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Madoka Magica is a pretty good example of a core cast that are completely "stained" their image color, though it uses more desaturated and washed-out shades of those colors compared to the 90's-00's series of the shoujo!mahou boom. I think it does this well; it suits the series' tone and makes the luminous glow of raw magic really pop. Homura, though, is a bit of an edge compared to the others, as I already discussed.

Let's discuss a more conventional Magical Girl show!

Tokyo Mew Mew (2002) is a good example of a series where characters' coloration changes when they transform. Most Pretty Cure series do this, but TMM predates the entire Pretty Cure franchise by a few years; there are also series prior to the 90's/00's wave that also do this, like Cutie Honey, but those star soloists, rather than members of a color-coded team.

As humans, the Tokyo Mew Mew girls' hair are relatively dull (but still recognizable) versions of their image colors, and their eyes are non-matching "natural" colors - brown or blue. When transforming into their animal-girl forms, their hair becomes practically fluorescent, and their eyes are a matching color.¹

You can see that the color red serves as "dark pink" for Ichigo: her natural hair color and her Cafe Mew uniform are both strawberry-red, not strawberry-candy-pink.² Her transformed state, too, has red accents.

Red as a shade of pink, in other series

This isn't unusual for pink magical girls - for example, Madoka's outfit has red trim accents, a red neck-ribbon, and red shoes. In Shugo Chara, Amu's pink transformation as Amulet Heart has red accents too. Historically, red has been just as much a *mahou shoujo* color as pink is, and I think you see this reflected in the designs of many pink magical girls. Pink Precures, however, tend to avoid darkening into red, leaning more towards the fuchsia hues in the "pink" spectrum.

Likewise, orange and brown are treated as "dark yellow" on Bu-ling: her Cafe Mew uniform is orange, the trim on her Mew outfit matches her red-brown monkey fur, and her eyes are brown in both human and Mew form. This, too, isn't really weird. If you want to incorporate dark accents into a yellow color pallet, you really have no choice but to shift it towards orange, red, and brown -- dark yellow doesn't really exist.

Orange/brown as a shade of yellow, in other series

Yellow Precures often have orange accents, to the point they are often just as likely to have orange hair as yellow. And while none of Amu's transformations change *her* hair color, the Guardian character that enables her yellow transformation is also a ginger.

Mint, interestingly, looks the most mundane in her civilian form - her hair reads as black, with a faint blue tint, and her eyes are a complementary brown instead of a matching blue. Still, when put next to the other characters, we can pick up that she's "the blue one." Not having watched Tokyo Mew Mew myself, I have no analysis of this. It doesn't immediately feel like it has symbolic significance, the way Homura's muted color scheme says things about her as a character.

1. In colored art for the manga, the characters' hair and eyes are always the same regardless of form; in Tokyo Mew Mew New (2022), the characters' coloration changes, but only very minimally compared to 2002. These are less interesting to discuss, by and large.

2. Tokyo Mew Mew is a show where every girl is named after a food. Ichigo is Japanese for "strawberry," Zakuro is Japanese for "pomegranate," and Bu-ling is supposed to sound like "pudding." (Japanese pudding, for the record, is more of a flan-like desert than it is like what Americans think of as "pudding.") Mint and Lettuce need no explanation to an English-speaking audience. You can probably guess, based on their names, what each character's image color is. Their base of operation has the "front" of being an ordinary cafe where they work as waitresses, continuing the food theme.