How Malileh Builds Its Palettes and Writes Its Guides

Quick Answer

Malileh is made by one person, Nahid Bozorgi, a self-taught digital artist and Procreate brush designer. It uses the established 12-season color framework, which describes coloring by temperature, depth and chroma.

What Malileh adds is transparency. Every color in every palette is measured, each palette is checked against the seasons next to it, and the guides only state what reliable sources agree on. This page explains how that works and where its limits are.

Who Makes Malileh

Malileh is created and reviewed by Nahid Bozorgi. Nahid is a self-taught digital artist who has been making Procreate brush sets and digital illustration tutorials since 2022. That work involves choosing, mixing and testing colors on screen every day, and Malileh grew out of it.

Nahid does not hold a formal color analysis certification, and Malileh does not offer in-person draping. If you want the most precise result possible, a trained analyst working with fabric drapes in controlled light is the better option. Malileh aims to be a careful, free and well-explained starting point.

Where the Framework Comes From

Malileh did not invent the 12-season system. Describing color by three separate qualities goes back to the Munsell color system of the early twentieth century, which describes every color by hue, value and chroma. Seasonal color analysis applies the same idea to a person's natural coloring.

The four-season approach reached a wide audience in 1980 with the book Color Me Beautiful. Later systems split each of the four seasons into three, giving twelve. Each of the twelve seasons is defined by a dominant characteristic and a secondary one:

• Temperature: whether coloring leans warm (golden) or cool (blue-pink).
• Depth: how light or dark the coloring is overall.
• Chroma: how clear and saturated, or soft and muted, the coloring is.

Light Spring, for example, is light first and warm second. Soft Summer is soft first and cool second. Malileh uses this framework for every season, and the palettes and guides are built to match it.

Why OKLCH, and What the Numbers Mean

Colors on a website are stored as HEX codes, which describe how much red, green and blue light a screen should mix. HEX is precise for screens, but it does not describe how a color looks to a person. Common alternatives such as HSL have the same problem: pure yellow (#FFFF00) and pure blue (#0000FF) both have an HSL lightness of 50%, yet the yellow looks far lighter.

OKLCH is a color space published in 2020 by Björn Ottosson and now part of the CSS color standard used by web browsers. It was designed so that a change in its numbers matches the change people actually see as closely as possible. Measured in OKLCH, the same yellow has a lightness of 97 and the same blue 45, which is much closer to what the eye sees. That is why Malileh uses it: to compare colors fairly, the numbers have to follow perception.

OKLCH describes every color with three numbers:

• Lightness: how light or dark a color looks, from 0 (black) to 100 (white). This is the measurable side of depth.
• Chroma: how far a color is from a grey of the same lightness. A chroma of 0 is a pure grey; the higher the number, the stronger and more saturated the color looks. OKLCH normally writes chroma as a small decimal, so Malileh multiplies it by 100 to make it easier to read. On this scale, the most vivid colors a screen can show reach about 30.
• Hue: the color family, written as an angle around a color wheel. Within one family, the hue shows which way a color leans, for example a red leaning toward orange or toward blue.

Lightness and chroma are the two numbers Malileh publishes. Hue is used for the warm-versus-cool pairs, as explained below.

How Every Palette Is Measured

Every Malileh season has a 30-color palette, including neutrals. Each color is measured in OKLCH, and each palette gets two averages: average lightness and average chroma.

If a palette is built correctly, the numbers should follow the framework: Light seasons should have the lightest palettes, Dark seasons the deepest, Bright seasons the strongest chroma and Soft seasons the lowest. The table shows the average of all 30 colors in each palette.

The two Light seasons have the lightest palettes, the two Dark seasons the deepest, the two Bright seasons the highest chroma and the two Soft seasons the lowest. Each season page shows its own numbers next to its sister seasons, along with signature colors measured side by side.

What the Numbers Cannot Show

Temperature cannot be captured in a single number. A red can be warm or cool depending on whether it leans toward orange or toward blue, and the same is true of every color family. That is why Malileh explains temperature with pairs: two colors of the same family and the same lightness, one leaning warm and one leaning cool. You will find these pairs on the season pages and in the comparison guides.

The numbers are for comparison inside Malileh's own system. They show how Malileh's palettes relate to each other and whether each palette matches the season it belongs to. They are not a universal standard, and they cannot be compared with numbers from other sites, which build their palettes differently.

The numbers describe the palettes, not you. Malileh does not measure your skin, hair or eyes, and no number on this site decides your season. Your season comes from how colors look next to your face, which you can estimate with the quiz and confirm with the comparison tests in our guides.

Finally, the numbers describe the HEX values, not what you see. Screens, printers, fabrics and lighting all change how a color looks, so use the palettes as a guide rather than an exact match.

How the Guides Are Written

Every Learn guide follows the same process:

• Published color analysis sources are researched and compared before anything is written.
• Only claims that the sources agree on are included. Where reliable sources contradict each other, for example on which season a particular celebrity is, the claim is left out.
• Every color named in a guide is checked against Malileh's own palettes, so the guides and the season pages say the same thing.
• Drafts are written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude, made by Anthropic). Nahid decides what each guide covers, then reviews, edits and approves every draft before it is published. The date it was last reviewed is shown on the page.

When a guide or palette is found to be wrong, it is corrected and the review date is updated.

How the Quiz Works

The Malileh quiz asks ten simple questions about your natural coloring: your skin tone, your natural hair and eye color, how clear or soft your eyes look, your contrast, whether bright or muted colors suit you near your face, how white shades and metals look on you, how your hair looks in sunlight, and which group of colors feels most like you. Your strongest characteristic, light or deep, bright or soft, warm or cool, decides your season family, and the next clue picks one of its two seasons.

Your answers are used to estimate your temperature, depth and chroma, and the combination points to the most likely of the twelve seasons. The result is an estimate based on your own observations. If your result does not feel right, the season pages and comparison guides show you how to test the neighboring seasons yourself.

What Malileh Does Not Claim

• An online quiz is not a substitute for an in-person analysis with fabric drapes.
• A color season is a styling tool, not a rule. You can wear any color you love; the palette shows which colors are most likely to flatter you near your face.
• Malileh does not give medical or dermatological advice about skin.

Found Something Wrong?

If you think a palette, color or guide is wrong, please get in touch through the contact page.