Jo MacIntosh

"Can I get a Colour Analysis if I've been out in the sun and built a tan?"

The short answer is yes, absolutely. But I'm big on the education side of things, so here's why.

Your colour season is determined by your skin's undertone, and that's fixed regardless of how much tan you've built on your skin's surface.

Skin colour is produced by two types of melanin.

Eumelanin is the brown to black pigment that primarily determines how light or dark your skin appears, and gives you your tanning capacity (very fair people who burn quickly have lower eumelanin levels).

People with proportionally more eumelanin tend to go darker, but the actual colour of the tan is determined by pheomelanin.

Pheomelanin is the red to yellow pigment that dictates the temperature of your undertone.

So, when UV exposure triggers your melanocytes to produce more melanin, the qualities of that tan is shaped by the ratio between the two. People with higher pheomelanin levels tend to tan with a warmer, more orange or golden quality, instead of an "olive-y" or neutral-toned tan. Lower pheomelanin = cooler undertone, and likely a Winter or Summer.

If you've been holding off on booking your colour analysis for this reason, you really don't need to. DM me if you have any questions.

The last ingredient of my cocktail of disorders came a year after my ADHD diagnosis: PMDD.

Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder isn't just "bad PMS." It’s a severe sensitivity to hormonal shifts that directly impacts my brain chemistry.

I learned that estrogen is essentially fuel for dopamine—it helps produce it, release it, and keeps the receptors active. Since my ADHD means my brain already struggles to maintain enough dopamine for focus and follow-through, the relationship between the two is huge.

When my estrogen levels bottom out in the luteal phase (around 10 days before my period), my dopamine levels go into withdrawal, basically causing me a physical loss of the chemical fuel I need to function.

For me, that means ADHD symptoms (brain fog, lack of motivation, task initiation, zero executive dysfunction) take over.

At the same time, the PMDD kicks in, making my brain hypersensitive to the shift. My patience thins and my ability to regulate my emotions is just switched off.

Learning that this is a chemical shift, and not a personal failure, has completely changed how I operate. The diagnosis gave me permission to stop fighting my own biology, and plan my life around hormonal changes.

If you’re in those hard weeks right now, be kind to yourself.

2016. I was first diagnosed with clinical depression, and it was a relief to label the weight I'd been carrying. With that diagnosis, suddenly what I'd been experiencing in silence was actually okay.

Six years later, I got another diagnosis: ADHD-inattentive type. And I had NO. IDEA. But both depression and anxiety are symptoms of ADHD and I, like many other late-diagnosed women, had been miss-labelled.

A year after that, I learned I also have PMDD. Turns out my brain isn't just dealing with a baseline dopamine deficiency; it's dealing with a dopamine system that gets HYPERsensitive to the cyclical fluctuations of estrogen. My brain basically goes through biological withdrawal of the exact chemical (estrogen) that my ADHD brain needs in order to function.

I'm sharing because May is Mental Health Awareness month, and I want you to know: if you've been struggling and haven't found answers yet, keep looking.

And if you're feeling alone in it, you're not. Human connection is crucial. Reach out to someone. Even if you don't think you need to. Even if you're not sure what to say.