DALLAS -- The questions of our age are overwhelming. Will robots replace us? Will our democracy endure? What are my best colors? The last one, at least, had a chance of being answered as I headed inside the Westin hotel near DFW Airport to meet the Color Countess, aka Megan Bentley, a woman master-trained in 16 seasons, 12 more than I knew about.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I’m changing women’s lives,” said Bentley, as she swanned around a setup that resembled a makeshift hair salon, a comfy barber’s chair across from a long mirror. On a silver rack hung a series of swatches the size of large throw pillows. Some were ribboned with colors, others solid. These were drapes, the primary tools of color analysis. I was, in the language of the trade, about to be draped.

Bentley is a 45-year-old mother and wife from Columbus, Ohio, but on Instagram and TikTok, she is a doyenne of color analysis, the art of identifying your best shades, a bit like a personality test for your face. Bentley worked in corporate sales for decades, but she has long been that friend tut-tutting someone else’s wardrobe choice. Last year she went into business as the Color Countess, taking her name from her favorite Real Housewife, Countess Luann de Lesseps, a woman she considers a real sophisticate, which is more than she can say for those other housewives.

“I gotta get myself booked on those reunion shows so I can do the Lord’s work,” she said, as I settled in her chair.‘Faster than Ozempic’

If color analysis sounds frivolous, consider the vast fortunes spent on self-improvement — all the Botox and chemical peels, the splurges at Sephora and Anthropologie — and how little discernment most of us bring to those purchases. Is red your color? What does “your color” even mean?

“We are a nation that’s obsessed with looking thinner, we want to look younger, and we want to do so quickly,” Bentley said when she appeared on Good Morning Texas in August. “Putting the right colors on you, I can erase fine lines, dark circles, and all of this is faster than Ozempic.”

Does that sound too easy? It does. Was I interested? You bet. A transformation that requires no needles or dieting sounded like my kind of makeover. On TikTok, I watched a Color Countess consultation that racked up 29 million views: a man discovering what purple did for his eyes. He gasped, he shimmied; it was like watching someone win the lottery.

Color analysis is not new. Impressionists talked about their paintings according to seasons, and in the early 20th century, painter and professor Albert H. Munsell created a taxonomy of color by hue, lightness and intensity, known as the Munsell color system, eventually used in art, fashion, even soil collection. In the ’40s, an image consultant named Suzanne Caygill synthesized these concepts to create color analysis, categorizing a client’s palette by season. By the ’80s, Carole Jackson took these ideas mainstream in the book Color Me Beautiful, the kind of self-help blockbuster you’d find on the shelf alongside Jane Fonda workout tips.

Lately, color analysis has enjoyed a resurgence on (where else?) social media, where the dramatic reveals — a stylist placing a silky drape on a client as their face lights up — makes for short, snappy content. Across the internet, you’ll find women like Dallas-based Tatum Mae, aka the Color Analysis Queen, who can help you discover your palette and purge your wardrobe.

The categories have grown more complicated since Color Me Beautiful days. Four seasons turned into 16; a person could be a cool or bright winter, a warm or deep autumn. I’d been hearing friends mention color analysis — suddenly people were a soft summer, in the way they’d once been a Virgo with a Leo rising — when Bentley reached out. She was in town for Behind the Chair, a convention she called “the Super Bowl of Hair.”

“Imagine knowing YOUR specific color palette,” read her website, where she charges $99 for a virtual consultation, “colors that YOU CAN COUNT ON every time, making your eyes sparkle, your hair look richer, and your skin more radiant.”

Of all ways to transform yourself, many of which turn out to be ways to screw yourself up, color analysis struck me as practical and low-stakes. It would be just my luck to learn I was traipsing through this world in colors I could not count on, burying my sparkle and glow in a stubborn fetish for hot pink.First step: undertones

I showed up to my appointment with no makeup, per instructions, and Bentley placed a white cloth across my chest to provide a blank slate.

“Do you know if you have warm or cool undertones?” she asked, placing her hands on my shoulders, and I experienced a helplessness, like when the hair stylist asks if I want texture. (What is “texture”?)

She explained that warm undertones meant my skin was dominant in keratin, cool undertones meant I was dominant in hemoglobin, and since none of this meant anything to me, we turned to the drapes for the answer. She placed two across my chest — one warm, one cool — and she tilted her head as she examined my reflection in the mirror, going back and forth between each. Bentley asked which looked better, a question that felt like choosing between six or half a dozen.

“Cool?” I ventured, but only because the word sounded better. She smacked a buzzer on a nearby table. Wrong answer! I glanced at Elías, the staff photographer who’d come along for the visit, because I considered him a neutral party, and he nodded. I was indeed warm.The end of all-black

The series of drapes continued through the hour, as we fine-tuned my palette. The second step was determining my season, and a lot of buzzes came my way. About 15 years ago, Bentley was a contestant on the series I Survived a Japanese Game Show, and she’s integrated playful game-show aspects into the discovery process. When a client gets an answer right, she lifts a bell and rings it, hallelujah style.

I attribute my bad answers to nerves, but also confusion between which colors I liked better, like the rich jewel box of autumn, and which ones flattered me, which turned out to be the pale pastels of Easter eggs.

“People think I’m going to take their favorite color away, but that’s not the case,” said Bentley. One can still wear burgundy, as long as one knows lilac might be a wiser choice. This is about information, not deprivation.

Bentley did throw down one rule. “Brown not black,” she told me, placing a manicured finger against my shoulder. “Eighty-seven percent of the population looks garbage in black,” she said, a number that seemed a bit high and arbitrary, but I take the point. Black is the path of least resistance; it is not technically a color so much as a best guess. I once had a camel-colored leather jacket, and the compliments were an all-you-can-eat buffet, but when it ripped, I replaced it with one in black. End of buffet. I never understood why, until now.Your secret identity

The third step of color analysis is seeing if you “flow” to other seasons. You might be a spring that flows to autumn, like having a double major, but no matter. I didn’t flow.

“You are a true spring!” Bentley said, as though revealing my secret identity.

I’ve sat in many chairs, both professionally and personally, and consulted many experts on the high-dollar business of how to look better, and a running theme is to stop trying to be someone else. This sounds easy, but we are primed on magazines and red-carpet looks and too many Kardashians whose styles have little to do with our particulars. You may love that forest green on the racks this fall, but it won’t necessarily like you back. A billion tiny fashion tragedies can be laid at the feet of trying to be someone you’re not.

“Green is your color,” said Bentley, after draping me in a series of spring shades to determine what she calls a person’s iconic colors. Mine were light turquoise, coral, sprout green, which I’m placing here because Christmas is coming soon.‘They’re selling you closet chaos!’

A few days later, I got an email from Bentley that listed the nuts and bolts of my consultation. “We shop by size, we shop by style — why not shop by season?” she wrote. Her dream is to work with major retailers like Target or Nordstrom to help people find pieces that flatter them. This made sense to me, since most wardrobes are a scattershot assortment of random trends and personal whim.

“They’re selling you closet chaos!” she told me when we spoke on the phone. Bentley had recently traveled to Las Vegas, she’s really making the rounds, and she was eager to hear how my life as a true spring was faring.

“I hope compliments are flooding your way,” she said. A generous trickle, I demurred.

I did find color analysis illuminating, a bit like a fashion allergy test; certain resistances became clear. Not just with clothing, but also jewelry and hair color. Though women are the prime demographic, I think men are the untapped market, blindly buying one polo shirt and North Face fleece zip-up after another, if the men in my life are any indication. Given the constant market push to separate us from our dollar, it’s wise for anyone to be armed with a little discrimination.

I can’t say color analysis changed my life, but I will tell you when I went to the Cattle Baron’s Ball a few weeks ago, I wore green.

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