Color match foundation makeup how to#
Color match foundation makeup skin#

Color match foundation makeup skin#

A pink or red undertone is intrinsic to the skin, and looks like a healthy, natural skin colour.) Surface redness can change with environmental conditions and health, is more localised, and appears as an effect or blemish on the skin. (This surface redness is not the same as having a pink or red undertone to the skin. Most people are red around the nostrils, some people are red down the centre of the face, some on the cheeks or jaw. Surface redness is very common on faces, though the location can vary. Under your eyes will be different, greyer or greener or purpler or whiter, it’s different on different people. Your cheeks and especially lips will be pinker or redder than other areas. Your skin colour is different in different places. On most people, the belly is pinker or redder and the shins are yellower. Try comparing the skin on your belly to the skin on your shins. Skin colours vary between people, but they also vary within a single person. In the discussion of skin colour above, I left out an important variable.

Once you have some basis for comparison, your understanding of the complexities of skintone will help you narrow down the foundation that fits you best. What you need to do is try a lot of foundations on your actual skin and find the one that blends in the most convincingly. Knowing, for example, that you have a medium-value, neutral-cool, yellow-undertoned, relatively low-chroma skintone doesn’t tell you which foundation will fit you, because that information about foundations doesn’t exist. And even if we did, makeup companies do not describe their shades accurately enough for that information to be useful by itself. While there are some commonalities between people of the same tone, there’s too much variation to know your skintone simply because of your tone. So, how do you use this information to find the foundation that best matches your skintone?Ĭan you infer it from which of the 12 tones you are? I see the reverse less often, of a too-low chroma foundation on a higher-chroma woman, but I have definitely seen it. In many brands you will have trouble finding a low-chroma enough shade. It’ll look like a bad facsimile of skin, or like a bad fake tan, or like you’re overheated.īut going more yellow doesn’t work, and neither does more red, and neither does lighter or darker.

The foundation will look too colourful, too orange compared to the rest of your skin. The difference is that your skin tone is slightly lower in chroma than the foundation.

The have exactly the same hue (a yellowy-orange) and the same value level (medium, or on our charts, 6). (You can always come back to the theory later, if you need to.) If that’s you, I recommend starting at Where to Test Foundation. Now, this is a lot to cover, and you may prefer to skip the theory and get straight into matching your foundation.

Color match foundation makeup how to#

You don’t have to know this to find your foundation shade, but it might help you understand why the advice you hear may not have worked.Īfter that I’ll cover variations in your skintone, what foundation should actually do, where and how to match it, and how to mix up your shade if you can’t find it straight out of the bottle. To that end, I’m first going to discuss what colour skin actually is. This is a complex topic and while I don’t want to overwhelm you, I do want to clarify some ideas. I see a lot of confusing and misleading information out in the world about skintones and foundations. If you have trouble finding a foundation that is a good match for your skin, you are far from alone.