Can Someone with warm features be cool?

This article is inspired by a question from a prospective client. She asked me whether someone can present with physical attributes that seem to conflict with their seasonal color palette. For instance, can a True Autumn (whose palette is fully warm) have cool eyes? Or cool hair? How could it be possible that someone with “cool” features only be flattered by the warmest of colors?

My answer begins with a fundamental belief that underscores all of my color analysis work: Human features are not as simple as paint swatches or pieces of fabric. They are more accurately described like the palette or canvas of an Impressionist painter.

You could take a magnifying glass and identify one small paintstroke within an Impressionist painting as warm, cool, bright, or muted. However, if you stepped back, you would not be able to describe a palm-sized area of that painting in such clear-cut terms.

Human features are each like a complex work of an Impressionist master. While a pair of blue eyes viewed at a distance may present as a cool, icy blue, it is very possible to step closer and pick out streaks of warm gray, yellow, or dark green. Even a relatively simple eye, presenting with a smooth and uniform color, will have more complexity than a paint swatch card from Home Depot.

The basic reality is that human features are complex blends of warm and cool tones, even when they average out to looking more one temperature than the other. It is impossible to predict that a cool-seeming eye will respond favorably to only cool toned colors, because human features are not so simple. As such, one cannot determine a person’s color palette simply by looking at the person in one static situation.

The exercise of color analysis is a comparative one. I select a warm dark color and compare it against a cool dark one. Then a bright neutral-cool color against a soft neutral-cool color. I see what changes when I alter one dimension of color while holding another one constant.

Looking at someone’s features and deciding that they seem to be cool, warm, or high contrast or low contrast in appearance is a futile exercise that drives so much color frustration. People are colored in different ways—and so each person’s expression of their season appears unique. I have draped Bright Winters with a vivid, sharp contrast between eyes, hair, and skin—the stereotypical Bright Winter depicted across so many websites and guides. And yet I have draped Bright Winters with pale hair, eyes, and skin who appear low contrast, light, and soft. These women are never represented in a seasonal stereotype, and so they are missed, overlooked, and miscategorized at a glance. But these women disappear or turn gray in the delicate tones of Light Summer, Light Spring, Soft Summer, or Soft Autumn. Their features become perfectly defined in deepest navy compared to soft periwinkle. A soft rose that at first I would have insisted matched their lips turns them into a pile of jellied nothingness. Yet a searing fuchsia becomes them, completing a picture that—upon first glance—did not seem to exist.

Staring at someone and naming their skintone as warm does not make it so. Just because a yellow foundation matches the average of all their surface skintones best compared to a rosy foundation does not make them warm in all senses of the word. And labeling someone’s features does not do any good if it does not help us decide what colors look best on that person.

Ultimately, the drapes tell us what season a person is. A True Autumn with sea-blue eyes and ashy-looking hair may begin to gleam and sparkle in her warmest tones. It is possible to see dashes and speckles of warmth where before one might have missed them. And even if, at a distance, or in a photograph, someone with a gun to their head could be forced to call certain features of hers “cool,” there would be no denying she is at her most beautiful, harmonious self in warm tones.

To answer my client’s question: Can a person with warm features fall into a cool season? Yes, absolutely.