When Color Becomes A Prison

By Jennifer Wang

The first time I saw a girl wearing lip gloss in middle school, it changed my world forever.

She was a regular at my lunch table. We were mutual friends, but I didn’t know her that well. She was loud, boisterous, and didn’t care much about how she was perceived by others.

One day, she pulled out a sleek-looking red tube of lip gloss from the inner folds of her backpack, swiftly applying a swipe to her bottom lip before delicately pursing them together. It was a vivid shade of coral, so bright it distracted from the rest of her facial features. One of our friends asked her about it, and she beamed proudly before passing it around for all the girls to look at.

As they oohed and ahhed, I couldn’t help but stare at her lips. In my humble opinion (at the age of twelve years old), it was an obnoxiously warm shade of red, bordering on being orange.

As a young Asian girl, I was always told to avoid vibrant colors at all costs. Especially when it comes to warm tones. I was told that it brought out the yellow undertones in my skin, and made me look sick. I never understood what that meant, but seeing that lip gloss on my friend clicked something into a place of understanding.

My friend reapplied her lip gloss yet again.

Yikes. That’s definitely not her color.

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The idea of color seasons first emerged in the 1980’s from color consultant Carole Jackson’s book Color Me Beautiful. These color seasons divided color palettes up into four categories, modelled after actual seasons. You were sorted into the seasons based on the colors and tones of your hair, eyes, and skin. In 2023, this idea reemerged on Tik Tok and quickly gained traction as a pop cultural movement.

It started off with videos of Korean celebrities getting their personal color seasons analyzed by professional clinics in Seoul. Soon, influencers and normal people alike began booking appointments at the clinics themselves — further bolstering the reputation of these services.

I encountered the concept of color seasons for the first time in high school, from a fateful post that popped up on my Rednote feed.

It was one of those nights where I let my revenge bedtime procrastination take the better of me. As I was scrolling, a woman’s obnoxiously loud voice stopped my finger from scrolling to the next piece of content.

“This is how I used to dress—”

A few photos of herself in various outfits popped up on the screen.

“And this is how I dress now!”

Cue the photos of herself again, in different outfits this time.

“Notice how ashy, lifeless, and bad I looked before, versus now! These colors made my eyebags look a thousand times worse, my cheeks bloated, and my sun spots extra visible. But after I discovered my color season, I have never looked better.”

What the hell was this woman on about?

“Have you ever wondered why you looked so bad in certain colors? Stop spending your life savings on flying to Korea and booking a color analysis service! Find out what season you are with this video right now! All you need is your phone screen and good lighting. Find a source of natural lighting, and cover half the screen with your hand.”

I listened attentively. I covered half of my screen with my hand. A series of colors flew by on the screen — the woman in the video told me to judge whether the cooler tones or warmer shades made my skin look “brighter.” I squinted.

The time blinked at me from the corner of my phone screen. Three a.m. I still didn’t know what color season I was, but perhaps that was an issue for another sleep-deprived night.

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I eventually tried to continue my quest in finding a personal color season. But the more videos I watched, the more lost I became. I started getting dizzy whenever I saw color wheels. They spun toward me from my computer screen, pleading to be claimed, demanding an answer. I had nothing to offer.

The internet told me to learn what the tone of my skin was to find out which season I fit into. They told me I could learn if I was “warm,” “cool,” or “neutral” depending on the color of veins that ran through my wrist. But every time I checked, my vision turned blurry. Were they more green, or blue? Was that a streak of purple? I found myself lost in the questions, lost in the colors of my body, and lost in a world that demanded to fit me into a label.

The more I tried to fit myself within a personal color season, the more questions arose. Curiously enough, I wasn’t the only one with this problem.

I distinctly remember scrolling across a Tik Tok of an influencer who had launched herself into an existential fashion crisis by getting her colors analyzed. All her life, she thought warmer colors suited her — but as it turns out, she was a “cool spring.”

Nothing from the analysis made sense to her. She walked away from that service more confused and less empowered.

That’s the irony with the fashion community. Fashion was supposed to be an art form, a way for people to creatively express themselves. However, the rules that get thrown at us weigh us down instead.

Growing up, my favorite color was pink. It was cliche, but that’s just who I was — I loved princesses, stuffed animals, sparkly things, and pink. But I eventually grew too tall for my clothes, and too timid for the color pink. Expectations from other kids and taunts of being “too girly” started the slow erasure of pink from my closet. I tossed the color out like it was a stain on my identity. Today, the only pink apparel I own is a graphic T-shirt, which sits in the corner of my dresser collecting dust.

There’s a heavy feeling that weighs down on my heart when I think about it. A pendulum swings back and forth in my ribcage, and it teeters between the desire to conform to the trends and the urge to stay authentic to myself. If my younger self could see me now, I just know she would be utterly disappointed. Whatever happened to our favorite color? Whatever happened to us?

Last summer, I impulsively bought a blush palette of cool-toned pinks. Was it a little too light for my skin? Perhaps. But seeing it dust my cheeks made me happy, and I decided that life was too fleeting to worry about what colors fit right on my face, and what didn’t.

In times like these I think back to the girl with her lip gloss at my middle school lunch table — maybe she was onto something. ■