Warm undertones: signs, examples and the colors that work

What warm undertones look like at each depth

Most descriptions stop at “golden, sun-kissed” and picture one kind of skin. That undersells how differently warmth shows across the range, so here it is by depth. Tone numbers refer to the Monk scale in the figure above.

• Tones 1 to 4, very light to light. Warmth is faint here, cream or soft peach rather than gold. It tends to show by comparison: hold plain white paper beside your jaw and the skin looks yellow or peachy next to it. Skincare.com calls this the white paper test. Flushing can easily hide it.
• Tones 5 to 7, medium. The easiest place to see it. Skin holds the most color here, so a golden or honey cast is clear in daylight. Our warm and cool versions sit nearly three times as far apart at tone 6 as at tone 2.
• Tones 8 to 10, deep to very deep. Pink and yellow stop being useful words. Clarins’ training manager offers a better guide: “golden, honey tones in deep skin would indicate warmth”. Look at the high points of the face, the forehead and cheekbones, in daylight, where skin catches the most light.

Warm also isn’t a synonym for tan or brown, and deep skin isn’t automatically warm. If a golden foundation goes orange on you, you might be neutral or cool at any depth.

Yellow or peach: two different kinds of warm

The top half of each strip in the figure above leans yellow and the bottom half leans peach. Yellow-leaning warm is closer to gold. Peach-leaning warm has more red in it, close enough to neutral that it often gets mistaken for pink. At tone 6 depth, the two versions sit further apart than neutral and warm do in our figures. Some brands make the split official: Dior sells separate Warm, Warm Peach and Warm Olive families.

It matters because each has a different look-alike:

• Peach-leaning warm often gets told it’s cool, because the skin looks a little pink. The giveaway is what happens with truly cool pinks: they tend to make the skin look yellow by contrast. Salmon and warm coral usually sit better than icy pink.
• Yellow-leaning warm often gets told it’s olive, because both go yellow. The giveaway is saturation. Warm skin holds richer gold, and strong warm colors like marigold tend to look alive on it. On olive skin they’re more likely to look harsh. See olive undertone to compare.

Treat this as our rule of thumb. Nobody has tested it, and you may be somewhere in between.

The warm bulb trap

Warm undertones are the undertone most often diagnosed by accident, because indoor light is warm. Household bulbs commonly run around 2700 K, a long way from daylight. Your eyes adjust and your phone corrects, partly, and neither finishes the job.

At tone 6 depth, the bulb moves neutral skin more than twice the whole distance between neutral and warm in our figures. So a bathroom selfie can overshoot an entire undertone. That holds at all three depths shown, and it’s why any undertone reading taken indoors at night should count for very little.

Daylight near a window is the fix. Skip direct sun, which adds its own glare, and avoid colored walls or a bright shirt, since they throw color onto you too. If you’re using a camera, give it something white to work from. That’s what white balance is: an adjustment that tries to make white objects look white. It can only be as good as the white it finds.

How do I know if I have warm undertones?

Each of the common signs helps a little. Here’s how far to trust each of them for warmth in particular:

• Warm and cool fabric in daylight. The best of them. Your skin looks clearer and more even in the warm one. Our undertone test runs pairs like this beside your photo.
• Gold looks better than silver. A fair hint, tangled up with taste and hair color. Brilliant Earth, which sells both, says these tests “provide clues rather than definitive results”. Try the gold or silver test.
• Green veins. Weak. Vein color depends mostly on skin optics, vessel depth and oxygenation, as Kienle and colleagues showed. People of any undertone can see green. Details on the vein test page.
• You tan easily. Weak. It says more about melanin than lean, and it can’t help you at all if you’re already deep.
• Warm hair and eyes. Skincare.com lists hazel, amber and warm brown eyes and chestnut or golden hair, and admits “it may not always hold true”. A very dark eye tells you little, and neither does dyed hair.

How to find your undertone ranks all of these and handles conflicting results.

What colors suit warm undertones?

Temperature is only one axis, so use depth to choose which warm colors to start with. These come from our Warm Spring and True Autumn palettes, along with Deep Autumn.

• Light and warm: warm coral, peach, warm turquoise, golden brown.
• Medium and warm: pumpkin, teal, mustard, olive.
• Deep and warm: this depth takes strength and light colors alike. burnt orange, mustard gold, deep warm teal, and also golden yellow for contrast.

Instead of bright white, cream or ivory is the classic swap. Instead of black, chocolate, olive and deep teal do the same job with more warmth, though if you love black, wear it. For metal, our warm palettes favor yellow gold, copper, bronze. And yes, you can wear silver. The temperature of a thin chain matters much less than the color next to your face. To test on your own face, use what colors look good on me.

Foundation labels: the M·A·C problem

Most foundation ranges use W, Y or G for warm, but not all. M·A·C does the reverse, and says so on its own shade finder: “Warm (W) undertones are defined as rosy,” “Cool (C) undertones are defined as golden,” and “Other brands tend to define cool and warm tones as the opposite.” So if you have golden, warm skin in the ordinary sense, the letter to look for at M·A·C is on the C side, and a W there will look pink.

M·A·C’s page doesn’t define the in-between NW and NC separately, so go by a counter test over any chart you find. It adds that “your shade may vary across foundations”, which holds at every brand. Take your depth and lean from the foundation shade finder, then read each brand’s key before trusting a letter.

Lipstick is simpler. Warm undertones usually do well with orange-based reds, coral and terracotta, and Clarins suggests the same logic for its own reds. On tone 9 and deeper, brick and warm plum are worth a try too.

Related guides and tools

• ToolGold or silver testCompare gold and silver on your own skin and read what it says about your undertone.
• ToolWhat colors look good on me?Six starter colors and one to avoid, tested under your own face.
• GuideUndertone meaningWhat undertone is, how it differs from skin tone, and the four types with examples.
• GuideCool undertonesThe signs on light and deep skin, redness against true cool, and the colors that work.