The Soft Winter Edit
About Michelle
I have studied color analysis for over ten years. Finding a lot of interest and enjoyment in the subject, I found myself trying to analyze everyone I saw. I became rather adept at it. I could analyze most of my family and friends, and I found myself mentally placing strangers and movie actors into their seasons. But for all of that, I could never quite find a home for myself in any of the seasons of 12-season color analysis.Most of that time I dressed as a Cool or Dark Winter, although many of the colors were simply too bright for me. I stuck mainly to black and navy, and occasionally burgundy. Several years in, I began to wonder if perhaps I was a Cool Summer or a Soft Summer, and I began trying out those colors. To my surprise, I found quite a few that I could add to my wardrobe, but many others were too light, too soft, and drained my coloring. Summer lipsticks especially washed me out, which was disappointing because I love lipstick. But I kept up the Summer wardrobe, largely because I was tired of having a closet consisting almost entirely of black and navy, along with a few colors that looked beautiful on the hanger, but that I rarely actually wore.During my time dressing as a Summer, I learned that I look fantastic in gray, almost any shade of it, and that I could wear more blues than I had previously realized. I was genuinely surprised to find that sage green was actually very good on me.
But I had my doubts about Summer. Those lipsticks that drained me. The still-limited palette. The fact that Summers are not supposed to look good in black, and I knew that I did.
I was undoubtedly cool, that much I knew. I favored darker colors in general, although I was not quite as dark as the textbook Winter. Bright? Not really. But Summer did not really fit either. Cool, yes. Light to medium, no. My coloring was not like the deepest of Winters, but it was deeper than the deepest of Summers. And soft? Well, no. I was somewhere between bright and soft.At some point during my search for a seasonal box I could actually fit into, I came across the term Soft Winter. I had never heard of this concept. Winters are deep, cool, and bright, right? The concept of a Soft Winter, a cool Winter touched by the softness of Summer, intrigued me. It felt right almost immediately.Unfortunately, although I wanted to jump headfirst into embracing the season, I could not find much help along the way. I quickly learned that Soft Winter is underserved, often ignored, and sometimes outright dismissed as something that does not even exist.
I embraced it anyway, on my own. I tried dozens of lipsticks (thank you, Revlon, for being so affordable). I swatched enough eyeshadows, foundations, and blushes to make the sales associates at Sephora and Ulta raise their eyebrows. I ordered and returned sweaters from Amazon, frequented thrift stores to find affordable test pieces, and took photos of my face in countless tops in shop fitting rooms.
There was no single moment where everything clicked into place. It was more of a slow accumulation, one color working, then another, a lipstick that finally looked the way a lipstick is supposed to look. Gradually, I stopped second-guessing myself in the mirror. The colors that once felt like a compromise started feeling like mine.And I figured out what actually harmonized with my season.
Why I Created The Soft Winter Edit
Seeing such a gap in the color analysis community, I decided that since I had learned so much through trial and error, I wanted to help other Soft Winters find colors that would help them feel beautiful and confident too.I put it all in one place. Not a rough guide or a quick reference, but something genuinely useful, the kind of resource I had spent years looking for. These guides were written specifically for Soft Winter, with the depth and accuracy the season deserves.You should not have to spend a decade figuring this out.
The Soft Winter Edit
© 2026 The Soft Winter Edit, Poppins