What is personal colour analysis?

In a studio, an analyst sits you in daylight with your hair pulled back and no make-up, and lays lengths of fabric under your chin one after another. Some colours drag the face grey and tired; others let it rest. The analyst watches the shadow under the jaw, the brightness of the eye and how even the skin looks, and narrows the drapes down until one family of colours remains.

That is the whole method. Everything else, the seasons, the names, the palettes, is a way of filing what the drapes showed.

The classic system sorts people into four seasons. Spring and autumn are warm; summer and winter are cool. Spring and summer are lighter and softer; autumn and winter deeper or clearer. Most people are not a clean example of any of them, which is why the Korean tradition, the one SAEK follows, divides each season into four depths: bright, light, mute and deep. Sixteen types, and every face lands in exactly one.

The sixteen are named on their own page, each with its standard name beside it, so a result from SAEK can be looked up anywhere.

A reading is four numbers, read from the pixels of your photographs.

• Temperature: how warm or cool the skin runs. Cool skin carries blue under the surface, warm skin carries gold. This reading chooses the family.
• Value: how light or deep the colouring is, taking hair, skin and eyes together.
• Chroma: how much colour there is in your own pigments, from muted to vivid.
• Clarity: how far apart hair, skin and eyes sit. Whichever of the four readings is most decided names your depth within the family.

A quiz asks what colour your veins are, or whether gold or silver suits you, and you answer as well as you can. The answers are opinions about yourself, and they decide the result. SAEK files your answers with the reading but never lets them decide it.

The photographs are taken in indirect daylight, and the white of your eye anchors the white balance, so the light you happen to stand in is corrected out before anything is read. The same photograph gives the same result every time, and a second reading is a second reading, not a replacement.

The result is a sealed file you keep on the phone, next to your skin.

• Your type, one of sixteen, with its name and its standard name.
• A palette of forty-four swatches, each with its name, hex and Lab, rendered colour-managed.
• A hair direction: the depth and undertone that keep your skin lit, and what to avoid at the salon.
• A shortlist for the things you buy without thinking: metals, denim, lipstick.
• A check: point the camera at anything new and get an honest verdict, with what to wear instead when the answer is no.

A consultation of twenty-eight questions about what you wear and what you were told before. Six calibration facts the camera cannot know: dyed hair, contact lenses, make-up today, the light you are in. Then the measurement, three photographs in about four minutes. Then the result, sealed with the date and the method version.