Soft Summer celebrities: typings, sources and disputes

Is Jennifer Aniston really a Soft Summer?

Nobody outside her own circle can say. She’s commonly typed that way: Soul of Color, FRANKIE4 and Brigette’s Newsletter all print Soft Summer. One of them, FRANKIE4, also names her among its Soft Autumns, in a different article of the same series. Season Approved has her as Warm Spring, and says of its own label that this “is not a verified personal color assessment.” Design Dash stops at Summer and doesn’t pick a subtype. None of these pages cites a draping session.

What is on the record is the hair, in her colorist’s own words. Michael Canalé told HELLO! she comes in “every five weeks to reconnect her previous highlights with her medium brown base colour.” In Hairdressers Journal he walks through the looks: one was “the lightest I have ever made Jennifer’s hair with highlights”, another the “only time we ever dyed Jennifer’s hair dark”, and for The Morning Show he says they “started letting the gold tones take over in preparation for the award seasons.”

Read that last line again. The warmth of the hair in those photos was scheduled. Anyone typing from those pictures is partly reading a colorist’s plan, and even a list that calls her Soft Summer notes she “rocks very highlighted beige blonde.” So our answer isn’t yes or no. It’s a reasonable guess that several people have made from photos, and she may be something else.

One face, six heads of hair

Fig. 1 is a demonstration with a made-up person, because we don’t put real people through our tools. We give the same skin and eye colors to the two functions our scan uses to rank seasons, and change only the hair. Undyed ash brown reads Soft Summer. Beige highlights move it to Light Summer. Black dye moves it to Cool Summer. Golden blonde and auburn both read Light Summer, with Soft Autumn next. That’s three different answers from one face.

The reason is plain. In this maths, hair counts toward how light and how clear you read, and a warm dye nudges temperature too. People judging a photo weigh hair as well, without even a formula to keep them consistent. It’s also why our scan doesn’t end at the reading: color rounds come next, and those are decided by your eyes on your own skin. The numbers behind this are synthetic. They describe how the code behaves, and nobody in particular.

Wikipedia’s summary of the classic system says the same in one line: “Skin color, rather than hair or eye color, determines a person’s season.” Whether you believe that or not, a list built on hair is a list built on the part that changes most.

Who else gets typed Soft Summer

Every list that covers them agrees on three names: Kristen Stewart (Soul of Color, Season Approved, PersonalColorAI and Truth is Beauty); Sarah Jessica Parker (Soul of Color, Season Approved, PersonalColorAI and Brigette’s Newsletter); and Cara Delevingne (Soul of Color, Season Approved and PersonalColorAI). These five have one list pulling away:

Emma Watson (PersonalColorAI and Palette Hunt) is a harder case, sitting on True Autumn at Soul of Color and Bright Spring at Season Approved. And plenty of names rest on a single list with nothing to compare them against, such as Rebecca Ferguson (Soul of Color); Miranda Kerr (Soul of Color); Joey King (FRANKIE4); Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (Brigette’s Newsletter); and Tilda Swinton (Season Approved).

Why Soft Summer lists are so unstable

Across the lists we read, 97 people are placed in Soft Summer by someone. 44 of them appear on at least two publishers’ lists, and only 6 hold on all of them. Two things make this season harder than most.

First, it’s the palette with the least color in it, and a screen is a poor place to judge that. The analyst behind Truth is Beauty is candid about this: “I often find Summer celebs difficult to narrow down into subseasons,” perhaps because the muted differences “are harder to discern on a computer screen.” The post on Kristen Stewart is worth reading for the method. It tests the person against black, against warm colors and against blonde hair before settling on anything, which is more than most lists show.

Second, it has neighbors on all sides. Soul of Color names Soft Autumn, Light Summer and Light Spring as easy mix-ups, and it flags Victoria Pedretti (Soul of Color) as “sometimes analysed as Soft Autumn.” If your own results keep landing on two of these, that’s normal: see Soft Summer vs Soft Autumn and True Summer vs Soft Summer.

What the lists say Soft Summers share

Names aside, the descriptions are fairly consistent, and they aren’t a portrait of anyone in particular. Soul of Color says eyes run from “hazel, gray, green-gray, blue-gray to a soft amber”, all with “a muted soft quality”. It puts skin at medium-dark to medium-light, “medium-cool in undertone with a smokiness to it”, and says hair can sit at nearly the same depth as the skin. The Concept Wardrobe calls the contrast between features low to medium and the eyes “softly greyed”. Nothing in those descriptions requires fair skin or light hair.

Soft Summer men

Leonardo DiCaprio (Soul of Color); Tom Hardy (Soul of Color); Jonathan Groff (Soul of Color); and Liev Schreiber (Soul of Color) come from a single list. Kevin Costner (Brigette’s Newsletter) and Michael Ealy (Brigette’s Newsletter) come from another. Cross-checks are rarer for men, and they don’t all hold: Harry Styles (Soul of Color) is Warm Spring at Palette Hunt, and Patrick Dempsey (Soul of Color) is True Summer at Brigette’s Newsletter.

Your own natural hair says more than theirs

If you came here to compare yourself, start with what you can see better than any list can. Soul of Color describes Soft Summer hair as around a level 4 to 7, with “a muted ashy tone” and not much darker than the skin. To find yours:

• Look at your regrowth at the parting, by a window, in daylight. Bathroom bulbs add warmth of their own.
• Don’t lean on childhood photos. Hair that starts light often darkens as you grow up, and Curate Your Style notes it’s common in both soft seasons.
• If you’ve colored for years and don’t know your base, cover your hair for the test. MySeasonColors suggests pulling it back or covering it so it doesn’t influence the read.

Try it on your own skin

Hold colors from the Soft Summer palette under your chin in daylight, with your hair tied back, and ask the question a list can’t: what does your skin do next to this color? The full colors, with hex codes, are on the Soft Summer palette page. What season am I? walks through the choice step by step. Neighboring typings are on Cool Summer celebrities and Soft Autumn celebrities.

Related guides and tools

• PaletteSoft SummerMuted and cool: dusty colors with hex codes and a free scan to check them on you.
• GuideSoft Autumn celebritiesWho is commonly typed Soft Autumn, with a source for each and the disputes shown.
• GuideCool Summer celebritiesWho is commonly typed Cool Summer or True Summer, sourced, with the caveats on dye.