Whether they are a professional makeup artist or an avid makeup user, knowing skin undertones is one of the foundations of using makeup.
“Without knowing your undertones, choosing what makeup to use will become harder than it already is,” said Skylar Burnham, an avid makeup user.
According to Beauty Bakerie, a black-owned makeup brand, “An undertone is the color from underneath the surface of your skin that affects your overall hue.” Skin undertone is the permanent, underlying color that the skin casts. Skin undertone is different from a regular skin tone due to the fact that skin tone is the color someone sees first when viewing themself in the mirror and it changes overtime. Where skin undertone remains constant The three traditional skin undertone colors are cool, warm, and neutral. A cool undertone generally involves skin that contains hints of blue, pink, or a red hue. Warm undertones have more of a peachy, golden, or yellow coloring to them. Neutral skin undertones can be seen as a mixture of both warm and cool tones or neither. Determining what undertone someone has can be found by a multitude of tests.
“Whenever I am checking for my undertone, I usually just end up looking at my arm veins to compare different color tones of makeup,” said Erika Potter, a senior.
The first test is to see what color your veins appear to be. Veins with a green hue are associated with warm undertones and veins with blue or purple hues allude to having cool undertones. Another test is comparing what color jewelry someone prefers to wear; cooler toned people tend to choose silver while warm toned people prefer the look of gold jewelry on their skin. Additionally, taking into consideration a person’s hair and eye color can be used to find out a skin undertone. Brown, black, or blonde hair with blue, gray, or green eyes, correlate to cool undertones.
Red, brown, black, or strawberry blonde hair with brown or hazel eyes are linked to warmer undertones. After finding out what undertone color someone is, it can be used for color matching many makeup products.
“Finding the right shade of foundation for my skin was really hard for me before I found out what my undertones were,” said Tiffani Turcotte, a senior.
Makeup products such as foundation and concealer heavily rely on color matching and if done incorrectly can appear unnatural and patchy.
Foundation can come in the form of liquid, cream, or powder and is applied to the face to cover blemishes or change the natural skin tone. Foundations duly function as a daily moisturizer or sunscreen. Concealer is similar to foundation, but is thicker in consistency and used to hide different pigments by blending imperfections into the person’s skin tone color. It can also be used to mask dark circles, age spots, large pores, and other small blemishes visible on the skin.