From the Chair: Undertones
Until you get the hang of undertones, the process is not as intuitive as say, figuring out if your skin is fair or deep. In fact, the question we are asked most frequently is, what undertone am I? Fortunately, we have our in-house makeup artist, Hannah, to answer all your undertone questions.
Here's what Hannah had to say:
Your skin tone is made up or surface tones and undertones. Surface tones may include redness, irritation, or being flushed. The color you see beneath the surface is your undertone. It isn’t always easy to identify your undertone, especially if is masked by surface tones that stand out. Not to worry, I have plenty of tricks that will help. If you can’t clearly determine your undertone at a glance try these steps to make it easier.
Jewelry: Do you look best in gold/copper toned jewelry? Then chances are you have a warm skin tone, but if you feel that silver/platinum is more flattering, then you are more likely to have cool skin.
What You Wear: Similar to the jewelry trick, if you find that you look best in muted tones like off-white, yellow, orange, reds, earthy greens, and browns then your undertone is probably warm. However, those with a cool undertone will look great in crisp white, jewel-toned pinks, blues, greens, purples, and black.
Coloring: If your skin is warm, your eye and hair color will likely be as well. Do you have green/hazel/light brown eyes or auburn/golden blonde/ or chestnut hair? Sounds like you are warm. If you are warm, your skin is also likely to tan to a richer gold. If you have blue/grey eyes and icy blond/ashy brown or black hair than your skin is likely cool too. You may also burn in the sun before it turns to a tan.
Veins: Generally you can see your veins fairly easily on your wrist. Take a closer look, if your veins look purple/blue you have a cool undertone and if your veins appear green than your skin is likely to be warm.
Our Satin Matte Foundations in cool are our most pink shades, neutral is still coolish pink but with a touch more yellow, beige is our peach tone, our warm shades are the truest yellow, and lastly olive is a neutral brown. If your skin is free of red or yellow tones, then olive may be your best match. I often encourage customers to try our olive range if they have found our neutral shades to be too pink and our beige shades to be too yellow. As you can probably tell from the top image, our olive line runs deeper than our other shades. It is the only undertone where we offer a "0" shade. An Olive 1 is loosely equivalent to a 2 in the other tones.
If you're still feeling a little unsure about your undertone, we have you covered. Four words...Find Your Match Set. We designed these sets to make finding your perfect match foolproof. You don’t need to think about your undertone at all. We have eight sets that are curated with every tone within a certain depth. For example, you will find all of the fair shades in each of our 5 undertones in our Find Your Match Set 1. Swatch all the shades in your set on your jawline and look in natural light (the rearview mirror of your car on a sunny day is a great choice) to see which shade seems to match your skin. Once you have tried every shade you will be able to see one or two shades that blend into your skin; the right shades will be almost undetectable, and it is not uncommon to find that you are good match with two shades. You still have plenty of time to order a Find Your Match Set and find your match before the sale ends!
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