Beauties, welcome back to Creative Contour By Carla™! Today we are talking about the toughest concept in makeup: properly matching your skin tone! I am giving out the goods in today's blog, and I cannot wait for you to read all about it! So first of all, let me say this: matching your skin tone is actually quite easy, and social media and corporate greed make it look super scary. Phew, is that a hot take! Now, let's get into it!!
What You Need
Beauties, you'll need a few things to match your skin properly:
mirror
natural lighting
white towel or shirt
notebook
What you're going to do is you are going to use natural lighting and stand by a window. Try your best to do this on a day that is fairly sunny out, so you can see all the colors that naturally occur in your skin tone. (Yes, we do have colors in our skin naturally, more on that in a minute.) You want to stand by your window in natural lighting. Look in the mirror while you either wrap a white towel around your shoulders, or wear a white top.
While you are looking in the mirror, you are looking to see what colors naturally occur in your skin tone: both depth and undertone.
Now let's break it down a bit further. First, let's talk about skin depth and why it is relevant to matching your skin tone properly. Skin depth is literally what it sounds like: how light or dark your skin is. When you are looking in the mirror, take note of the depth of your skin tone: light, medium, deep, are the easiest classifications. There are more exact descriptions, but you're better off having a makeup artist match you directly with those type of descriptions; just putting this out there now. Back to skin tone matching.
Once we have our skin depth match, we are going to start looking for colors that naturally occur in the skin. Literally just take a look at what colors you see naturally: yellow, blue, red, green, orange, etc. Our skin has a very complex, yet interesting combination of colors! Write down all of the colors you see.
Now, to the part that helps us determine our proper match! When you are trying to match your skin tone properly, you want to see what colors are making up your skin's undertone. Let's break that down below:
Warm Undertone
Made up of mainly yellow and/or red tones that naturally occur in your skin. This will make up a majority of your skin's undertone. It will be very obvious if your skin has a lot of red and/or yellow in a warm undertone.
Cool Undertone
Made up mainly of blue and/or violet. This will make up the majority of your skin's undertone, and will be very obvious that your skin will have a lot of blue and/or violet in a cool undertone.
Neutral Undertone
Neutral undertones naturally have an even mixture of warm and cool undertones.
Everything Else
Oh boy, beauties, I could talk about this for ages!! There are some exceptions outside of the things I listed above. I want to make this easy for you, so let me break it down a little bit further.
When we are looking at the colors in our skin, we will notice sometimes that there may be a combination of undertones naturally occurring in our skin tone, but it may not be an even mixture. A great example of this is the olive undertone. Olive undertones have warm, cool, and neutral options. Olive undertones naturally are very green, so technically they can be considered a neutral undertone. However, some olives are very warm and have a lot of yellow in them. Some olives are very cool and have a lot of blue in them. Some olives are true, but may also have a bit of red in them. This is where it can get a bit complicated.
Another great example of this is the red undertones. Red undertones are warm majority of the time. However, some red undertones can have a bit of blue in them, making them a more cool toned red.
At this point, if you are having difficulty navigating matching your skin tone properly because your undertone falls under one of these complex examples, I highly recommend contacting a makeup artist (hi there!). We know what colors to look for, and how to help you navigate finding your perfect match!
Beauties, I hope you found this helpful! If you are ready to properly match your skin tone, let's go shopping! Book your free phone consult today to get started!
Lots of love and lipstick,
Carla
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