How to Identify Your Skin Tone

Your skin tone is natural and permanent, so you need to know the perfect skin tone so that you never face any problems in buying the perfect makeup for your skin. It’s time for you to stop depending on your friends, or the makeup sellers to determine your skin tone. Selecting the right tone and identifying the skin tone you have is not as difficult as you might have imagined.

What is surface color?

Surface color is prone to change with daily routine.

There is a very wide difference between the surface color and the undertone that people have. Surface color is the exact color that you see in the mirror. People differentiate it in terms of fair, light, dark, and medium skin tone. The surface color can change depending on the lifestyle of the individual. For example, people who have light skin usually get tan in summer and their skin lightens when there is winter season. The surface color can also change on the basis of dryness, dullness, redness, rosacea, and hyperpigmentation.

How to determine the surface color?

Remember that surface color tends to change every now and then so just learn the trick as you will have to do it often. First, look at your jawline as it is the only part that remains unaffected. Look at the skin of your jawline and determine if it’s dark, medium, light, or fair.

The second thing that you need to look at is how people describe or look at you. If you get comments that your skin is pale in winter and gets tan in summer, then you are light. If people say that you look tan throughout the year then your color would be medium. In case people refer towards the dark or fair skin tone, then there are high chances that you have that color.

What is undertone?

Undertone is the natural color of your skin that remains the same from the time of your birth till the time you die. This undertone is the main subtle color that is present right underneath the top layer of skin. When it comes to the undertone, it is highly recommended to choose from the color of the undertone rather than the surface color.

This is the main reason that people end up buying the wrong foundation as they target the surface area instead of the undertone.

How to determine the undertone?

Here is how you can determine your undertone. It’s just a one-time realization and then you can use that throughout your life and can never go wrong. There are three categories of undertone. The first is warm in which the color is gold, peach, and yellow. The second is cool in which pink, red and blue colors are included. The third is neutral in which the color olive and a mix of all the above-mentioned colors are present.

Easy hacks to determine the skin tone

We have mentioned some easy ways and you can select all of them or any that you like.

• Look at the color of your wrist veins. If it is bluish-purple then you have cool color, green reflects the warm color and bluish green reflects neutral.
• Observe if you get any tan or skin burns on the skin. Getting tan reflects a warm tone. Getting red in the sun reflects the cool color and if it is not affected at all then it is warm toned.
• Look at the blush, if you get pink and easily blush anytime then you have cool-toned color.

Skin tone and foundations

Once you have made the right choice about your skin tone then the next step is to select the right foundation and make-up for yourself. If you have warm color then you should get golden, tan, beige, chestnut, or caramel color. Cool shades go perfectly with rose color, cocoa, sable, and porcelain. As for Neutral shades, they are perfect with buff, ivory, praline, and nude tones.