Sisters Hannah and Sophia Rashad were first introduced to the world of color analysis as teenagers, when their mother hired a stylist to overcome her wardrobe woes and pinpoint why she never seemed to have anything to wear, despite near-constant shopping. “She just knew that every time she put on an outfit, something wasn’t right. She wasn’t representing herself, but she couldn’t pinpoint why,” says Hannah.

When she had her color and body shape analysis done, it suddenly clicked. “The stylist trained her to walk around a store and reverse-engineer the experience, so rather than trying to fit into the latest trend, she was looking for pieces that would fit her,” Hannah explains. “Over time, she’s curated a collection where everything works together, she can invest confidently in pieces that will last, and she’s happy to get things tailored, because she knows she’ll get more wear out of them. It completely eliminated her buyer’s remorse.”

Hannah and Sophia watched their mother go through this metamorphosis at the height of makeover television, when shows like How to Look Good Naked, Ten Years Younger, and What Not to Wear emphasized the transformative power of a good outfit. But the general culture at that time sold the idea that “if you’re not feeling right in the clothes, the problem is you”, says Hannah. Today, as the co-founders of London-based personal styling platform Curate Your Style, the sisters tell clients the opposite: “We want to make people feel better about themselves and reach a genuine level of self-acceptance while radically changing our shopping habits.”

Curate Your Style positions itself as a route to sustainable consumption. In Hannah and Sophia’s vision for the future of fashion, consumers know what different colors and shapes suit them best, and they know how to leverage that to create whatever impression they want. As a result, they’re more confident investing in fewer, better pieces and caring for them properly; everything in their closets matches (without reverting to all-black everything); and they don’t impulse buy pieces that don’t suit their style, leaving fewer clothes unworn at the back of their closet.

It’s a bold aim: using color analysis to curb overconsumption, encouraging shoppers to buy less but better, and helping them tune out the constant onslaught of fashion advertising. Can it live up to its promises?

The color analysis renaissance

Color analysis has its roots in 20th century art theory. It wasn’t until the 1940s that it was applied to personal styling, but the real boom happened in 1980, with the publication of Carole Jackson’s book, Color Me Beautiful. Despite its popularity, color analysis eventually fell out of favor, as consumers sought to express their personalities through fashion, regardless of what someone else told them was ‘flattering’.

Today, fashion formulas like color analysis are enjoying a renaissance on TikTok. But for every convert extolling its virtues, there is a critic completely baffled by its popularity. This isn’t surprising: alongside videos of professional color analysts carefully draping swatches on clients and explaining the theory behind their judgement, there are just as many DIY filters and short-cut methods muddying the waters. And that’s before the algorithm feeds you consultations-gone-wrong, where color analysts accidentally tell the client they look terrible in everything, or the comments section rips the result to shreds.

While color analysis as a social media trend has helped to raise awareness of the process, it also risks “diminishing its power”, says Sophia. “It can feel gimmicky if you don’t know how to use it, and a lot of the AI-based services revert to stereotypes, which can be especially problematic for women of color,” Hannah adds.

Rather than projecting beauty ideals, Hannah and Sophia aim to help clients harness color and shape to give whatever impression they want, and to bring out their personalities. They still offer body shape analysis — which is based on the width of your shoulders, waist and hips, as well as your bone structure, torso length versus leg length, and bone size — but it’s not used to “correct” a client’s silhouette. Likewise, the hair and makeup analysis — extensions of the color service — riffs on the client’s personality. “We advise people on their best shades, whether that is blonde, brunette, pink, or blue. It’s about finding the right shade for you, whatever your personality,” says Sophia.

Some people just use color analysis as a loose guide, but others adopt it as a complete doctrine. “We have had clients change their homes or car interiors. Some dip their jewelry. Others extend it to their pets and babies. They might even send their whole family or their bridesmaids if they’re getting married,” says Hannah. “Some people do it for a specific event, others use it in everyday life. We’ve seen the full spectrum — all ages, all genders, all countries.”

Could a personal fashion formula help to curb overconsumption?

Color analysis might not seem like a direct line to sustainability, but proponents say the two are deeply intertwined. In the best-case scenario, clients come away from color analysis with a deeper understanding of what works for them, so rather than being influenced by trends or content creators with totally different body types and undertones, people can shop for their own silhouettes. And if you’re shopping in line with your analysis, you will have fewer pieces gathering dust in the back of your closet or donated, because the color or the fit wasn’t quite right. In the six months since I got my color analysis done, I’ve seen how this can play out.

I grew up in the golden era of Topshop and Asos, when fast fashion was seen as a way to democratize the industry, and shopping was a Saturday hobby. Like many fashion lovers, I over-indulged. I had more jeans than days of the week, more shoes than occasions to wear them, and more bikinis than holidays. A mountain of clothes, and I was still left with the lingering feeling that I never had anything to wear.

When I first got into sustainability in my late teens, my personal overconsumption was the starting point. I banned myself from shopping new, only to find that shopping secondhand could fuel the same bad habits, and then went cold turkey on shopping new or secondhand, on a quest for self-reflection. Now, as a sustainable fashion editor, I have a complicated relationship with shopping. I still love fashion and the way it can make me feel, but I’m acutely aware of how badly the industry affects people and the planet. I want to support small brands and designers trying to do the right thing, but I find shopping overstimulating, and I’m too frugal to commit to investment pieces when I don’t know how my body or style will change. In other words, I was a prime candidate for color analysis.

To find out whether the service could live up to its promises, I put it to the test. When I got my results, my first instinct was to go full Marie Kondo and start from scratch, but there’s nothing sustainable about that. Instead, I’m slowly reselling items that sit outside my color palette or giving them to friends, and replacing them with pieces I know I’ll love for a long time. Knowing what colors suit me has narrowed my focus, making me less sentimental about pieces I love that just never quite worked on me, and helping me to feel more confident investing in wardrobe staples (recent additions include a Charlotte Simone Penny Lane coat I found on Vestiaire Collective and a pair of knee-high leather boots from Hobbs that I got for a steal on Vinted).

While I initially wasn’t sold on my color palette — I had assumed I would be an autumn like my mum, but I’m actually a true summer — the cool, muted shades have grown on me, and I get so many more compliments when I’m wearing them.

Most of the time, I’m too busy to think that deeply about what I wear, and opening my closet in the morning gives me the overwhelming feeling that I just want someone to tell me what to wear. That said, I’ve never been particularly sold on the idea of a capsule wardrobe (too samey) or a style uniform (too tech-bro). Building a wardrobe around what works for me means I’m slowly transitioning from the feeling of having nothing to wear to a quiet confidence in outfit repeating and easy experimentation. In the same way that people revert to wearing all-black everything to avoid mismatching, sticking to your color palette can also open up new combinations, because nothing clashes, meaning you get way more wear out of each item, undermining the feeling that you constantly need newness.

As Hannah says, it’s not a rigid rulebook, it’s a filtering framework. “When you give yourself more boundaries, you actually have more flexibility,” she explains. “But when you’re overwhelmed by choice, you just feel lost.”

Scaling the impact

Increasingly, Curate Your Style is working with brands and retailers to integrate its analysis into VIC services. At Fendi and Chloé, for example, Hannah and Sophia help in-house sales advisors pull pieces that would work for their clients’ color seasons, allowing them to make more personalized recommendations, and weave their previous purchases into the service (for example, a new-season scarf might be a perfect complement to the bag they bought last year). At Harrods, they work with the private shopping teams to create bespoke experiences for VICs and help the personal shoppers understand clients’ color results.“This is something we want to invest more in, so everything — even email communication — is more personalized, instead of constantly pushing clients to buy more without considering their existing wardrobe or what works for them,” says Sophia.

It’s also working to scale its services outside luxury. In addition to in-person consultations, Curate Your Style now offers online consultations, where clients pay a lower price to upload photos, which are then analyzed by the business’s growing team. Unlike the physical fabric swatches of old, clients come away with a PDF they can keep on their phones, zooming into particular color swatches while shopping to compare hue, value, and chroma. They also get recommendations for the denims, leathers, suedes, and metal colors that will work best for their palette, as well as a clothing care guide encouraging repair, tailoring, and reuse. To make its personal styling advice more accessible, Curate Your Style also shares mood boards and inspiration photos on Pinterest and Instagram, showing how different style aesthetics might interpret the 12 color seasons. “The idea is to strengthen your relationship to the palette, keep you inspired, and break some of the negative associations you might have with certain colors,” says Sophia.

“It isn’t selling more, it’s helping people understand what suits them, so they buy less but with more intention,” says Helen Brocklebank, CEO of British luxury trade body Walpole, which named Curate Your Style as one of its Brands of Tomorrow in 2025. “When consumers have a clearer understanding of the colors, shapes, and styles that work for them, they are more likely to invest in pieces they genuinely love and wear repeatedly, rather than making impulse purchases that quickly lose their appeal. If these behaviors can be successfully encouraged at the luxury end of the market, there is significant potential for them to influence wider consumer habits.”

When it comes to sustainability, consumer habits are one of the hardest aspects to change, says Jamie Moore, managing director of environmental consultancy Positive Luxury, which issues the Butterfly Mark certification that Curate Your Style is backed by. “Consumers are navigating an extraordinary amount of noise: seasonal drops, trends, social media, targeted advertising, urgent promotion. This all creates a powerful incentive to keep buying. Color analysis provides a valuable filter against this. There is a framework guiding every purchase, which should result ultimately in a wardrobe of pieces that are worn more frequently, retained for longer and valued more highly. It’s a real shift to quality over quantity, from volume to value.”

For private clients, there is also a personal style service, which is the most introspective involved process. It took me several hours to complete, and I had to come back to it a few days later, once I’d had time to mull things over. It turns out, it isn’t that easy to say what food you would be, or what you would sound like as a piece of music.

This is the bit that has taken me the longest to wrap my head around, and I’m still iterating on my personal style guide with Hannah and Sophia. It’s a strange sensation, having someone relay something so deeply personal back to you, and incredibly vulnerable, laying out how you feel about your body and your style, what you want to look like, and how you want to be perceived. But Sophia says it is key to making shopping more sustainable. “This service is really about making you feel at home in your palette and shape, so you can feel deeply connected to it,” she says. “Once you feel connected, everything clicks.”

This feature was shot at Maison Colbert, the East London home and showcase created by artists Philip Colbert and Charlotte Colbert, in collaboration with designer Angus Buchanan and Chris Dyson Architects.