Soft Autumn Myths and the Dangers of AI in Color Analysis
With rising popularity on social media, and with the increased usage of AI, I see more and more misleading myths about color seasons propagated every day. One popular myth, aided by unfortunately deceptive AI-generated images, is that the Soft seasons (Soft Autumn and Soft Summer) are exclusively the domain of women who “look” soft. What does looking soft mean? Well, usually there is very little visual contrast between the imaginary AI woman’s hair, skin, eyes, and lips. Compare this AI-generated “Soft Autumn” woman with a living, breathing Soft Autumn client of mine below:
While there may be a woman in existence who looks like the AI image, it perpetuates a stereotype that all women in this season might resemble the fantasy image. In reality, my beautiful Soft Autumn client has what many would consider to be a “high contrast” appearance. While she has porcelain skin, her hair is a very deep chocolate brown. Her skin is relatively cool in appearance, which is not uncommon for a Soft Autumn. But because Soft Autumn is a warm season, AI-generated “Soft Autumn women” will often look more golden because that is what the creator has prompted the engine to create.
I can just as easily create deceptive imagery “forcing” someone with certain characteristics (pale cool skin, dark brown hair, light eyes) to look beautiful and “at home” in a certain color season. Above is an AI-generated image of a woman wearing colors that fall within a Dark Winter palette. Her skin, hair, and eyes look fantastic. But this is not a reflection of reality. The AI image is specifically generating a perfected, airbrushed woman with flawless skin and features. If I dressed my real Soft Autumn client in these same colors, I would never be able to create a perfect illusion—she is a real woman, not a computer-generated fantasy. The dark burgundy lipstick and saturated evergreen sweater appear too dense on my client in reality, destroying the smooth and subtle glow of her skin, as well as the delicate colors of her eyes, lashes, and brows. While her hair is dark, it has a soft, lustrous quality to it that it only visible when she is dressed in the correct colors. In deeper Winter colors, the tones of her hair appear less healthy and rich, and more flat and one-dimensional.
AI imagery replaces the relationships we see in real life between colors and creates a false world where colors are able to exist in perfect harmony without affecting one another. If you upload an image of your face and ask an AI generator to dress you in 12 different palettes, the images created will all look relatively beautiful and normal. That is because AI imagery is always perfected and smoothed. The purpose of color analysis is to take the complexity of a human being’s coloring—the subtle tones in their hair, lips, eyes, and skin—and find a palette in which that person seems completely normal and at home. In real life, a person’s skin reacts negatively to the wrong colors and positively to the right colors. But filtered through an AI image generator, that person’s skin will look consistently perfect no matter what. And the purpose of color analysis is totally lost—replaced by an imaginary world where we don’t really look like ourselves.
The best method to see which colors look best on you in real life—is to test those colors out in real life, not in a fantasy world where everything is equally beautiful.
