An instrument for reading the colour of your own face.

Three steps, and the second one is the only one that leaves your phone.

1. 01

   Take the photograph in daylight

   Near a window, with the light on your face rather than behind you. A warm bulb pushes everyone toward looking golden, which is flattering and useless as evidence — and a phone's auto white balance is actively trying to neutralise the cast you are trying to measure. Percol asks for the frame it needs before the shutter.

2. 02

   The reading is made, then the photograph is gone

   The report is produced by an outside service: your photo is sent there and deleted as soon as the report is finished. Percol tells you this and asks before the first one. There is no account, no email and nothing to fill in.

3. 03

   Eight pages you keep

   The dossier stays on this phone, readable offline, and you can erase all of it in one tap. Your season, your palette and the pages that follow from them are yours to go back to rather than a screen you screenshot before it disappears.

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  Primer · 5 min read

  What a foundation is actually moving

  Shade matching picks an average. What has been measured on faces, over and over, is the spread around it — and the counter is not organised that way.

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  Primer · 5 min read

  The pigment you can eat

  Melanin and blood are the two everyone names. There is a third in your skin, it arrives from food, it moves in about a month — and whether it reads as beauty depends on who is looking.

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  Practice · 5 min read

  Hair colour is almost entirely a lightness

  Every natural hair colour on earth absorbs inside a twenty-nanometre band. What varies is how dark. Everything a salon argues about after that is a correction — bought with the reagent that costs you the fibre.

Read all nine

The questions people actually ask.

Is personal colour analysis scientific?

Partly. Skin colour has a standard measure — the Individual Typology Angle, built from lightness and yellowness — and facial contrast has been quantified repeatedly across four continents. What has no standard measure is warm against cool. A 2024 study found single human raters unreliable, with agreement below .30.

What is the difference between a warm and a cool undertone?

Almost everything meant by undertone is a ratio of two pigments: melanin in the epidermis and haemoglobin in the blood below it. Neither of them is warm or cool. The warm-cool split is a convention laid over that ratio, useful for prediction and not a property of the skin itself.

Does the wrist test work?

There is nothing behind it. Vein colour is what happens when light scatters through tissue on its way back out, and the same wrist reads blue or green depending on the lamp above it. No published measure of undertone uses the wrist, and no instrument reading agrees with it.

Can you tell your season from a selfie?

The pigment separation survives an ordinary colour photograph — melanin and haemoglobin can be pulled apart from one, and that was demonstrated in 1999. The limit is the room, not the camera. Shoot in even, indirect daylight, and take the photo twice; a warm bulb changes the answer.

What does a personal colour consultation cost in Korea?

Roughly ₩60,000 to ₩400,000 for a session in person, depending on the studio and the length. There is no state accreditation behind any of it: 241 personal colour credentials sit on the national register, and not one of them holds the accredited status the register also tracks.

Where did the four seasons come from?

A Bauhaus teaching exercise. Johannes Itten had students build compositions from their own faces and hair and noticed the choices clustered. Suzanne Caygill turned that into a practice in 1940s California, and Carole Jackson's 1980 paperback Color Me Beautiful compressed it into four palettes and a set of swatches.