Fair skin: tone, undertone and the colors that suit it

Fair, light or pale: what do the words cover?

People use these three as if they were interchangeable, and sources don’t agree on a line between them. Lining up what each one actually says makes that plain:

Our working version: fair is roughly Monk tones 1 to 3, light overlaps it and runs to about tone 4, and pale is a casual word for the same stretch, sometimes implying skin looks drained at that moment. Those boundaries are editorial. Expect another site to draw them differently, and expect your own sense of it to shift between summer and winter.

Where fair sits on the scales

The published numbers hold a surprise. Monk tones 1 to 3 barely differ in lightness. Tone 3 is even a shade lighter than tone 2. What moves is yellowness, which climbs from tone 1 to tone 3. So the variety at this end of the scale is less about how light you are than about what color that lightness has, and that’s the part the single word fair hides.

Is fair skin Fitzpatrick type 1 or 2?

Often, but you can’t tell by looking. A Fitzpatrick type is a sun response, so the honest test is what happens to your skin, whether it always burns and never tans or burns easily and tans poorly. A fair person who tans after a first burn would be closer to type III. Ware and colleagues note the scale correlates poorly with baseline skin color in the first place. See the chart for why that column carries no colors.

Which undertones can fair skin have?

All of them, including olive. Bethany Brenneman, a makeup artist and color analyst quoted by IPSY, describes olive as ranging “from fair to deep”. The grid at the top of this page shows the four at each fair depth, and you’ll notice how close together they sit.

That closeness is real, and worth understanding. The published Monk swatch at tone 1 carries only about a fifth of the color of tone 6. In our own ramps, cool and warm sit only about a third as far apart at tone 2 as at tone 6. There is less color here for an undertone to show in, so fair skin is one of the two hardest places to read it. Very deep skin is the other, for a similar reason.

Fair skin also gets misread for another reason. Lighter skin takes much of its color from hemoglobin in the dermis, so it shows blood readily. A flushed fair person looks cool in the moment and may not be, a mix-up we pull apart on the cool undertones page. For the test itself, go straight to how to find your undertone.

Colors that suit fair skin, and why “washed out” happens

The usual explanation of “this color drains me” is about temperature, and sometimes it is. Quite often it’s simple lightness. A garment at nearly your skin’s own lightness gives the eye no edge at your collar, and you read as one pale shape.

A sensible way to choose, then, is contrast first and temperature second:

• If your hair and brows are dark, your coloring already has contrast and can carry deep, strong color. Black can work for you too.
• If your hair and brows are light, mid-tones tend to be kinder than either pastel or black. Teal and cadet blue give an edge without a shout.
• If you lean cool, try rose, cornflower and soft lavender. See the Cool Summer palette for more.
• If you lean warm, try warm coral, peach and warm turquoise, as in Warm Spring.
• If you lean olive, muted colors are a good place to start: sage, muted teal, antique rose.

None of this forbids anything. Pale pastels on fair skin can be lovely if you want a soft, tonal look. Our best colors for pale skin guide has more ideas. What colors look good on me tests them on you.

The history in the word “fair”

It’s worth being straight about this. Fair comes from Old English fæġer, meaning beautiful, and that older sense survives in lines like “fair of face”. A language that uses one word for both pale and beautiful has told you something about the people speaking it.

Colorism is the name for the wider pattern, where people receive better or worse treatment according to skin tone, and darker-skinned people are marginalized in favor of lighter-skinned ones. It’s why the word carries weight in many markets. In June 2020 Unilever said it would stop using “fair”, “white” and “light” across its beauty brands, with its beauty president saying the words “suggest a singular ideal of beauty”, and Fair & Lovely became Glow & Lovely that July.

We use fair here because that’s the word people type, and only as a description of depth. Lighter isn’t better, and this page doesn’t offer a way to get lighter.

Sun and fair skin, briefly

The NHS lists people with pale, white or light brown skin, freckles, red or fair hair, or a tendency to burn rather than tan among those who should take extra care in the sun, and advises a sunscreen of at least SPF 30 with at least 4-star UVA protection. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends sunscreen for everyone, so this isn’t special pleading for fair skin. A doctor is the right person for anything beyond that.

Foundation for fair skin

Start with undertone, because at this depth a wrong one shows as a mask: too pink or too yellow against your neck. Test near the jaw in daylight, and let it settle. Dior, for one, advises matching to your neck rather than your hand. Don’t expect a brand’s lightest shade to be light enough, or a shade to carry across formulas; even M·A·C warns “your shade may vary across foundations”. And read how M·A·C labels warm and cool before buying there, since it runs the opposite way to most. The foundation shade finder gives you a depth and undertone family to begin from, though it won’t name a brand shade. The skin tone test gives you a nearest published tone, with one catch for this page: tones 1 to 3 are paler than a camera tends to report even fair skin, so it’s likely to place you a step or two deeper than the chart would.

Related guides and tools

• GuideColors for pale skinSwatches for cool, warm and neutral pale skin, and what drains each one.
• GuideSkin tonesThe common names, the scales that measure skin and why undertone is a separate axis.
• GuideSkin color paletteCopyable skin tone hex codes from a published scale, plus ramps by undertone.
• ToolFoundation shade finderA calibrated reading of depth and undertone, translated into how shade names work.