How to choose the perfect hair colour according to your skin tone and style season

Old wives' tales suggest that hair holds energy. Maybe that explains why the most iconic, powerful, and defining moments of our lives like getting out of a bad relationship, taking a momentous career leap or moving countries, are marked with a hair transformation—it could be a new cut, a new style, or a new colour.

With the overarching growth of the beauty industry coupled with biotechnological advancements in the hair care sector, hair colouring options available to us are limitless—from globals, highlights, and lowlights to ombré effects, balayages, and more.

It almost feels as if the end goal of hair colouring has changed. It has grown into something quite personal. While we are still influenced by people whose style we admire, we want the colour of our hair to reflect our most beautiful, bold, confident, and true selves.

But the thing is, even the most beautifully done hair colour in the most expensive salon may not elevate your look unless you take into consideration your skin undertones and style seasons. 

how to know YOUR SKIN UNDERTONE?

You can understand your skin tone by observing the veins scaling your wrist. If they seem to be more blue or purple, you may lean towards a cool undertone. If the colour of your veins seems to be more green, you may lean towards a warm undertone. If they’re both blue and green, you may have a neutral undertone— giving you many more style options. In general, gold accents suit people with warmer undertones, while silver accents suit people with cooler undertones. 

WHAT’S YOUR STYLE SEASON?

Style season are of four base kinds, you guessed it, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. As an overarching understanding of this rather complex and increasingly popular European typology, especially from an Indian perspective is: a spring style season can be characterised by warm skin undertones, light to medium brown hair, and light eye colours. A summer style season usually centres around cool skin undertones, cool brown hair, and pale eye colours. An autumn style season can be characterised by warm, golden rich skin undertones, deep brown to black hair, and black-brown eye colours and a winter style season usually revolves around cool, olive skin undertones, cool brown to black hair, and cool and pale black-brown eye colours. 

HAIR COLOUR FAMILIES TO BRING OUT YOUR INNER RADIANCE

BLONDES

While there is most definitely a blonde for everyone, it’s incredibly important that we choose the right shade of blonde. Cooler undertones in summer and winter style seasons are beautifully complemented by delicate ashy, beige, and baby blondes, while warmer undertones in spring and autumn style seasons look stunning in golden, caramel-hued blondes. 

BROWNS

Brunettes are making a comeback and how! This family of hair colours has an entire treasure box of options suited to diverse Indian skin tones and the right shade of brown can truly bring your innate beauty to the forefront. 

While shades like chestnut, dark chocolate, bronzed brown, toffee, and dark auburn are winning hearts for our warm toned girls in spring and autumn style seasons, amber, cool caramel, esspresso, plum brown, and charcoal browns perfectly complement our cool-toned summer and winter style season beauties.  

Remember though, with browns it's just as important to have a little bit of contrast between the skin and hair tones as it is to complement it. 

REDS:

Always attractive and ever so slightly mystical, hues of red make for some of the most magical hair transformations. From sexy coppers to fiery gingers, redheads also tend to make for the most dynamic of personalities. 

True coppers with peach and orange bases and mahogany hues take well to warm skin tones in the spring and autumn style seasons while true reds, plums, and violet-based burgundies are perfect for making a cool-toned summer and winter style season shine. 

Hair is the crown of our heads and the right colour can truly make our looks and personality shine brighter. Thus it is important to invest in hair care that’s suitable for your hair type so that you can play with them without any worry about damage. Also, remember that while style seasons and many other such typologies are tools to help you choose well, they are not the gospel—trust your gut and have fun. Even if something does go wrong, remind yourself that a disastrous hair colour phase makes for the best memories.