12 seasons or 16?

If you have looked into colour analysis, you have probably seen both a twelve-season and a sixteen-season system. They are not different sciences — the same three axes, more or fewer buckets.

What the 16-season expansion adds

The sixteen-season system splits some of the twelve seasons further, mostly to separate people who sit on the boundary between two seasons. It is a refinement for people who feel they fall between two of the twelve.

Why this site resolves to 12

Twelve is the granularity a professional analyst works in and it is enough to shop with. Sixteen adds precision at the edges but also more ways to be wrong in a three-question self-assessment. Twelve is the honest middle — detailed enough to be useful, coarse enough to be reliable.

What you gain and lose

With twelve you gain clarity and a palette you can actually use. With sixteen you gain finer distinctions at the boundaries, at the cost of more ambiguity in a self-test. For most people, twelve is the right place to start.

How to map a 16-season result onto a 12-season palette

A sixteen-season result usually names a twelve-season season plus a direction — for example “soft summer, leaning soft autumn”. Use the named twelve-season palette and borrow the two or three colours from the neighbouring season it points to.

Take the quiz to find your twelve-season palette.