How to choose a foundation shade without seeing it

Buying foundation online sounds like guesswork and mostly is not. Two variables decide the outcome, and once they are separated the choice gets much smaller.

Depth is how light or dark the shade is. Undertone is the colour underneath — the cast your skin has regardless of how tanned you are. Depth decides whether it disappears at the jawline. Undertone decides whether it reads as skin or as makeup.

Most people get depth roughly right and undertone wrong, then conclude the shade range was bad.

Reading a shade name

Our system — and most systems that use two words — puts depth in the number and undertone in the word. Depth runs 05 at the fairest to 50 at the deepest, in steps of five:

• Fair — 05
• Light — 10, 15
• Medium — 20, 25
• Tan — 30, 35
• Deep — 40, 45, 50

And the undertone word:

• Neutral — 05, 20, 30, 40. Neither obviously pink nor obviously golden.
• Warm — 10, 25, 35, 45. Golden, peachy or olive.
• Cool — 15, 50. Pink or slightly blue.

Finding your undertone

Three tests, in order of how much you should trust them.

1. Jewellery

The most reliable of the three, because you already have years of data. If silver consistently looks better on you than gold, you are probably cool. If gold wins, warm. If you honestly cannot tell and wear both, neutral.

2. White paper

Hold a sheet of plain white paper next to your bare face in daylight, no makeup. Against true white, most skin declares itself: yellow or peachy cast means warm, pink or rosy means cool, and greyish or hard to place usually means neutral or olive.

3. Wrist veins

The famous one, and the weakest. Blue reads cool, green reads warm, a mix reads neutral. It fails often because vein colour depends on skin thickness and translucency as much as on undertone, and because the inside of the wrist is nothing like face skin. Use it as a tie-breaker, never as the decision.

What olive skin should do

Olive skin has a green-grey cast that neither "warm" nor "cool" describes well, and a foundation that is too pink turns visibly ashy on it. As a rule, olive skin does better in the warm or neutral column than in the cool one — and a shade that looks slightly too yellow in the bottle often looks correct on the face.

Where to test, and where not to

Test at the jawline, in daylight, near a window, with no other makeup on. Swipe a stripe and look at it from the side.

Do not test on the inside of the wrist or the back of the hand. Both are a different colour from your face — usually darker on the hand, usually pinker on the wrist — and matching to either is how people end up with a visible line at the jaw.

Match to your neck, not to your face, if the two differ. The face is the part that changes with sun and with product; the neck is what everyone actually sees the face against.

Wait twenty minutes before deciding

Foundation oxidises. Over the first fifteen to thirty minutes on skin, many formulas shift a little darker and a little warmer as they interact with skin oils and air. A shade that looked half a step too light when you applied it can be exactly right by the time you leave the house.

So apply, do something else, and come back. Judging a foundation in the first two minutes is the most common way to talk yourself into the wrong shade.

If you are between two depths

Take the lighter one — with one condition: that the formula is buildable.

A buildable foundation lets you add a second thin layer where you want more coverage, so a shade slightly too light closes the gap. A shade too deep has nowhere to go; it sits on the face looking like a mask and there is no fixing it with technique. Oxidation pushes in the same direction, since most formulas move darker rather than lighter.

If the formula is not buildable, go with whichever of the two matches your undertone better. Undertone beats depth every time — a shade half a step off in depth reads as "a bit of colour"; a shade in the wrong undertone reads as grey, orange, or pink, and everyone can see it.

Two things nobody warns you about

Flash photography

Foundations coloured with mineral pigments contain titanium dioxide, which reflects light very efficiently — including camera flash. That is the white or grey cast people see in photographs from a night out, and it has nothing to do with having chosen the wrong shade. If you know there will be flash, use less product, or set with a translucent powder that is not itself titanium-heavy.

Your shade changes twice a year

Most people move one step of depth between summer and winter while keeping the same undertone. That is why shade ranges step in fives: a person who is 25 Medium Warm in February is often 30 or 35 in August. Undertone does not change with a tan — only depth does.

Concealer is a separate decision

For covering blemishes and redness, take a concealer at the same depth as your foundation. The job there is to disappear, not to brighten.

For the under-eye, one step lighter is the usual choice. Going more than one step lighter is where the grey, ashy under-eye comes from, and it shows up most on deeper skin.

Ours

The VELOURIS™ foundation comes in ten shades on the system above, and the formula is buildable — so the between-two-shades rule applies: take the lighter one. The concealer comes in seven, on the same depth-and-undertone scale.

One difference worth knowing before you order: the concealer is vegan and the foundation is not — the foundation contains organic beeswax, which is what holds its texture together. That is on every shade page, and why the word "vegan" needs checking is a longer story.

General information about choosing colour cosmetics. Every shade page carries the complete INCI ingredient list and the declared fragrance allergens.