True Summer hair color: cool shades for Cool Summers

True Summer or Cool Summer: which am I reading about?

Usually the same season. Most 12-season charts use one name or the other for one place on the map, and this site calls it Cool Summer, so a True Summer palette and ours aim at the same thing. There’s one catch. In Agile Styling’s 16-season method, True Summer and Cool Summer are two seasons, with Cool Summer a flow toward True Winter that can carry more depth and contrast. If an analyst typed you that way, you may suit hair a little deeper than this page describes. Either way, the advice about brass is the same.

The palette explains the priority. Ours is the coolest of the twelve on average, and the things on its avoid list all share yellow in the base. Rust, for one, is there because it makes rosy skin look ruddy. Hair sits right next to your face, in a large area, so the same logic applies with more force.

Shades that work

The picture at the top holds lightness still and changes only the tone. Everything on the left is a working direction, and the levels below come from Soul of Color.

• Medium cool brown, level 4 to 5. The home base. Soul of Color describes natural True Summer hair as medium to dark brown with a slight, muted ashy quality.
• Ash brown, milk tea or frosty brown, level 5 to 6. The same idea a step lighter, and a good way to add light without warmth.
• Dark ash blonde, level 7. As far up as Soul of Color goes for this season. On a box, it suggests words like frosted, iced, ash and cool, and a level with an A after it, such as 7A.

These numbers are soft. The same site gives natural True Summer hair as level 3 to 6 in one article and 4 to 7 in another, and color-analysis.app writes of a corridor from light ashy blonde through dirty blonde to medium cool brown, never near-black. Level numbers also differ between brands. L’Oréal Paris, writing about undertone in general and not about seasons, suggests ashy casts for cool skin: mushroom, ash brown, cool chestnut and cool auburn, with cool espresso for deep skin. Those last few give you more range than season lists tend to.

Why blonde so often washes this season out

Soul of Color makes an observation worth testing. With light eyes and skin, you’d expect blonde to suit a True Summer. Often it doesn’t: blonde washes them out, and they look better with brown hair because they need that contrast. We can put a rough number on the idea, by measuring the lightness gap between hair and skin.

Read across the top left. On skin like Monk 2, level 4 hair sits 68 points from the skin and level 9 only 13. So lifting from brown to pale blonde gives up most of the contrast you had. That matches the observation, although it doesn’t prove anything about how a face looks. Now read down the right side. On deep skin the pattern reverses: at Monk 8, level 4 hair is close to the skin and level 9 is far away. A True Summer on deep skin who goes blonde adds contrast and doesn’t lose it, which is a different decision altogether. Season guides tend to skip this because their examples are mostly fair.

Brass, and why your skin shows it first

Brass is what’s left when hair is lifted. A cosmetology study guide explains that eumelanin breaks down first, leaving warm pheomelanin showing. Kenra Color’s manual lists what you’ll see at each level: orange at level 5, gold orange at 6, gold at 7. So the lighter you take a cool brown, the harder it works against itself, and that’s the real reason dark ash blonde needs more upkeep than cool brown.

Which product you reach for follows from the wheel, which the Soft Summer hair page draws out in full. Kenra pairs blue with level 5, and blue-violet with level 7. Wella says blue pigments are best for the orange tones in brown hair, and purple for yellow in lightened pieces. A toner or gloss at the salon goes further than either. As your color fades, look at it in daylight next to Cool Silver or a white shirt. If the shirt makes your hair look orange, it’s time.

How to ask for it

That last question matters more than it sounds. Wella’s Koleston Perfect chart gives ash as blue and green, and Schwarzkopf’s Igora gives -2 ash as blue and -1 cendré as blue and violet. A green lean can look flat next to rosy skin, and a blue or violet lean tends to sit more easily. That last bit is our judgment. Mention, too, that cool tones look darker than their level, according to a California cosmetology study guide, so you don’t get a surprise when a level 6 ash comes out looking deeper than you pictured. Colorists plan for all of this, and your hair’s history affects the result as much as the formula does.

What if you go lighter, warmer or grey?

Your season stays. That’s the classic position, and it holds even if you dye your hair. What changes is how your clothes look next to your new hair. After a warm or very light color, you may find Rose and Cornflower less convincing against it. If you scan, scan with your natural color showing, because our scan reads hair and a dye can move its answer.

Grey is the friendly case. Grey hair is hair without pigment, and this palette is already built around Blue Grey and Pewter Blue. Silver hair tends to sit well with it, and Dusk Navy and Rose near the face keep it from looking flat. That’s our view, with no study behind it.

Try it first

The hair try-on has ten fixed chips, and Ash brown and Mushroom brown are the two to start with. They’re screen colors, and dark hair stops short of them, so read them as direction. Silver shows you the cool end. Press Copper next, for the warm comparison. It shows the effect from the top of this page on your own face, which is what you came for. The season has its own palette page, and the celebrities page lists who gets typed here. The Full Color Report shows hair colors on you.

Related guides and tools

• PaletteCool SummerCool and gentle: blue-based colors with hex codes and a free scan to check them on you.
• GuideTrue Summer makeupCool rose and berry lips, soft blush and slate eyes, for True or Cool Summer.
• GuideCool Summer celebritiesWho is commonly typed Cool Summer or True Summer, sourced, with the caveats on dye.