Which Hair Color Suits Your Undertone? Warm, Cool and Neutral

Start with your skin. Your undertone is the golden, pink or neutral base beneath its surface, the part that stays when a tan fades or your cheeks flush. It isn’t your skin tone, the lightness or depth of your skin. If you haven’t pinned yours down yet, find your undertone first.

Hair has an undertone of its own. Gold, honey, copper and red glints read warm. Ash, the gray-beige cast of a cooled blond or brown, reads cool. A shade that shows neither one clearly sits in the middle.

Colorists use two words for this. Level is how light or dark a shade is. Tone is the color family it leans toward.

In color analysis, level is your depth (also called lightness) and tone is your temperature, warm or cool. A golden blonde and an ash blonde can share a level and have opposite tones. That’s why two blondes can need two different blondes.

Why does it matter? Hair frames your face and reflects its color onto your skin. Gold throws warmth onto it. Ash throws coolness.

When the tone agrees with your base, your skin looks even and your eyes look awake. When it pulls against your base, you may see yellow or gray skin and a shadow under the eyes.

In my view, a hair shade isn’t warm or cool in the abstract. It’s warm or cool next to your face.

Warm means your skin leans golden, yellow or peach. The shades that suit it repeat that gold instead of fighting it: golden blonde, honey, golden brown, light copper, auburn.

But warm covers several sub-seasons, and each one wants a different depth. Here are three that lean warm, from slightly warm to very warm:

• Light Spring (slightly warm): golden blondes, honey, light strawberry blonde
• Warm Spring (very warm): golden blonde, honey, light copper, golden brown
• Warm Autumn (very warm): red, coppery tones, auburn, golden brown, dark honey

Look at the gap between the first and the last. Both lean warm. One is light and delicate, the other rich and deep.

Put the copper of a Warm Autumn on a Light Spring and the shade is too heavy for the face. Put a very pale honey on a Warm Autumn and it floats.

Warm doesn’t mean loud, either. For a Warm Spring the rule is simple: keep the warm tones, always. For a Soft Autumn, covered below, the warmth is quieter.

The family to handle with care is ash. The Light Spring and Bright Spring notes both steer away from ashy effects, and a gray-beige cast on a golden face can read flat.

Your own tones also show how warm you are. Golden glints in your natural hair are a clue about your coloring. They aren’t a verdict.

Yes, cool-toned brown is real. It’s brown with the gold and red kept quiet. What you see is a neutral or slightly ashy brown instead of a chestnut or a copper-leaning one.

It comes in two moods, and the difference is clarity (also called intensity), meaning how soft or crisp a color looks.

The soft mood belongs to Soft Summer: ash brown, ash dark blonde and soft brown, with very blended highlights rather than strong contrasts. The crisp mood belongs to the Winters. True Winter wears black, cool brown and ashy dark brown. Bright Winter wears cool brown, black or a very light cool blonde, all shiny and clear.

The rest of the cool side looks like this:

• Light Summer: light ash blonde, beige blonde, cool light brown
• Cool Summer: ash blonde, ash brown, cool brown
• Deep Winter: cool dark brown, black, very dark brown

Same cool tone, different clarity. A blended ash brown tends to lose its softness on a Bright Winter, who wants shine and definition. A crisp cool brown can look hard on a Soft Summer.

Gray or white hair has a place here too. Cool Summer and True Winter both wear it naturally, with no dye needed.

On the cool side, gold and copper are the shades to be careful with. The Light Summer and Deep Winter notes both steer away from them, because they can pull a cool face toward yellow.

If you search for cool tone hair color, this is the picture: ash for the lighter faces, cool brown and black for the deeper ones.

Neutral means neither side wins clearly. A coral and a cool pink both look fine on you, or both look a little off. Neutral-warm and neutral-cool are the in-between readings.

Olive adds a green-gold cast that doesn’t sort neatly into warm or cool. The page on olive skin tone colors explains how to read it. If your own tests contradict each other, why undertone tests disagree will tell you what to do next.

Neutral doesn’t mean no direction. It means a small one. And that’s where depth and softness take over. Look at three pairs of neighbors:

Read across each row. The depth and the clarity stay put, soft, deep or bright. Only the lean changes. A Soft Autumn keeps a warmth that is never fiery. A Soft Summer keeps blended highlights and no strong contrast.

If you land in one of these rows, the shades at the very edges are the ones to test first. A very golden shade or a very ashy one asks your face to pick a side. The in-between shades ask less.

For the Autumn rows in full, see Autumn hair colors. For the Summer ones, see Summer hair colors.

It holds. Only the vocabulary changes. Here is the same warm and cool split, family by family, using only the shades from the sub-season pages:

Blond is where tone is easiest to see. Light hair sits close to your face and shows its undertone first, so a blond choice deserves the most careful look.

Brown has the widest range. It runs from golden brown on one end to ash brown on the other, with chocolate and cool dark browns in between. Pick the tone first, then the level.

Red lives on the warm side in these palettes. You find strawberry blonde at the light end, copper and auburn in the middle, deep auburn at the dark end. That doesn’t make every redhead an Autumn. Hair color is one clue, and I come back to it below.

Black appears on the Winter lists: Deep Winter, True Winter and Bright Winter. Deep Winter and Bright Winter run neutral to cool, not fully cool. If you lean neutral to warm and love dark hair, the Deep Autumn shades (chocolate brown, or dark brown with mahogany or coppery tones) are worth testing. The choice stays yours.

Undertone is one of three signs. The other two are depth (the lightness of your coloring) and clarity (soft or bright). Contrast, the distance between hair, eyes and skin, adds a hint but never decides alone.

That’s why two warm faces can need different hair. The warm tone is the same. The depth and the contrast aren’t.

Contrast also explains why a big jump in level changes more than the color. Go much darker and you widen the gap between hair and skin. Go much lighter and you narrow it. On a low-contrast face that can feel heavy, which is why the Light Spring notes steer away from very dark colors.

Your natural color is where your hair started. It isn’t your season. A brunette can be a Spring and a blonde can be a Winter, as the guide on natural hair color and your season explains. What decides is how your skin responds to colors held near your bare face, with your hair covered.

To see which shades belong to you, open the twelve sub-season pages. Each has a hair section next to the palette.

You can also go against your palette on purpose, if the shade serves what you want from your look. If you do, bring the missing warmth or coolness back with the clothes and makeup near your face.

Changing your hair color goes through a colorist. A fabric or a swatch near your face can preview a direction, but your starting color and any earlier dye decide how far one visit can go. Your colorist knows how to make the shade. You tell them where you want to land.

Give them words they can use:

• Name the tone: “golden,” “ash” or “neutral,” not just “prettier.”
• Name the level: “one shade lighter” or “two shades darker.”
• Name what you refuse: “no orange,” “nothing gray.”
• Bring three photos you like and one you don’t, and say what you’re looking at, the tone or the depth.
• Ask how the shade will read in daylight, not under salon lights.

My advice: if you hesitate, move the tone and keep your level. It’s a smaller step than jumping three shades lighter, and it shows you quickly whether the direction suits you.

Screens and filters bend color, so use them for ideas and not for decisions. A photo of a shade on someone else’s face tells you about her coloring, not yours.

Find two fabrics, one honey or golden and one ash gray. Pull your hair back and wrap it in a plain cloth. Take off your makeup and hold each fabric under your chin for a minute, in daylight.

Watch your eyes and the skin around them. One fabric will make your face look rested. The other will make it look tired.

Then try the free color analysis quiz: ten questions, no sign-up. Its answer is a starting point for the conversation with your colorist, and your fabric test adds what the quiz can’t see.