Colour analysis app · in development
Find your colour season from three guided photos. Daydrape measures your skin, hair and eyes on four axes and shows exactly how it got there. Your result is free, before any paywall.
Soft Autumn
58% match · close second Soft Summer 42%
The problem
We read 1,741 public app-store reviews of colour-analysis apps. The same four complaints kept coming up.
You do the whole scan, then the answer is locked behind a payment.
the most common complaintSame face, different photo, different season, and no explanation of why.
A cheap trial that quietly turns into a monthly charge that's hard to cancel.
Phone cameras misread colour in poor light, and studies find bigger errors on darker skin.
How it works
By a window, no flash, holding a printable reference card with grey and skin-tone patches. Live checks for light and angle, and three matching shots, so one bad photo can't decide your season.
Lightness, warmth, chroma and contrast, read across your skin, hair and eyes, each with an honest uncertainty band.
Your colour season is built from those measurements. When it's close, we show the runner-up and tell you so.
Workings shown
Every result shows where you sit on each axis and how sure we are. A wide band means less certain. We'd rather show you that than fake confidence.
Soft Autumn
Why is warmth less certain? Even trained raters barely agree on skin undertone, while they agree well on lightness. So we show a range.
SourceBranigan et al. · 2024 ↗The science
Most apps glance at one selfie and hand you a season. Daydrape measures your colouring in CIELAB, the international standard colour space, corrects for your light, and only then names a season, with every step on show.
Read across your skin, hair and eyes, never skin alone.
How light or deep your colouring is. It's the most dependable thing to measure: raters agree on lightness far more than on undertone,1 and clinical colour meters give highly consistent skin readings (ICC 0.98).2
Where you sit between rosy and golden, measured as a hue angle. It's real, but people barely agree on it by eye (ICC ≈ 0.15),1 so we show a range, never a flat "warm" or "cool".
How vivid or muted your colouring is. It's what separates a "clear" season from a "soft" one, and it's the reason two people with the same undertone can suit very different colours.
The gap between your skin, hair and eyes. Contrast changes how skin is seen: the same faces looked more even-toned against darker hair.3 In a 2026 study, hair and eyes told a model more about season than skin did.4
Your phone quietly re-tints every photo. A single selfie can't tell your colouring apart from your kitchen light. So we don't trust a single selfie.
built to cut lighting error, not hide it ↓The card sits in the same light as your face, so we can correct your camera's colour against known patches. In lab tests, skin-tone reference charts cut colour error to about 2.5–4 ΔE, versus up to 11.8 ΔE with a standard chart.5
Tilting a phone alone shifted measured skin colour by more than a unit, and flash didn't reliably help.6 So we take three guided shots and only give a result when they agree. If they don't, we ask for a retake rather than guess.
Phone cameras make more white-balance and exposure errors on darker skin,7 and uncorrected photos skew skin tone lighter.2 Correcting against the card is how we tackle that. We're testing across a wide range of skin tones before launch and won't claim more than those tests show.
Seasons are a styling convention from 1970s and 80s colour books, not a biological type. A 1986 analysis of eleven published colour-analysis systems found few similarities in their colour advice, even between authors using the same season names.8
On a public benchmark of expert-labelled faces, AI models pick the right one of four seasons only about 55% of the time, yet the right season lands in their top two about 81–85% of the time.9,4
So Daydrape derives your season from your four measurements, shows how close the call was, and names the runner-up when it's close. You get the honest answer, and a far more useful one.
Example · illustrative values
close call → we tell you
workingsSeasonal colour analysis is a styling tradition, not settled science. We cite research for what can be measured, and we're upfront about the rest. Daydrape is in development, so we'll only quote our own accuracy once our testing produces it.
Share cards
Pick a style, add your name, share to Stories. Five looks, from quiet to loud.
psst The illustrated portrait is optional, off by default and always labelled as AI-generated. Example cards show a fictional person.
Pricing
Your reading
Free
Full palette
£4.99 one-off · planned launch price
FAQ
Seasonal colour analysis is a styling tradition, not settled science. Daydrape measures four things that can be measured (lightness, warmth, chroma and contrast) and builds your colour season from them, with a runner-up when it's close. You see exactly how the answer was reached, and you can judge it yourself.
We won't pretend this is solved. Phone cameras are measurably less accurate on darker skin, and studies show it. That's why Daydrape uses a reference card with skin-tone patches, three matching photos and a visible uncertainty band. We're testing across a wide range of skin tones before launch, and we won't claim more than our tests show.
Light changes how colour photographs. Daydrape guides you to daylight, no flash and a level phone, checks the light live, and only gives a result when three photos agree.
Partly. Warmth (your skin undertone) is one of four measurements. It's also the hardest to read reliably, so we show it with a wider band instead of a confident "warm" or "cool" label.
An in-person draping session with a trained consultant is a lovely experience. Daydrape is a quick, low-cost way to start at home, and it shows its working so you can see why you got your result.
Your photos are used to make your reading, and that's all. The details (where they're processed, how long they're kept and how to delete them) will be set out in full in our privacy notice before launch. Right now we only collect waitlist emails. Read the privacy notice.
The reference card is a small sheet with grey and skin-tone patches that helps correct your camera's colour. We're still deciding how you'll get it (print at home or another option) and will confirm before launch.
Your result is free, before any paywall. The full palette is a one-off purchase, with a planned launch price of £4.99. No subscription, and no trial that turns into a charge.
We're building it now. Waitlist members hear first. That's the only email we'll send you until then, apart from the odd build update.
Stop guessing which colours are yours. Join the waitlist and you'll be first in when Daydrape launches: the launch email goes to the list before anyone else, and your result is free.