Writing about colour? Start here.

Open your wardrobe and be honest. How much of it do you actually wear?

For most women the answer is somewhere between a third and a half. The rest hangs there — bought with good intentions, worn once or twice, quietly making you feel guilty every morning.

The usual explanation is that we buy badly. We don't. Most of those unworn clothes were perfectly sensible purchases: good fabric, decent fit, a colour that looked lovely on the hanger. The problem is that clothes don't get worn on hangers. They get worn next to your face.

Every colour you put near your face does something to it. The right ones make your skin look clearer, your eyes brighter, and you look like you slept well. The wrong ones cast shadows, pick up redness, and add a tired, washed-out quality that no amount of concealer fixes. You may never have put this into words, but you feel it — which is why that expensive jumper keeps losing out to the same old favourite. The favourite is almost certainly in one of your best colours. The jumper almost certainly isn't.

This is what colour analysis actually measures. In a session, I drape dozens of precisely chosen fabric colours under a client's chin, in natural daylight, one after another. The changes are not subtle. Faces visibly light up or shut down as the drapes change, and clients see it happen in the mirror — usually with some disbelief, often with laughter, occasionally with a tear or two. By the end, we know which palette of colours works with her natural colouring rather than against it.

What does that have to do with the overstuffed, underused wardrobe? Everything. Once you know your colours, the mystery of the unworn half solves itself. Those clothes weren't mistakes of taste. They were mistakes of chemistry — fine garments in colours that were never going to flatter you, bought because they suited the mannequin, or a friend, or a version of you that doesn't exist.

And the habit changes from that day on. Shopping stops being a lottery. You walk past the rail of colours that will sit in your wardrobe unworn — however beautiful they look on the hanger — and you spend the same money on fewer things you will wear constantly. My clients routinely tell me their clothes spending goes down after a colour analysis while compliments go up. One put it perfectly: "I used to own clothes. Now I own outfits."

If you want to test the idea before going anywhere near an analyst, try this at home. Take the three things you wear most often and the three things you never wear, and hold each one under your chin in front of a mirror, in daylight, with no make-up on. Watch what each colour does to your face — not whether you like the colour, but what it does to you. For most women, a pattern appears within minutes. The favourites flatter. The strangers don't.

That pattern has been there all along, hiding in plain sight in your wardrobe. Colour analysis simply gives it a name — and once it has a name, getting dressed becomes the easiest part of your day.

Within a minute of meeting someone, I'm already doing it. I can't help myself. I'm looking at the relationship between their hair, their skin and their eyes — and at what the colour they happen to be wearing is doing to all three.

That relationship is what colour analysis reads. Everyone's natural colouring sits somewhere on three scales. Warm or cool: does your skin lean golden or rosy? Light or deep: how much contrast is there between your hair, skin and eyes? Clear or soft: do your features look vivid and defined, or gently blended? Where you sit on those three scales decides which colours make you look alive — and which make you look like you're coming down with something.

The four "seasons" — Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter — are shorthand for the main combinations. Springs are warm and clear: they glow in coral, warm teal and golden yellow. Summers are cool and soft: dusty pink, powder blue, lavender. Autumns are warm and deep: rust, olive, burnt orange. Winters are cool and bold: true red, emerald, navy, hot pink. Nobody is "not allowed" a colour — every season has a version of most colours. A Summer's red is a soft raspberry; a Winter's red is pillar-box.

Here's the part people find hardest to believe: you cannot reliably work this out from a photograph, a quiz, or one of the AI apps. I say this as someone whose own website has a colour quiz on it — it's a fun indication, and that's all it claims to be. Photographs lie about colour: every camera, screen and lighting condition shifts skin tone. And the warm-or-cool question, which everything else depends on, is precisely the thing that's invisible in a selfie taken under kitchen spotlights.

So in a session we do it the slow way, and the slow way is the point. The client sits facing a mirror in natural daylight, hair back, make-up off. One by one, I drape precisely dyed fabrics under her chin — warm gold then cool silver, soft rose then vivid fuchsia, tomato red then cherry red — and we watch her face. Not the fabric. The face.

The wrong colours do something almost unkind: shadows deepen around the mouth and under the eyes, redness comes up in the cheeks, the jawline blurs. The right ones do the opposite — the skin looks smoother, the eyes pick up light, the whole face comes forward. Clients assume I'll be making refined judgements they can't see. The truth is the opposite. By the third or fourth comparison, clients are calling it before I do. "Oh — that one's awful." It's the best part of my job, every single time: the moment a woman watches her own face light up and realises it wasn't her all along. It was the colour.

She leaves with her season, a palette of her best colours to keep on her phone, and something less tangible that I'd argue matters more: proof, seen with her own eyes in a mirror in Yorkshire daylight, that she doesn't need to be fixed. She needs to be lit properly — and now she knows how.

Somewhere between the third cocktail-making class and the fourth afternoon tea, the modern hen do ran out of ideas.

Ask any bridesmaid who has organised one. The brief is near-impossible: something all ages can do together, from the bride's school friends to her future mother-in-law. Something that isn't drinking-dependent, because Auntie Carol doesn't, and something more memorable than a craft workshop everyone forgets by Monday. It has to photograph well, work for a group, and give people something to talk about at dinner afterwards.

Which, unexpectedly, is a precise description of a colour analysis party.

Here's how one works. The group — anywhere from four to twelve women — gathers at the studio or a venue of their choosing. There's prosecco. Each guest takes her turn in the chair while I drape colour after colour under her chin, and the rest of the room watches her face change in real time. And this is where it departs from every other hen activity I've seen: the room joins in. There are gasps. There is heckling, of the loving kind. Someone's lifelong signature black turns out to do her no favours at all, to roars of delight from her sister. The future mother-in-law discovers she's a Spring and visibly blooms. Nobody is checking their phone.

The genius of it as a group activity is that everyone gets a turn in the spotlight without anyone having to perform. The shy cousin doesn't have to sing, dance or down anything. She just sits in good light while a roomful of women tells her how wonderful she looks in teal — and watches it be true in the mirror. I've seen quiet guests arrive braced for an ordeal and leave having had the best afternoon of the weekend.

And the bride? She gets the thing every hen do promises and few deliver: her favourite women genuinely bonding, around her, over something real. Plus a practical souvenir — every guest leaves knowing her season and carrying her colour palette, which means the wedding-guest outfit shopping that follows is transformed. More than one bride has told me the party quietly upgraded how half the congregation looked in the photographs.

It also solves the awkward-mix problem better than anything else I know. Colour doesn't care whether you're 24 or 64, size 8 or 18, teetotal or three proseccos in. Every single guest has colouring; every single guest gets her moment; nobody's turn is better than anyone else's. Try saying that about paddleboarding.

The hen party was where this started for me, but the same format has quietly spread — to big birthdays, to mother-and-daughter afternoons, to the work team day where colleagues who've shared an office for years discover something new about each other. The common thread is a roomful of people watching each other light up, literally, and going home still talking about it.

The modern hen do didn't run out of ideas after all. It just hadn't met this one yet.

Every year it happens. The shops turn rust, olive and conker-brown in September, icy pastels in January, brights in June — and every year, obedient to the window displays, we buy the season's colours whether they suit us or not.

Here's the thing the window displays won't tell you: the season that matters isn't the one outside. It's the one you carry around in your own colouring — and that one never changes.

In colour analysis, every person's natural colouring belongs to one of four seasons. It's decided by the interplay of your skin, hair and eyes: whether your undertone is warm or cool, how deep or delicate your colouring is, whether your features read vivid or soft. A warm, golden-toned woman with rich brown hair is an Autumn whatever the calendar says; a cool, high-contrast woman with dark hair and bright eyes is a Winter even at a July wedding.

And this is why the annual shop-window ritual treats women so unequally. When the September knitwear arrives in mustard, rust and khaki, the Autumn women of Britain have the time of their lives — those are literally their colours. The Summer women, cool and soft, buy the same mustard jumper and spend three months wondering why they look permanently exhausted in it. Come January, when the rails turn to icy grey and sharp black, the tables turn: the Winters look magnificent and the Autumns look like they've been unplugged.

It isn't that some women "can wear colour" and others can't. It's that the high street rotates through the four seasonal palettes over the year, and whichever women happen to match the current rotation look effortlessly good — while everyone else is shopping in the wrong aisle, through no fault of their own.

So what do you do with this, practically?

First: notice your pattern. Think about the time of year the shops seem made for you — when everything you try on just works. If autumn shopping always feels easy and January shopping always disappoints, that's data. Your best season's palette probably shares something with the colours in the shops that month.

Second: when the shops are against you, shop your version of the trend. Every trend colour exists in all four seasonal palettes, in different form. The high street's burgundy too heavy for you? Your raspberry is nearby. The icy pastels draining you? Look for the warmer, creamier versions hiding on the next rail. The trick is knowing which translation is yours — which is exactly what a colour analysis gives you: not a list of rules, but a palette that lets you buy anything, any season, and know it will earn its keep.

And third — the quiet superpower — feel free to ignore the season entirely. The woman wearing her own best teal in deepest November, while everyone else drowns in obligatory oatmeal, is not breaking a fashion rule. She's the one you'll remember from the room.

The calendar has four seasons and insists you dress for all of them. Your face has one, and it's had the same one all your life. Dress for that, and every season in the shops becomes yours to raid — on your terms.