Color analysis statistics: our quiz and palette data, in numbers

Quiz statistics: all 143,360 possible outcomes, enumerated

The quiz has 8 questions with 4 to 7 answer options each, giving 143,360 possible answer combinations. We ran every one of them through the production scoring function. Each line below is a share of that full answer space, a structural fact about the quiz itself rather than a survey of people:

• 10.5% of answer combinations reach the high-confidence bar (a clean margin over the runner-up season plus enough answered evidence).
• 45.9%land at low confidence, mostly because "not sure" answers withheld evidence; the quiz caps its own confidence rather than guessing.
• 89.5% of combinations return a named alternate season with a specific daylight test to decide between the two.
• 36 hand-written boundary tests cover the season pairs the quiz most often has to disambiguate.

Which seasons come up most

The Bright Spring row is worth being candid about, because it is the kind of number most tools would quietly hide: with our current 8 signals, no combination of answers lands on Bright Spring as the primary result. Its warm-bright-medium position always sits a hair closer to a neighboring season in the scoring geometry. The quiz still reaches it honestly: Bright Spring is the named alternate in 7.3% of all outcomes, and the drape test attached to those results is exactly the instrument that separates it from Warm Spring and Bright Winter. We publish this instead of patching the geometry to force a cosmetic nonzero share.

The 340-color dataset

• 340 named colors across the 12 season palettes, each with a hex value, between 23 (Bright Spring) and 30 per season.
• 324 of those hex values are unique; 15 hexes appear in two or more seasons, because neighboring seasons genuinely overlap at their edges.
• #C9A227 (a mustard gold) is the most shared color in the dataset, appearing in all three Autumn palettes: Soft, Warm, and Deep.
• 70colors are flagged as capsule-building neutrals, an average of 5.8 per season, which is why "your neutrals" on this site rarely means black and white.
• 61avoid-colors carry a stated mechanistic reason (what the color does against that coloring), never a bare "doesn't suit you."

The full palettes, with every hex, live on the color seasons pages, and the quiz that maps you to one is the free color analysis quiz.

Cross-tool reliability test: methodology first, number when measured

Every serious source repeats the same caveat: photo-based color analysis is less reliable than in-person draping. Almost nobody measures it. The only published figure we know of is third-party: colorpaletteanalysis.com reported that just 6 of 23 participants received results matching a reference palette, a 26% match rate. We are running our own test, and committing to the methodology publicly before the number exists:

• The same participant is analyzed by at least 4 selfie-based tools from our apps comparison plus our own no-photo quiz, using one photo set taken in natural daylight, no makeup, neutral top, per the standard photo guidance those tools themselves give.
• We record each tool's named season verbatim, then report the disagreement rate two ways: exact 12-season match, and season-family match (the four-family level where tools should agree easily if the method is sound).
• The result publishes here and on the apps comparison with the run date, the tool list with versions as of that date, and the participant count, whatever it shows, including if our own quiz is the outlier.

Status: test in progress. The measured number will appear here with its run date; this section will not quote an estimate in the meantime.

Method and refresh schedule

All quiz and palette figures on this page are generated by a script that reads the live product data and enumerates the full answer space; nothing is sampled or rounded beyond one decimal. Computed 2026-08-21 from the production quiz and dataset. This page is refreshed each January against the then-current data, and whenever the quiz or palettes change materially. Cite as: WardrobeVerdict color analysis statistics, 2026, wardrobeverdict.com/statistics.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most common color season?

In WardrobeVerdict's quiz, Warm Autumn is the most common outcome: 17.3% of all 143,360 possible answer combinations land there, followed by Soft Autumn at 17.0% and Soft Summer at 14.4%. The rarest reachable results are Cool Summer and Cool Winter at 2.2% each. These are structural shares of the quiz's answer space, not a survey of people.

How accurate is a color analysis quiz?

Honest answer: a quiz can narrow you down, and it should tell you how sure it is. WardrobeVerdict's quiz reaches its high-confidence bar in only 10.5% of all possible answer combinations; the other 89.5% get a named second-possibility season and a daylight drape test to settle it. Any tool that returns a confident single season for every input is hiding that uncertainty, not avoiding it.

How many colors are in a seasonal color palette?

Across WardrobeVerdict's 12 season palettes there are 340 named colors, between 23 and 30 per season, of which 70 are flagged as capsule-building neutrals. 324 of the 340 hex values are unique: 15 hexes appear in more than one season, because neighboring seasons genuinely share edge colors.

Do different color analysis tools agree with each other?

Published evidence says agreement is poor: one third-party test found only 6 of 23 participants got matching results across tools (a 26% match rate, per colorpaletteanalysis.com). We are running our own cross-tool consistency test with a written methodology; the result will be published on this page and on the color analysis apps comparison when it completes.