Spring Colour Palettes
Every year around late February, something interesting starts happening in shop windows. The deep burgundies and forest greens that carried the autumn give way to softer, lighter, slightly hopeful tones. Butter yellow turns up where mustard used to be. Pale pink replaces oxblood. Pistachio appears, somehow, in everything. By the time the clocks change, an entire visual language has shifted, and most of us absorb the change without quite registering it as a deliberate decision.
Why spring colours look like spring
The light changes. As days lengthen and the sun rises higher in the sky, the quality of natural light shifts from the warm, low-angled light of winter to a cooler, brighter, more diffuse light. Colours that read as rich and warming in low winter light start to look heavy and oppressive in spring brightness. The same burgundy that looked elegant in a December lamplit room looks slightly funereal in April sunshine.
The colours that don't belong
Part of building a coherent spring palette is knowing what to leave out. A few shades that look slightly wrong in March and April, even when they're beautiful in other seasons.
Black, in head-to-toe quantities, reads as winter or as a deliberate fashion statement rather than as seasonally appropriate. Used sparingly (a black shoe, a black bag) it's fine; used as the foundation of an outfit, it works against the lighter mood of the season.
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