Cool vs warm undertone: six simple tests you can try at home, why veins and jewelry often mislead, and what to do when your skin reads neutral or olive.
By Lisa Routa
Your veins won’t tell you your undertone.
Neither will your jewelry box.
Neither will the way you tan.
Those are three common tips. They are hints at best.
What works better is plainer. You hold two colors up to a bare face, in daylight, and you watch what your skin does.
It takes a few minutes. It also asks you to look at your skin instead of at a vein on your wrist.
Undertone is the tone under the surface of your skin. It’s the background color: golden, yellow or peachy for warm, pink or bluish for cool.
Skin tone is something else. It describes how light or deep your skin looks, from fair to deep. It says nothing about warm or cool. A fair skin can be warm and a deep skin can be cool.
Then there’s the overtone, also called the surface tone. That’s the redness, the flush, the tan, the tired day. It moves with sun, blood flow and fatigue. The undertone underneath is generally considered much steadier.
Hair and eyes don’t settle it either. They depend on systems that are partly independent from your skin, so golden hair doesn’t prove a warm undertone.
My advice: don’t guess an undertone from skin color, hair or eyes.
Set up first. Sit by a window in daylight and take off your makeup.
Cover your hair with a neutral cloth so its color doesn’t tint your skin. Skip the yellow bulb: it warms everything, your skin included.
| Test | The usual rule | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Veins | Green veins mean warm, blue or purple mean cool | Blue and green are hard to tell apart, and light changes what you see |
| Gold or silver | Gold brightens you if warm, silver if cool | Yellow, rose and white gold differ, and a bracelet on your wrist tells you nothing about your face |
| White or cream | Cream softens you if warm, pure white wakes you if cool | Your whites aren’t all the same, and a stark white can look harsh for other reasons |
| Two colors | The one that smooths your skin shows your side | A fabric that lights up your eyes can fool you |
| Sun | Tans easily means warm, burns easily means cool | It reflects sun exposure and sensitivity, and a tan changes surface tone, not undertone |
| Compliments | The colors people praise are yours | People react to taste, contrast and eye color too |
Two of these deserve more time.
Holding two colors near your face is a home version of draping. Pick two plain, matte, fairly large fabrics, a coral and a raspberry.
Hold one under your chin, then the other. For a proper setup, color draping at home walks you through it.
Look at your skin, not the fabric. The right one evens out your complexion, softens the shadows under your eyes and gives your eyes some sparkle. The wrong one turns your skin yellow or gray, and you see the garment before you see the person.
Blue eyes are the classic trap. A blue top will light up your eyes without your undertone being cool.
The white and cream test works the same way. Hold a pure white, then a cream, and watch your skin.
Then repeat on another day, at another hour. If the same side keeps winning, you have a direction.
Then you’re not doing it wrong.
Tests disagree for ordinary reasons: the light, your taste, a tan, a vein that looks different at four o’clock. Often they disagree because the answer isn’t a clean warm or cool.
A neutral undertone has no golden or pink lead. Gold and silver both look good on you, and you wear warm and cool colors, though not all of them. Neutral usually tips a little to one side, which is why you’ll see neutral-warm and neutral-cool.
An olive undertone is the most misread. The background carries a muted, greenish-gray or dull golden cast. It gets mistaken for warm, then for cool, and the colors you pick miss. At home it looks almost the same as neutral. I go through it in olive skin tone and its colors.
Several of the twelve sub-seasons live in this in-between zone. Soft Autumn is neutral to warm. Soft Summer is neutral to cool. A mixed result at home may simply be telling you where you sit.
It gives you half the answer.
Warm leads to Spring or Autumn. Cool leads to Summer or Winter. That’s temperature, one of the three axes of seasonal color analysis. The other two are depth, also called lightness, and clarity, also called intensity.
So warm doesn’t finish the job. Warm Spring and Warm Autumn are both very warm. What separates them is how light and how bright the colors are.
In my view, undertone is the right first question and a bad last one. Once you have a direction, browse all twelve sub-seasons and see which palette matches what you saw in the mirror.
It means the color under your skin leans pink, rosy or bluish rather than golden. It has nothing to do with how fair or deep you are. Cool skin may look smoother next to a raspberry than next to a coral, and holding the two up is how you check it.
Probably nothing you can lean on. Veins that look both blue and green are often read as neutral or olive, but the two colors are hard to separate, and light and angle change what you see. Take it as a faint hint, then hold two colors near your bare face.
Rust is a warm color, and it appears in the Warm Autumn and Deep Autumn palettes. Still, warm and cool are relative inside a color family. Judge rust by what it does to your skin, not by its label.
Ash tones: ash blonde, ash brown and cool brown. Golden, honey and copper tones are warm. Hair alone can’t give you your undertone, though, since hair and skin color depend on partly independent systems. Check your skin first, then choose the hair color.
You can wear anything. But an orange, a mustard or a golden yellow can turn some cool faces sallow or deepen the shadows under the eyes. Hold each one up to your bare face to check. If you love one, wear it away from your face, or pair it with a cool neutral near your chin.
Pick a coral and a raspberry, sit by a window and cover your hair. Hold one under your chin, then the other.
Keep one idea: your undertone shows in how your skin reacts, never in a single clue.
If you want a first look before you drape, take the free color analysis quiz. Ten questions, about two minutes, no sign-up. It gives you a likely season to check against your mirror.
With all my heart and passion, Lisa
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Seasons mentioned in this article
Take the free quiz for a first hint of your season, then explore the 12 seasons to see your palette.
