Now, these are similar colours. The have exactly the same hue (a yellowy-orange) and the same value level (medium, or on our charts, 6).

The difference is that your skin tone is slightly lower in chroma than the foundation. The foundation will look too colourful, too orange compared to the rest of your skin. It’ll look like a bad facsimile of skin, or like a bad fake tan, or like you’re overheated.

But going more yellow doesn’t work, and neither does more red, and neither does lighter or darker.

Only going more muted, ie. greyer, will work.

I see this effect on women all the time. In many brands you will have trouble finding a low-chroma enough shade.

I see the reverse less often, of a too-low chroma foundation on a higher-chroma woman, but I have definitely seen it. She looks grey and ill.



Matching foundation to your skin

So, how do you use this information to find the foundation that best matches your skintone?

Can you infer it from which of the 12 tones you are?

While there are some commonalities between people of the same tone, there’s too much variation to know your skintone simply because of your tone. And even if we did, makeup companies do not describe their shades accurately enough for that information to be useful by itself.

Knowing, for example, that you have a medium-value, neutral-cool, yellow-undertoned, relatively low-chroma skintone doesn’t tell you which foundation will fit you, because that information about foundations doesn’t exist.

What you need to do is try a lot of foundations on your actual skin and find the one that blends in the most convincingly.

Once you have some basis for comparison, your understanding of the complexities of skintone will help you narrow down the foundation that fits you best.

Variations in skintone

In the discussion of skin colour above, I left out an important variable. Skin colours vary between people, but they also vary within a single person.

Try comparing the skin on your belly to the skin on your shins. On most people, the belly is pinker or redder and the shins are yellower.

Your skin colour is different in different places.

That’s especially true on your face.

Your cheeks and especially lips will be pinker or redder than other areas. Under your eyes will be different, greyer or greener or purpler or whiter, it’s different on different people. The temples are often greener.

Surface redness is very common on faces, though the location can vary. Most people are red around the nostrils, some people are red down the centre of the face, some on the cheeks or jaw.

(This surface redness is not the same as having a pink or red undertone to the skin. Surface redness can change with environmental conditions and health, is more localised, and appears as an effect or blemish on the skin. A pink or red undertone is intrinsic to the skin, and looks like a healthy, natural skin colour.)

Pigmentation can also vary across the face, with melasma and hyperpigmentation and age spots all being results of uneven melanin distribution in the skin.

The colour of the throat is often paler than the face or body, because it’s protected from the sun by the jaw. The face, on the other hand, may be significantly lighter than the rest of the body, if sunscreen is commonly applied to the face only, or darker, if the face is the only part that is commonly exposed to the sun.

Now the question is, given all these variations in your skin, how do you find a single foundation colour to match it?

In fact, why even wear foundation when variation is normal and natural, and in fact, necessary for skin to look like skin?

Great question! (If I do say so myself.)

The Purpose of Foundation

Let’s start by talking about the purpose of foundation, which is to even out the skintone.

While variation in the skin is normal, excessive variation or abrupt discontinuities in skin colour can be a sign of poor health.

If you look at children, who mostly have offensively perfect skin, you’ll see some variation, but less than in older people, and much less than in sick people, and the variations will flow into each other smoothly.

Now, if you’ve had a Personal Colour Analysis, you will have seen that disharmonious colours can draw attention to blemishes in the skin, and can make different areas look oddly different in colour and disjointed from each other.

Harmonious colours, conversely, make the skin’s colours appear to flow into each more smoothly, and appear as a cohesive (though not completely uniform) whole. This is partly why wearing your own colours can make you look younger.

That’s what foundation is supposed to do, too.

You may find that wearing your own colours evens out your skin enough that foundation is unnecessary, or you may prefer the extra effect that foundation will give you.

If you do choose to wear foundation, keep in mind that skin without any variation doesn’t look natural or healthy, and that’s why full-coverage foundations usually look mask-like. Sheer to medium-coverage is a better option for most people.

Foundation is not intended to cover blemishes — that’s what concealer is for.