Best colors for olive skin, with swatches to test
Muted, slightly complex colors are the safe start for olive skin at any depth, and loud golds and oranges are the ones to test first. Beyond that, sources disagree, so here are three swatch sets and a way to find out which olive you are.
Light olive
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Medium olive
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Deep olive
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Warm colors or cool ones? The experts split
Olive skin carries a slight green or grey cast at whatever depth it comes, and that makes the warm or cool question unusually hard. Here is what the people we read actually recommend. They don’t line up.
| Source | Wear | Careful with |
|---|---|---|
| Brooke Ann, color analyst, in IPSY | Gray, taupe, mauve, berry and silver for olive that leans cool, and jewel tones from winter palettes | Browns, coral, earthy shades and gold, which can look dull |
| Bethany Brenneman, color analyst, in IPSY | Neutral colors | Yellows, reds and oranges, which can look “sickly” on a strong olive |
| Mi Colorometría, on warm olive | Olive green, toasted mustard, terracotta, camel, petrol blue | Pure white, next to ivory |
| Mi Colorometría, on cool olive | Jade, aubergine, slate blue, grey-brown | Camel, which it says yellows the skin |
| Mi Colorometría, on neutral olive | Sage, taupe, toasted mauve, moss | Doesn’t list any for this group |
| Mi Colorometría, on any olive | Sage, soft aqua, khaki, petrol blue, earthy and greyed pinks, mid browns | Lemon yellow, vivid orange, pure fuchsia, flat light grey |
So terracotta and mustard are recommended by one and warned against by another, and gold gets the same treatment. What they share is a pattern: everyone says olive skin is fussy about strong warm color, and everyone likes something muted. The argument is over what’s underneath, which our olive undertone page looks at more closely. Here we can do something more useful with it, which is ask why one family of colors gets blamed so often.
The sallow trap, in numbers
“Sallow” means skin that looks yellowish and unwell, and olive skin gets that word more than most. Here’s our explanation for it. It’s our reading, built from a known visual effect, and no study has tested it on olive skin in particular.
Color has a direction and a strength. Plot olive skin at Monk 6 depth on a color wheel and it points toward yellow, with only a little strength. Now picture a mustard next to it. Mustard points almost the same way, several times as strong. Your eye sees the same color twice, once strong and once faint, and the faint one is your face.
40 of our 480 colors fall in that wedge. Almost none of them are Winter or Summer colors: 23 are from Spring palettes and 16 from Autumn. That matches the warnings closely, and it also shows why they go too far. Soft mustard is in the wedge too, even though it’s a muted color, and it’s the kind of color Mi Colorometría recommends for warm olive. The gentler the version, the less of this effect you’d expect, so the trap is about strength as much as about yellow.
The second half of the effect is what the color next to you does to your eye. Each square below holds the same skin color, to the pixel.
Goldenrod
Tomato
Baby Pink
Sage
Plum Wine
Slate Teal
On the gold, the square tends to look greyer and flatter. On the pinks and plums it can look greener, which is why pink foundation and baby pink knits are frequent complaints. Beside sage and teal it often looks calm. Chevreul studied this while running the dye work at the Gobelins tapestry works, and clothing near a face is the same arrangement at a smaller scale.
Swatches at three depths
Olive isn’t a depth, and the picture at the top of this page shows why that matters. The same color does a different job on each ground, so the three sets change along with it. They’re starting points from our palettes, chosen for being muted or slightly cool, since those are the two things most of the sources above agree on.
Light olive
Most colors are darker than you here, so the job is to give your skin enough to sit against without drifting into pale khaki, which can blend with the cast. Rosewood and mauve put some rose back near your face. Muted teal and forest moss work with the green in your skin instead of fighting it, and storm navy is the easy replacement for black.
Medium olive
This is where the cast shows most, and where it’s most often called difficult. Mid-tones sit close to you, so jewel teal sits almost level with you in lightness at this depth and relies on its hue. That can look wonderful. If you want more of a step, go up to soft cream or dusty pink, or down to petrol and plum wine. Burnished berry is worth trying on anyone at this depth, since the red in it can bring back what the green takes out.
Deep olive
Lighter muted colors stand out strongly here, with a gap of 38 for sage and 60 for aged ivory. Muted turquoise and cool jade are lovely on this ground, with enough hue to separate from your skin at a medium step. The dark skin guide goes deeper on what changes at this end of the scale.
Find out which olive you are
Mi Colorometría suggests a home check with clothes that we think is a good one, because each piece does a specific job. Hold a golden yellow and a sage green up to your face by a window. If the gold makes you yellower and the sage evens you out, you’re likely olive. Warm non-olive skin tends to do the reverse. Then it separates warm olive from cool olive in two more pairs:
- White against ivory. It reports that pure white suits cool olive, and ivory suits warm olive better.
- Camel and olive green. Camel yellows cool olive, it says, and an olive green garment lights up warm olive where you’d expect it to blend.
We can’t verify those beyond the source saying so, since it’s a color analysis site and reports no test. They are cheap to try, though, and easy to see. If both whites and both metals look about the same on you, you may be a neutral olive, and greyed colors from Soft Summer or Soft Autumn are the place to start.
One limit in our own tools needs saying. Our undertone test only returns olive in the middle of the depth range, roughly Monk tones 6 and 7 on the published scale. Our olive recipes outside that band come back as warm. So on very fair or deep skin, an answer of warm doesn’t rule out olive, and it doesn’t separate warm olive from cool olive at all. Fabric will tell you more. The scan reads your skin, eyes and hair and shows your colors beside your photo, and what colors look good on me gives you six to start with.
Neutrals, metals and the colors you own already
Neutrals are the safest spending for olive skin. Mushroom, taupe grey and cool greige share some of your skin’s greyness and rarely argue with it. Black works if you like it, with more of a step on lighter skin, and espresso or storm navy is softer near the face. Bright camel is the one to test before you buy, since it falls inside the wedge above, and Mi Colorometría names camel as a color that yellows cool olive.
On metals, Brooke Ann points cool-leaning olive toward silver, and Mi Colorometría suggests aged or matte finishes over polished ones of either kind. If you already own something in a suspect color, you don’t need to give it up. Move it away from your face, or put a muted scarf between it and your collar. If hair is next on your list, the best hair color for olive skin runs the same idea on dye, and the Full Color Report builds a palette of about 40 colors around your own result.
Related guides and tools
Sources
The Full Color Report: $19one time
You in your best and worst colors, about 40 colors with hex codes, makeup, hair and a capsule wardrobe plan.
See a sample reportCommon questions
- What colors look best on olive skin?
- Muted colors with a little grey in them are the easiest start: sage, muted teal, rosewood, mauve, taupe. Add depth or lightness to suit you, since a deep olive has more room for pale muted colors and a light olive has more room for deep ones.
- What colors make olive skin look sallow?
- Strong golds, mustards and oranges are the usual suspects, because they point the same way as olive skin at far greater strength. Baby pink can do the opposite, making the skin look greener by comparison. A softer version of the same color often works where the loud one fails.
- Should olive skin wear warm or cool colors?
- Sources disagree. Some treat olive as mostly cool, and others say it can be warm, cool or neutral, each with its own colors. Treat muted colors as the shared ground, then test a golden yellow against a sage, and white against ivory, in daylight.
- Does black look good on olive skin?
- Often, yes. It has a large step from light and medium olive skin and a softer one on deep olive, and it carries no yellow to compete with the cast. If it feels heavy, try espresso or a dark navy right next to your face.
- Can olive skin wear red?
- Yes, and red sits opposite the green cast, so it can look good. The problem some artists report is with coral and chili reds, which Brooke Ann says can look too orange or harsh. Try a berry or a blue-leaning red before an orange one.
- Is olive green a good color for olive skin?
- It can be, though it depends on the olive. Mi Colorometría reports that an olive garment lights up warm olive skin, where you might expect it to blend in. On cool olive skin, greyer or bluer greens such as jade are usually a safer test.
See which colors are yours.
See your colors on your own face, compare seasons side by side, and get your season, your undertone and a starter palette.