Skin tones: names, types and how they are measured

So what are the skin tones?

There is no fixed set. Human skin color runs continuously from very light to very deep, and every list you find is somebody choosing where to cut. What differs is why they cut it, so the first useful question is what a given scale was built to do.

That last row is the one most people arrive with. Beauty brands tend to simplify to four words, fair, light, medium and deep, which is how Clarins groups them. Those are good words to use, as long as you remember the edges are soft.

Skin tone names, and why they refuse to line up

The figure at the top places about twenty common names against Monk’s ten tones. The placement is ours, drawn from how the words get used, because nobody publishes a key for them. One list on Skincare Geeks runs to 25 names with no scale behind them, and its own definitions show the problem: honey “ranging from fair skin” to “deep brown”, and tan covering nearly any shade of brown. So treat each bar as a loose neighborhood.

The names fall into a few families, and each has its own habits:

• Depth words: fair, light, medium, deep. The plainest and most useful, and the ones we use on this site. Some writers prefer deep over dark, because dark on its own can read as a judgment.
• Material words: porcelain, ivory, bronze, mahogany, ebony. Shop shelves love these. They set a mood more than they describe a color.
• Food words: honey, caramel, espresso. Widely searched, and some readers find them uncomfortable. We go into that on the caramel skin tone page, with reference swatches.
• State words: tan, which can describe your usual skin or last week’s holiday.
• Cast words: olive, which isn’t a depth at all, so it gets the dashed outline in the figure.

If you need to describe a skin tone precisely, say depth and lean together, as in “medium, warm” or “very deep, cool”. Add a Monk number if the reader needs to see it. Fair skin has its own page, including what that word carries.

What gives skin its color

Skin color comes from a few things absorbing and scattering light. Melanin matters most, and it comes in two main kinds. Here are the parts that show:

Quantity isn’t the whole story either. Differences in color also come from the size and spread of melanosomes, the tiny packets that carry melanin. And the blood matters to how we read a face: when Stephen and colleagues let people adjust calibrated face photos to look healthiest, they raised skin blood color above its starting level. So pink in skin is part of how we read a face.

How skin tone gets measured

Scientists use a spectrophotometer, pressed against the skin, and report three numbers: how light the skin is, how red, and how yellow. The BMJ’s 2026 pulse oximeter paper gives a handy reading of those: redness is affected by melanin and blood flow, and yellowness reflects constitutional pigmentation and the ability to tan.

Those numbers show how much skin color varies in ways a chart can’t. Wang and colleagues measured 188 people at up to ten body sites and found the average hue of every group within a tiny slice of the color circle. Xiao and colleagues, across four groups and four body sites, reported systematic differences in averages, and distributions that overlap significantly.

Cameras are the rough end of this. In an IEEE study of skin lightness estimated from face images, readings for the same person varied significantly between pictures and only tightened when camera, background and setting were controlled. So any app that gives you a tone, ours included, is giving you an estimate. Ours asks for a white sheet of paper to reduce the problem, without removing it.

Tone, undertone and complexion are three different words

Skin tone is depth, how light or deep. Undertone is the lean, toward pink, yellow, a balance of both, or olive, and it’s a separate axis. Complexion is the everyday word for the condition and look of your facial skin. Clarins’ training manager puts the usual mix-up well: “Historically, people have been a bit guilty of assuming that warm means darker.” It doesn’t. Every undertone turns up at every depth, as the undertone guide lays out, and you can check yours with the undertone test.

Skin tone isn’t race, and no tone outranks another

Skin tone tells you little about anyone’s background. Google’s guidance for its own scale is a flat rule, “Don’t: equate skin tone to race”, and notes that racial and ethnic groups include a vast spectrum of tones. That’s why this guide lists no ethnic groups beside any tone, though plenty of name lists do.

Nor is the ordering neutral in the world, even if it is on a chart. Colorism is discrimination based on skin tone, and it has real costs. Monk’s own 2015 study found skin tone was a significant predictor of perceived discrimination among African-Americans, with health gaps inside the group that often rivaled those between Black and white Americans overall. It’s worth knowing, when you read a beauty site that ranks or praises a tone, what that habit comes from. Here, a lower number means lighter, a higher number means deeper, and that’s all it means.

Does skin tone change over time?

Yes, within limits, and in more ways than tanning:

• Sun. Tanning deepens skin, and it fades. That’s why researchers separate constitutive color, what you have without sun, from what you have today.
• Age. A study of 385 women in four groups, led by de Rigal, found facial skin darkened significantly with age in all of them.
• Diet. Whitehead and colleagues tracked 35 people for six weeks and linked changes in fruit and vegetable intake to changes in skin redness and yellowness, through carotenoids, in a group they describe as Caucasian.
• Place on your body. Forehead, cheek, inner arm and hand can differ noticeably on one person.

The inner arm is a common place to look for your baseline, since it sees little sun. For makeup, your face and neck matter more. One Monk step can be small or large: tones 2 and 3 are almost equally light, while tone 6 is far deeper than tone 5, so a good tan could easily move you a step in one part of the scale and not in another.

How to work out yours

1. Look at bare skin in daylight, near a window. Evening bulbs and phone screens both push the color around.
2. Open the skin tone chart and find the two tones you sit between. Most people land between two, and that’s a fine answer.
3. For a second opinion, run the skin tone test, which uses your camera and a white sheet of paper, then reports your tone in plain words, from very light to dark, with your place on the Monk scale. At the very fair end it leans on points that are our own judgment, so treat that tone as rough.
4. If you’re here for makeup, carry that depth over to the foundation shade finder. If you make art, the skin color palette has every hex to copy.

Related guides and tools

• GuideSkin tone chartThe real scales side by side, what each is for and where common names fit.
• GuideSkin color paletteCopyable skin tone hex codes from a published scale, plus ramps by undertone.
• GuideFair skinWhat counts as fair, its possible undertones and how to pick colors that do not drain it.
• GuideCaramel skin toneFour medium skin tone names compared, with reference swatches and likely undertones.