Skin Undertone Quiz
Answer 6 questions about the signs stylists and makeup artists commonly use. You get a likely undertone (warm, cool, neutral or olive) to use as a starting point for foundation shades, jewellery and colours.
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Answer all 6 questions to see your likely undertone.
How it works
Undertone is a styling convention, not a measurement. It describes the tint people see in skin: golden, yellow or peach is called warm, pink, red or blue-ish is called cool, and a mix of both is called neutral. Olive is used for skin with a slightly green or grey-ish cast. There is no scientific test for any of these.
Each answer counts as one vote for warm, cool or neutral. Answers such as "I cannot tell" count for nothing. The result is warm if warm has at least 2 more votes than cool and more votes than neutral. Cool works the same way in reverse. Everything else, including every tie, is neutral.
Olive is decided separately. If you choose the olive answer in both the skin tint question and the foundation question, the result is olive. One olive answer on its own counts as a neutral vote.
Undertone is independent of how light or dark your skin is. Very fair skin can be warm, deep skin can be cool, and olive skin exists at every depth.
What it cannot tell you
- This is a likely undertone based on your own judgement of colour, not a fact about your skin. Two people can answer differently about the same face, and so can the same person in different light.
- The signs are less reliable on deeper skin. Veins are often hard to see through brown and Black skin, so the vein question has an "I cannot tell" answer that is left out of the score. The jewellery, fabric and foundation questions, judged in daylight, tend to be more useful there.
- The sun question is the weakest sign. The answer is hard to separate from how light or dark skin is, which is a different thing from undertone.
- Undertone cannot tell you what you are allowed to wear. Use it to narrow down foundation shades, then trust what you see on your own skin.
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Common questions
You find your skin undertone by looking at several signs together in daylight: the tint of your bare skin, whether gold or silver jewellery looks better, whether pure white or off-white suits you, and which foundation shades match. No single sign is reliable alone. If the signs disagree, your undertone is usually described as neutral.
In the vein test, veins that look green at the wrist are read as a warm undertone and veins that look blue or purple as a cool undertone. It is a rule of thumb with no scientific backing, and it works poorly on deeper skin where veins are hard to see. Use it as one clue, not the answer.
An olive undertone is a slightly green or grey-ish cast to the skin. It is usually described as a kind of neutral, and it appears in light, medium and deep skin. People with olive undertones often find that standard foundation shades look too pink or too orange on them.
Yes, dark skin can have a cool undertone. Undertone is separate from how light or dark skin is, so deep skin can be warm, cool, neutral or olive, and so can very fair skin. On deeper skin, cool undertones are often described as red or blue-ish and warm undertones as golden.
Skin undertone is not a scientific measurement. It is a convention from makeup and styling that helps group foundation shades and colours. It can be useful for shopping, but there is no test that proves an undertone, and the common signs can disagree with each other.