Personal color analysis based on color harmony for skin tone

Abstract

Personal colour is a method for determining the best colours for a person's clothes, jewelry, make-up, and other accessories. Colours that promote a person's skin radiance, healthy looks, and great character are appropriate. A person's skin tone defines their personal colours. This study investigated the method for analyzing personal colour using colour harmony between skin tone and sampled colours. Fifteen skin tone samples were selected from the Pantone SkinTone Guide to represent three types of skin undertone: warm, cool, and neutral. They were paired with 128 sampled colours with various hues, lightness, and chroma. The colour pairs were displayed one by one on a computer screen, allowing observers to evaluate colour harmony for each pair. It was found that in addition to skin undertone, skin lightness also affected colour harmony with respect to personal colour. Warm undertones of all lightness groups most harmonised with autumn colours (warm hues); the cool-high lightness group most harmonised with winter colours (cool hues); the cool-medium low lightness group harmonised with summer colours (cool hues); the neutral undertones harmonised with all season colours. The predictions from the universal colour hamony models yielded only 53% agreement with the visual results. This indicated that there should be a colour harmony model specially derived for personal colour analysis.