Taylor Swift: Summer
No selfie. No photo. Your season comes from your answers, so lighting and filters can’t move it.
Our read is Summer. The read rests on contrast more than anything: her natural features sit close together in depth, so nothing about her face is high-contrast. That rules out the Winter family, which needs a gap between hair and skin to work. Cool eyes and skin that reddens rather than browns push it cool rather than warm, which lands on Summer.
This is our read of publicly visible coloring, not a fact about the person and not anything they have taken part in or endorsed. Color analysts disagree about most people, so the disagreement is on the page too.
The coloring this is read from
Fair skin that burns before it tans, blue-grey eyes, and naturally light blonde hair before any coloring — a set of features that sit close together in depth.
What works on a Summer
Powder blue, soft rose, lavender and cool cream — the colors she is most often photographed in for softer eras. Icy pastels read clean on her rather than washed out.
- Powder
- Lilac
- Rose pink
- Soft blush
- Sea glass
- Dove gray
- Cornflower
- Soft white
Powder #BCD4EF · Lilac #C7B3E5 · Rose pink #E58FB1 · Soft blush #F6C9CF · Sea glass #9FD3C7 · Dove gray #B8B8C2 · Cornflower #6F8FD9 · Soft white #F4F4F0
The full Summer palette and hex codes →
Five colors to skip
Loud oranges and very saturated warm colors tend to overpower a Summer palette.
- Burnt orange
- Mustard
- Camel
- Rust
- Pure black
Burnt orange #CC5500 · Mustard #D1A520 · Camel #C19A6B · Rust #B5522B · Pure black #111111
What Taylor Swift is actually seen wearing
Her album eras are a useful natural experiment, because each one came with a palette. The Lover and 1989 imagery — pastel pinks, powder blues, cool lilacs — is Summer almost exactly, and it is the period she is most often described as looking well in. The Reputation era went hard into black and high contrast, and it reads as a deliberate costume rather than as her own coloring, which is arguably the point of it. Folklore's greys and soft creams are Summer again, in a muted register.
What you can borrow, and what you cannot
What transfers from her is the register, not the specific colors. If you are also cool and light, the soft-pastel-with-cool-cream formula works the same way on you. If you are warm — Spring or Autumn — copying her palette is the fastest way to look washed out, because the thing making it work is the match between her cool skin and those cool pastels, not the pastels themselves. The one thing anybody can borrow is the low-contrast pairing: keeping the whole outfit within two shades of itself is a Summer habit that flatters most people who are not high-contrast.
If Summer is your season too, wear this
If Summer is yours too, the easiest starting outfit is three cool colors within two shades of each other and nothing sharp: a soft rose or powder blue knit, mid-blue denim or dove grey trousers, and a soft white rather than an optic white underneath. Silver jewelry, nothing gold. If you want one stronger note, make it the raspberry sorbet rather than a true red, because it keeps the blue base that holds the rest together. The mistake to avoid is a black jacket over the top, which undoes the whole thing by introducing a contrast your face does not have.
Where analysts disagree
The common counter-read is Light Summer rather than true Summer, on the grounds that her natural depth is very light. Both sit in the same family and the practical palette barely changes.
What about you?
Ten picks between two colors and you have your own season, with a palette and hex codes to keep. No photo, no sign-in.