ShadecubbyHow to find your undertone: warm, cool, neutral or olive
Your skin tone is how light or deep your skin is. Your undertone is the color underneath, and it stays the same when you tan. Getting it right is most of what makes a foundation look like skin instead of a mask.
Updated · 5 min read
The four undertones
- Warm
- Golden, peachy or yellow. Gold jewelry tends to look better on you, and you tan easily.
- Cool
- Pink, red or bluish. Silver tends to flatter you, and you may burn before you tan.
- Neutral
- A balance of both, with neither pink nor yellow standing out. Gold and silver both work.
- Olive
- A green or gray cast alongside some yellow. Many “warm” shades look too orange and many “cool” ones look too pink. See olive undertones.
Four quick tests
Do each one in daylight by a window, with a clean face and no foundation.
1. The vein test
Look at the veins on the inside of your wrist. Mostly green suggests warm, mostly blue or purple suggests cool, and a mix suggests neutral. Greenish veins on skin that also looks a little gray or green can point to olive.
2. The white paper test
Hold a sheet of plain white paper next to your bare face. Next to the white, your skin may look yellow or golden (warm), pink or rosy (cool), grayish green (olive), or neither (neutral).
3. The jewelry test
Gold that brightens your face suggests warm, silver suggests cool, and both suggest neutral.
4. The sun test
Skin that tans without burning leans warm or olive. Skin that burns first leans cool.
When the tests disagree
They often do. Lighting changes everything, redness or rosacea can make warm skin look cool, and the vein test is hard to read on deeper skin. If two tests point one way, start there. If they’re split, you’re probably neutral or olive. The most reliable test is still a swatch: put two or three shades on your jaw and check them in daylight.
Reading undertone codes on a foundation
Most brands put the undertone in the shade name. The letters are fairly standard: W for warm, C for cool, N for neutral and O for olive. Some brands use their own words, such as golden, rosy, peach or beige, and a few use codes that read the opposite way to what you’d expect. MAC’s NC shades, for example, look golden, and its NW shades look rosier.
That’s why Shadecubby shows where each undertone came from.
Once you know your undertone
Use it to shortlist shades, then swatch. Undertone narrows the search a lot, but depth and finish matter too. Our guide to finding your foundation shade covers the rest.