Guides

How to find your undertone: warm, cool, neutral or olive?

Two shades can be equally light and still look completely different on you. The reason is the undertone: the colour that sits underneath how light or deep your skin is.

Depth and undertone are two different things

Depth means how light or deep. Undertone means leaning yellow-golden (warm), rosy (cool), a bit of both (neutral) or with a greenish-grey cast (olive). A foundation can be right in depth and still be off in undertone. Then it looks pink, orange or grey, even though it’s “technically” the right lightness.

The vein test and gold-or-silver: nice, but unreliable

Whether the veins on your wrist look blue or green depends a lot on the light and on how thin the skin is there. And whether gold or silver suits you better is mostly taste. Both work as a rough hint, but not as a decision for a foundation.

How to actually see it

1. Take three shades of the same depth: one warm, one neutral, one cool. Many brands mark them W, N and C.
2. Swatch them as stripes next to each other on your jaw, not the back of your hand, which often has a different tone from your face.
3. Go to a window (daylight, no direct sun) and wait a few minutes until everything has dried.
4. The shade that almost disappears has your undertone. If one looks pink, it was too cool; if one looks yellow or orange, it was too warm; if everything looks slightly grey, look at olive.

If you already have a foundation that fits

Then you’ve already found your undertone: it’s in that shade. The shade finder shows you which shade at other brands is closest, and whether it reads warmer, cooler or pinker. The catalogue marks every shade by undertone: 1,199 warm, 1,445 neutral, 922 cool, 256 golden and 143 olive.