Best colors for pale skin, sorted by undertone

Why the lists disagree

Read a few guides to this question and you’ll be told to wear pastels and to avoid pastels, that white is crisp and that white drains you, that warm tones give you life and that warm tones turn you sallow. These authors aren’t all careless. They’re each picturing a different pale person.

Pale is one reading on one axis. Dermatology’s Fitzpatrick scale describes pale skin by how it burns and tans, and we take it here as tones 1 to 3 of the Monk scale, the lightest three. Neither says anything about undertone. A rosy redhead, a fair brunette with grey-blue eyes and an ash blonde with barely any pink in her cheeks can all share that lightness, and they don’t want the same sweater. Analyst Jeannie Stith says as much in an interview with Women.com: skin tone “tells us part of the story”, and undertone, contrast and overall coloring tell much more.

So take two questions before any list. Does your skin lean cool, warm or neutral? And are your hair and eyes close to your skin, or far from it? The picture above sorts starting colors by both. If you’d like more on the words themselves, our fair skin guide covers fair, light and pale, and the undertone test will give you a reading.

One warning about that first question. At this depth undertone is faint. Our cool and warm recipes at Monk 2 sit only about a third as far apart as the same two at Monk 6. You may well struggle to see it on bare skin, and that’s why fabric against your face is the better test.

Cool pale

Skin with some pink or rose in it, and often some visible redness. Colors with blue underneath tend to look settled on it. If your hair and eyes are light, stay with soft mid-tones: rose pink, soft periwinkle and blue spruce from Light Summer, with soft navy doing the work of black. If your hair is dark, you can go much stronger: raspberry, true blue and wine all hold up. Burgundy is the color Stith singles out for this group, saying it’s “one of my favorite fall colors for fair skin, especially when someone has cool undertones”.

Warm pale

Skin with some peach, ivory or gold in it, often with freckles, sometimes with red or golden hair. Here clean warmth looks alive, where cool pastels can leave your skin looking a little yellow beside them. With light coloring, try warm salmon, sea teal and warm rosewood from Light Spring. With deep red or brown hair, or strong eyes, the depth can come up: teal, forest and rich chocolate from True Autumn tend to be better companions than icy shades.

Neutral pale

Skin that doesn’t obviously go either way. Lucky in one sense, since very little is plainly wrong, and tricky in another, since very clear colors in either direction can feel louder than you. Slightly greyed colors are the easy place to start: dusty rose, slate teal and muted teal. Add depth if your hair is dark, with forest moss or charcoal. An olive-leaning pale, which is real and easy to miss, belongs here too, and it has its own guide.

Do pastels wash you out?

Some do. “Washed out” has a fairly exact meaning in numbers: nothing separates the color from your skin. Lightness can’t, since pastels sit next to you on the scale. So it comes down to strength, how much color is in the color. Here is every one of our 480 palette colors, placed by those two values against a pale skin.

42 of the 480 land in that box. Two colors make the point. Butter is almost exactly your lightness at Monk 2, but it carries enough color that you can see it from across a room. Mint Cream is just as close in lightness and carries very little color, so next to pale skin it can read as one soft shape, which some people love and some people call washed out.

So the honest answer to “do pastels suit pale skin?” depends on the pastel. Of the 17 Light Spring colors near this lightness, 2 land in the box. Light Summer has 14 near this lightness and 8 in the box. That’s a real difference in what each palette asks of you, and it’s why people told they’re a Light Summer often need more help with this question.

A tonal look isn’t a mistake, by the way. If you want soft and blended, it’s a very pretty way to dress, and a darker lip or a framed eye gives you an edge exactly where you want it. If you want your clothes to do that job instead, move one step: more color, or a clearly deeper shade.

Can pale skin wear white?

Yes, and the common advice on it is more confident than the numbers. Some guides say bright white suits only cool skin. We measured six whites on our boards against all three grounds.

Pure white sits at about the same distance from all three. So it doesn’t favor cool skin by that measure, and it stands apart from every pale skin by about the same amount. Creams are what take a side. Cream sits clearly closer to the warm ground than to the cool one, and Soft Cream shows the same pattern.

In practice, that suggests a simple choice. Want crisp and separate? Pure white gives you that on any lean, so judge it by what it does to your skin in a window. Want soft and close? Pick a white that matches your lean, ivory or cream for warm and oyster for almost anyone. These differences are small, so don’t expect a dramatic difference on a screen. It shows up in fabric.

What about warm colors?

This is where one analyst’s good advice shows why a single list can’t work. Stith’s fall picks for pale skin are burgundy, forest green and dusty rose, and she suggests skipping terracotta and heavy orange because they can drain your face’s natural vibrancy. Set that beside our own boards, written for different colorings:

We read that as agreement more than conflict. Stith’s list leans cool, and she says burgundy works especially for cool undertones. Warm pale skin, particularly with red or auburn hair, is the person for whom terracotta and rust can look like home. If terracotta takes the life out of your face, you have useful information about your lean. It isn’t a rule about pale skin.

Bright orange and yellow deserve a test even if you’re warm, because they carry so much more color than your skin. A deeper or softer version often works where the loud one doesn’t: mustard over a lemon, salmon over a neon coral.

Do you need contrast?

You’ll often read that pale skin needs dark or bright colors to “show up”. That turns out to depend on the rest of your face. With very dark hair, your coloring already holds a huge step from light to dark before you get dressed, and strong, deep colors echo it. With light hair and eyes, the same black top may be the darkest thing in sight by a long way. Black sits about as far below this skin as a color can, and our Light Spring and Light Summer boards both list it as a color to avoid near the face.

If that’s you, a soft navy or cool grey does the same job in a calmer voice. The face contrast guide will measure where you fall, and low contrast is a description of your coloring, never a shortfall.

A quick way to settle it on yourself

1. Find a window with indirect daylight and take off any makeup you can. Warm bulbs flatter warm colors and make everything look closer.
2. Hold two colors you own under your chin, one at a time: something rosy or blue-based, then something peachy or golden. Look at your skin, not the cloth.
3. Watch for the small things, since differences at this depth are quiet: redness around your nose, shadows under your eyes, the color of your lips.
4. Repeat with a pastel against a mid-tone. If your eyes and mouth get easier to find with the mid-tone, you know which way to shop.

No clothes to hand? The scan reads your skin, eyes and hair from your camera and shows your season and colors beside your photo, and what colors look good on me runs a set of comparisons and tells you what they added up to. Real fabric still has the final word. The Full Color Report builds about 40 colors from your result.

Related guides and tools

• ToolUndertone testCompare warm and cool colors on your own skin and get an undertone with the reasons behind it.
• GuideFair skinWhat counts as fair, its possible undertones and how to pick colors that do not drain it.
• PaletteLight SummerPale and cool: gentle colors with hex codes and a free scan to check them on you.
• PaletteLight SpringPale and warm: clear colors with hex codes and a free scan to check them on you.