Undertone meaning: what skin undertones are, with examples

One note if you landed here from elsewhere: this page is about skin. The word also names a horror film, the musical undertone series and, in everyday speech, a hidden meaning beneath someone’s words.

Three words everyone blurs

Most confusion about undertone comes from using one word for three different things, so it’s worth keeping them apart.

In the figure at the top, depth runs left to right and undertone runs top to bottom. A tan moves you sideways. It doesn’t move you up or down. Clarins’ training manager Charlotte McHale puts the common mistake well: “Historically, people have been a bit guilty of assuming that warm means darker. But the depth of colour and undertone are two completely different concepts.”

What are the types of undertone?

• Warm leans yellow, golden or peach. In very deep skin, golden and honey notes.
• Cool leans pink or rosy, and in very deep skin, red or terracotta, by Clarins’ description.
• Neutral has about an equal balance of the two, or a lean too slight to call.
• Olive has a muted green or grey cast. Some sources count it as a fourth type and others don’t.

All four occur at every depth. Sites that picture warm as tan and cool as pale are repeating an assumption, and the same goes for tying an undertone to an ethnicity. Xiao and colleagues measured four groups and found skin color distributions that overlap significantly, even with systematic differences in averages. An average can’t tell you about a person.

What undertone looks like in numbers

Here’s the part that surprises people. “Cool” doesn’t mean blue, and “warm” doesn’t mean orange. On a color wheel, nearly all human skin sits in a single slim wedge between red and yellow. Wang and colleagues measured 188 people with a spectrophotometer and found the averages of all four groups within a few degrees of each other on the color wheel. All the talk of warm and cool concerns very small moves inside that wedge. Cool skin is an orange with a little less yellow. Warm skin is an orange with a little more.

Our own illustrations reflect that. Our cool and warm recipes sit 11 degrees either side of neutral, and our skin reading treats about that much as a full lean. It’s a small shift, the sort that white balance on a phone can easily swamp, and it’s why the whole subject feels slippery. A wrong foundation still shows, because at the jaw it sits right beside bare skin, and your eye gets a direct side by side.

Is undertone real, or just marketing?

Somewhere between. It isn’t a medical or dermatological term. It doesn’t appear in the Fitzpatrick types or in the skin tone groups researchers use, and Wikipedia’s entry calls it “a term used in cosmetics”. No lab test certifies yours. On the other hand, the thing it points to is real: skin does differ in its redness and yellowness, and instruments measure both. The BMJ describes measured redness as affected by melanin and blood flow, and measured yellowness as reflecting constitutional pigmentation and the ability to tan. Blood adds red, melanin adds brown, and carotenoids from food add yellow.

What nobody has shown, as far as we could find, is that those measurements divide cleanly into three or four types, or that a given type should wear a given color. That second step is a styling convention. It’s a useful one, as seasons are, because it gives people a shared way to talk about what they see. We say this plainly because the people selling you a shade tend not to.

Does your undertone change?

Most beauty sources say no, flatly. Skincare.com says undertones “never change” and are “totally fixed”. Clarins says yours “remains constant”. That’s a fair rule of thumb for shopping, but it’s a claim, not a finding, and the measurements point toward something more nuanced:

• Whitehead and colleagues saw skin redness and yellowness shift with fruit and vegetable intake, in 35 people over six weeks, driven by carotenoids.
• De Rigal and colleagues reported yellowing with age in one of the four groups they studied.
• Xiao and colleagues found redness varies by body site, so your forehead and inner arm don’t even agree with each other.

So “fairly stable, within limits” is about as far as the evidence goes. If your foundation has stopped matching after some years, you haven’t got it wrong. You may simply have changed.

Why it’s hardest to see at both ends of the range

Skin holds the most color in the middle of the depth range and the least at the extremes, and that holds even in the published swatches. Undertone is a lean in color, so where there’s less color there’s less to lean with.

In our ramps, cool and warm sit about three times as far apart at tone 6 as at tone 1 or tone 10. That has a practical meaning. Very fair skin and very deep skin are both hard to read, for the same reason, and neither is an exception. Monk tones 1 and 10 carry only a small fraction of the color of tone 6. Tests invented with fair skin in mind tend to do badly on deep skin, but that’s the fault of the tests. Deep skin has undertones like anyone else, and Clarins describes how they tend to look: golden and honey on the warm side, red and terracotta on the cool.

Is olive an undertone?

Sources split. Wikipedia treats olive as a tone with greenish or golden undertones. Stylist Brooke Ann calls it an overtone. Mi Colorometría says it’s “un subtono, no un tono”, an undertone and not a tone. In numbers, olive moves further round the wedge than warm does, and with less color, so it doesn’t sit neatly on the warm to cool line at all. We lay out who says what on the olive undertone page, and olive skin has the chart.

What knowing your undertone gets you

Three practical things, in order of how much they matter:

1. Foundation. The wrong lean sits right next to bare skin at your jaw, where it’s easy to see. Watch out for labels here: M·A·C defines warm as rosy and cool as golden, the opposite of most brands.
2. Colors near your face. It gives you a sensible first guess at what to test, in clothes, lipstick and hair color.
3. Color analysis. Temperature is one of three axes in any season system, alongside depth and strength. Undertone alone won’t give you a season, but it rules several out.

To find yours, how to find your undertone ranks the usual tests by how much each can really tell you. Or go straight to the undertone test. If you only want the quick ones, there’s the vein test and the gold or silver test, and both say how far to trust them.

Related guides and tools

• GuideWarm undertonesThe signs at every skin depth, yellow against peach, and the colors and metals that work.
• GuideCool undertonesThe signs on light and deep skin, redness against true cool, and the colors that work.
• GuideNeutral undertoneHow to confirm it, whether you really lean one way and which colors fit.
• GuideOlive undertoneWhy olive is its own case, how to spot it and why foundation goes wrong.