Terms Across Languages
Seasonal color analysis spread through several markets at once, and each one built its own words for it. Korean beauty culture developed a rich vocabulary around 퍼스널컬러; Japan condensed the whole warm-cool question into two syllables; Chinese-language beauty media coined terms that fold skin depth and undertone together. Underneath the different words, everyone is describing the same three measurements — hue, value and chroma. This page is the translation layer, so a Korean video and an English article stop contradicting each other.
Korean 호수 (foundation "number"). Codes like 21 and 23 describe depth only; the letter beside them (C, N, W) carries the undertone. The number alone tells you nothing about warm or cool.
Japanese 1st / 2nd. Japanese analysts often report a primary and secondary season, which is closer to our between-two-seasons reading than to a single label.
Chinese 冷白皮 / 暖黃皮. These fold two separate ideas — depth and undertone — into one word. 冷白皮 means fair and cool, so it is not a synonym for "cool undertone": a deep cool complexion is equally cool.
English "warm colors". In general design, warm colors are reds and oranges. In color analysis, warm means yellow-based — and a warm blue exists. Do not read a color wheel article as if it were an undertone article.
Yes. It is the Korean term for the same practice, with a stronger consumer culture around in-person studio diagnosis. The four-season labels map directly, and our eight types split each of those by depth and clarity — see the systems comparison.
None in meaning. イエベ is short for "yellow base", the Japanese contraction of warm undertone, and ブルベ is "blue base" for cool. The terms are shorter, not different.
It exists everywhere but is named inconsistently: 뉴트럴 in Korean, ニュートラル or イエベ・ブルベどちらでもない in Japanese, 中性調 in Chinese. Some studios avoid the label entirely and assign the nearest season instead.
Search in the local language rather than translating: 퍼스널컬러 진단 in Korean, パーソナルカラー診断 in Japanese, 個人色彩檢測 or 冷暖皮 in Chinese, análisis de color personal in Spanish. Translated queries return far weaker results.