You can go a step further by selecting colors that match your season skin type. While wearing clothing from the other cool tone season often looks better than wearing a warm tone, a good bet is to choose colors that match your season to look your best. Here are some recommendations for those with summer or winter skin colors:
Choosing the Best Clothing for Your Skin Tone
If you’re looking to build your wardrobe but don’t know which colors will look best on you, you’ll want to know all about how your skin tone can impact the clothing you wear. Knowing your skin tone can help you choose colors that complement your natural skin undertone while avoiding those that clash with it.
The best clothing clothes for skin tone use colors that flatter your skin tone, making you stand out in a crowd. In contrast, clothing in colors that don’t match your skin tone result in your hair and skin looking dull or even sickly.
This article explains how to determine your skin tone and the best colors for it so you can dress for your skin tone.
Determining Your Skin Tone
As you look to build your wardrobe, you’ll want to find clothes to match your skin tone. To clear up any confusion, your skin’s surface tone, or what you’d generally describe yourself as having, is not the same as the undertone. When you’re looking for clothes to match your skin tone, you’re actually looking for clothes that complement your skin’s undertone rather than the surface tone.
Even though people have a variety of skin colors, there are only three different categories of skin undertones — warm, cool and neutral. Warmer complexions consist of yellow undertones, while cool complexions consist of pink undertones. A neutral complexion has a mix of both warm and cool undertones. Though your skin’s surface might change its color depending on how tan you are, your skin undertone will not change.
If you don’t know what your skin undertone or how you can determine if you’re warm or cool, you can find out using the following steps:
1. Examine Your Veins
To determine what your skin tone is, start with your veins. The blood vessels on your elbows, temples and wrists are often close to the surface due to the skin being thinner. With light skin, you can often see the veins through the skin, making it easier to determine what color the veins are.
As you look at your veins, check to see if you have blue or green veins. Blue veins signal that you have a cool skin tone, whereas green shows that you have a warm skin tone. If you can’t tell if you have green or blue, it’s likely that you have a neutral skin tone.
2. Use the Paper Test
If you can’t see your veins or want more confirmation, the next step to determining your skin tone is to administer a white paper test on yourself. Place a white piece of paper against your skin to help you identify the colors that jump out to you. These colors then inform your skin tone.
Instead of placing a piece of paper next to your face, you’ll want to place it near your chest or throat. The face can have reddish tones for a variety of reasons, such as sun exposure, and can give you a false reading for your tone.
Hold the white piece of paper up to your chest or neck, looking for the colors that become more obvious compared to the white paper. If you notice pink and blue colors, your skin tone is cool, and if you noticed gold and green colors, your skin tone is warm. A neutral skin tone likely has fluctuating skin colors depending on the amount of sun exposure and the time of year.
3. Think About How Your Skin Reacts to Sun
If you’re constantly getting sunburned, especially in the summer months, you’re likely to have cool-toned skin. In contrast, those with warm skin often tan instead of burning. Additionally, if you rarely ever get burned, but you also don’t tan, you may have a neutral tone. Another indication of a neutral tone is if your sunburns often heal quickly and turn into a tan.
To test this, don’t go out and overexpose yourself to the sun to see if you burn or not. Instead, t hink about how your skin has reacted in the past. If sunburns are rare, you’ll have your answer.
Learn Your Seasons
In fashion today, many people like to make further distinctions between those whose skin has warm and cool undertones. In fact, there are two subcategories under both the warm and cool skin tones that can help you further craft your look to accentuate your undertone. These subcategories often place people into four different seasons to illustrate the differences. Below you can find the differences between the four main types of skin tones:
Cool Tone Seasons
Both summers and winters are cool tones and have many similarities. However, they do have some differences that men who know how to dress will be aware of:
- Summer: While administering the white paper test, you’ll notice that this skin tone has pink, red or blue undertones. Those with a summer skin tone will have hair and eye color that provides a gentle contrast to their skin color.
- Winter: For those with a winter skin tone, the white paper test will reveal the same undertones of pink, red or blue. However, someone with a winter skin tone will have eye color and hair in stark contrast to their skin. For example, someone with black hair but pale skin will have a winter skin tone.
Warm Tone Seasons
Springs and autumns have warm undertones, but there are still some differences between the two skin types:
- Spring: A spring skin tone has undertones of peach, cream and golden that you can see during the white paper test. Springs usually have strawberry red or straw-colored hair, along with freckles, blue or green eyes and rosy cheeks.
- Autumn: For those with an autumn skin tone, a white paper test will reveal golden or yellow undertones. Autumns often have darker hair and eyes compared to someone with a spring skin tone.
A GUIDE TO WHAT COLORS ARE YOUR BEST LOOK
There’s no better feeling then going out with your girlfriends wearing your most flattering little black dress. We know, we know, you look like a total bombshell. But what is life without a little color? Adding color to your closet can be a little intimidating, but we promise it’s worth it. Depending on your skin tone, hair, and eye coloring, some colors look fabulous on you, while other colors make you kinda hate to look in the mirror.
What is life without a little risk? On your next shopping spree, be intentional about the things you get. Does this shirt bring out my eyes? Make my cheeks look rosy? Does it clash with my skin or make me look washed out? Of course, everyone has their go-to favorite colors (and it’s still okay to wear it even if it doesn’t match your look completely)! However, we’ve made it easy for you to figure out what looks best on you.
Cool skin tones
- How do you determine if you have a cool skin tone?
- Hold a piece of white paper up to your face. Your skin will look pink, rosy, or blue.
- Flip your wrist up and look at your veins. They will be blue, purple, or a mixture of both.
- Your skin will react to the sun by burning rather than tanning.
- You have lighter hair, grey/blue eyes, and are often described as fair or pale.
- Best colors to wear with a cool skin tone
- The best colors for you to wear include blue, lavender, rose, and grey.
- Avoid orange, tomato red, and strong yellows because they can clash with your skin completely.
- Silver, platinum, or white gold jewelry look best on you!
Warm skin tones
- How do you determine if you have a warm skin tone?
- Hold a piece of white paper up to your face. Your skin will look yellowish, greenish, or light brown.
- Flip your wrist up and look at your veins.
- Your skin tans easily in the sun.
- Darker hair: black, dark brown, auburn, brown or hazel-brown eyes,
- Best colors to wear with a warm skin tone.
- Natural colors like honey, olive, coral, and cream look great with your skin!
- Avoid icy blues or jewel tones because they can wash you out and make your skin look gray.
- For jewelry, stick with gold, bronze, and copper.
Dark skin tones
- How do you determine if you have a dark skin tone?
- You tan without burning
- You have dark hair, like black or brown and your eyes are a dark amber or black.
- Best colors to wear with a dark skin tone.
- Your skin looks great with a variety of colors including: white, khaki, dark purple or plum, red, gray, light blue, orange, gold, or pink.
- Gold jewelry is your best look!
- Avoid black, navy, dark brown, and light green as these colors tend to clash with your skin tone.
Neutral skin tone
- How do you determine if you have a neutral skin tone?
- Hold a white piece of paper up to your face and your skin will look gray or ashy.
- When you look at your veins, it will be hard to tell if its blue, purple, or greenish.
- You both tan & burn when you’re out in the sun.
- Best colors to wear with at neutral skin tone
- The colors that look best on you includes royal blue, jade, red, and white.
- Oversaturated colors tend to overwhelm your look, so stay away from super bright colors like neon.
- For jewelry, deep gold and dark silver look great on you!
Colors every skin tone can wear
Pure white, light pink, teal, and tomato red.
What is your go-to color for makeup, jewelry, and clothing? Girl, whatever you’re wearing, we know that you’re rocking it.
