The five phases
五行 is usually translated as five elements, which suggests five substances. The texts treat them as five phases of one process — what produces what, and what checks what.
Two cycles, and two questions
Wood produces fire, fire produces earth, earth produces metal, metal produces water, water produces wood. That is the productive cycle. Against it runs the controlling one: wood on earth, earth on water, water on fire, fire on metal, metal on wood. Every reading in this system is an application of those two rings to eight characters.
The pages below answer two separate questions that both get called “your element”. The first is the governing element, 用神 — the phase a chart wants supplied or wants restrained, which is what the colours, materials and numbers are chosen for. The second is the phase the Day Master itself stands on, and how much of that phase the eight characters carry: thin, even, or dominant. The two are frequently not the same phase, and conflating them is the commonest error in English-language material.
Nothing on these pages is a prescription about what will happen. They state what the tradition assigns and where it assigns it from.
Cast the chart this page describes
The four pillars, the Day Master, the five-phase count, the day’s almanac read against the chart and the true solar time working — about 2,700 words — are free and need no account. The chart is computed in the browser; nothing about the birth is sent anywhere.