yellow with care: most yellows favor the warm seasons regardless.
• Greens. Grassy means warm. Seafoam and teal mean cool.
• Blues. Greenish-blue runs warm. Purplish-blue runs cool.
• Whites. Pure white is cool. Cream is white with yellow added, which makes it the warm seasons' white.
• Blacks. Pure black is cool and intense. Dark browns are the warm seasons' black. Charcoals are the soft seasons'.

Overtone is the skin color you see in the mirror: fair, peachy, olive, brown. Undertone is the color temperature underneath: warm or cool.

Here is the part most online quizzes get wrong. Your undertone determines your season, not your overtone. People of every race, ethnicity, and skin tone can have either undertone, which means people of every skin tone can land in any of the twelve seasons. Two people with identical overtones can have opposite seasons.

A quiz that types you by hair color and eye color alone will get plenty of people wrong, and it quietly implies that people with dark skin only fit a handful of seasons. That is why professional stylists drape instead.

Draping is the professional method: physically holding colors up to a face and watching what each one does to it. I do it digitally, using a client's actual photo against every season, so they can see the evidence instead of taking my word for it.

Here is what to look for. A color is right for you when:

• Your skin looks more even and awake.
• Shadows and imperfections fade.
• The whites of your eyes look brighter.
• Your features, meaning your eyes, lips, and smile, pull the viewer's attention.
• The color does not outshine you. You wear it; it does not wear you.

A wrong color does the opposite. It casts shadows, flattens your skin, and grabs attention that belongs to your face.

Untrained eyes usually cannot articulate any of this. But once you know the checklist, you start seeing it everywhere.