True Tone

A new generation is experimenting with the idea that your "season" determines your most flattering shades. Lynn Yaeger, a devotee of the muted palette, spins the color wheel.

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I want to be a Moonlit Winter! It makes me think of crunchy snowdrifts and hot toddies and burnished rosy cheeks and cherry red lips. Alas, this is not to be. Jeannie Stith, the founder and CEO of Color Guru, tells me that I am only half right due to unsuspected greenish tints in my eyes and a yellow undertone lurking in my otherwise ghostly face, I am actually a Vivid Winter. Which means that, in addition to my usual funereal-gray-and-black palette, I can allegedly add chartreuse, shamrock green, and one specific shade of lemon yellow to my repertoire. This comes as quite a shock to me, since a lifetime of shopping has perhaps once or twice found me attempting to don chartreuse or shamrock and then running screaming back to 50 shades of gray.

I am having my "colors" done by Stith because, as it turns out, color theory is suddenly back, mesmerizing a whole generation of rabidly enthusiastic TikTokers-people far too young to remember the previous incarnation of this craze. The appeal remains the same carefully analyze your skin tone, hair, and eye color, figure out what your "season" is, and pretty soon you will be able to rush out and buy the perfect makeup, and also build a capsule wardrobe composed entirely of things that will actually look good on you, as opposed to the heap of rejects that are currently overflowing your closet.

If you are of a certain age and have a long memory, you may recall that back in the 1980s, a book called