How to find your undertone at home

Your undertone is the warm, cool or neutral tint beneath the surface of your skin. A few simple tests can point you in the right direction, as long as you know where they go wrong.

Undertone is not the same as skin tone

Skin tone, sometimes called surface tone, is what you see first: how fair or deep your skin is, plus anything temporary sitting on top, like a tan, redness or a breakout. Undertone is the steadier tint underneath. It usually stays the same whether you are pale in winter or tanned in summer.

There are three broad answers:

• Warm: skin with a golden, peachy or yellow cast.
• Cool: skin with a pink, rosy or bluish cast.
• Neutral: a mix of both, or neither clearly. Many people land here, and it is a real answer, not a failure to find one.

Some people also describe their skin as olive, a muted green-gold cast that often confuses the tests below. More on that further down.

Set up before you test

Every test here depends on what you can see, so lighting matters more than the test itself.

• Use daylight from a window, ideally on a bright overcast day or away from direct sun.
• Turn off warm indoor lights in the room. Mixed lighting is the most common reason tests disagree.
• Remove makeup, self-tanner and tinted moisturizer. Wait a while if you have just showered or exercised and your skin is flushed.
• Wear a plain white or light gray top, or drape a towel over your shoulders, so a colored shirt doesn't reflect onto your skin.
• Pull your hair back, especially if it is dyed.

Test 1: Look at your veins

Look at the veins on the inside of your wrist. If they look mostly blue or purple, that suggests a cool undertone. Mostly green suggests warm. A mix, or hard to tell, suggests neutral.

The limits: veins don't actually change color with undertone. What you see is the vein through a layer of skin, and the effect depends on how thick and how deep your skin is and on the light in the room. On deeper skin the veins can be hard to see at all. Treat this as a weak hint.

Test 2: Gold or silver

Hold a gold piece and a silver piece of jewelry, or two pieces of foil, against your skin one at a time. Notice which makes your skin look clearer and more even, rather than which you like better. Gold flattering you suggests warm; silver suggests cool; both looking fine suggests neutral.

The limits: it is hard to separate this from habit. If you have worn silver for years, it simply looks "right" to you. The finish matters too: shiny metal reflects the room, and a brushed or antique finish reads differently from a polished one. Ask someone else to watch your face, not the jewelry.

Test 3: White or cream

Hold a sheet of bright white paper or a pure white T-shirt under your chin, then swap it for something cream or ivory. Compare in a mirror.

• If bright white looks crisp and cream makes you look yellow or dull, you may be cool.
• If cream looks soft and healthy while white looks harsh or makes you look gray, you may be warm.
• If both look about the same, you may be neutral.

The limits: this test also picks up on contrast and clarity, not just undertone. Someone with soft, low-contrast coloring may find bright white harsh even with a cool undertone. That is useful information in itself, but it isn't purely about warm and cool.

Test 4: How you react to the sun

The traditional version says that if you burn easily and rarely tan, you are cool, and if you tan easily and rarely burn, you are warm.

The limits: this one is the least reliable. How you react to the sun mostly reflects how much melanin your skin has, which is about depth, not undertone. Plenty of people with fair, warm skin burn easily, and plenty of people with deep, cool skin tan without trouble. If you use it at all, give it the least weight. Never test it on purpose, either: sunburn is not worth the data point.

Putting the results together

No single test is decisive. Look for a pattern across all four, and give the white-versus-cream and gold-versus-silver tests more weight than the vein and sun tests. If the answers point in different directions, neutral is a reasonable conclusion.

If your skin looks olive, you may find that warm colors look slightly too yellow on you and cool colors look slightly too pink. Many people with olive skin do well with colors that are a little muted, and with neutral or gently warm shades rather than strongly golden ones.

Undertone is only one third of the picture

Undertone tells you about warm and cool. It says nothing about whether you look best in light or deep colors, or in clear or soft ones. Two people with the same warm undertone can belong to very different seasons, for example Light Spring and Deep Autumn. That is why a full color analysis looks at depth and clarity as well. The overview of the 12 seasons explains how the three qualities fit together.