There are a lot of people who don’t understand their skin color. I don’t mean mixed race women here either. Everyone, from all backgrounds has trouble with this.
Lets see if I can help. One way to see your skin tones is to use fabric of paper swatches.
Using a large piece of fabric or paper in yellow/gold, silver/blue, true red, brown, black and even green can help you see your skin in a different way.
Start by getting in front of a mirror with some good light. No makeup! Now, hold up one of the swatches by your face. Lets say you start with the yellow. Does your skin now look yellow? Or did it become suddenly pink or grey next to the yellow?
Continue on with this excersize and make note of what your skin color looks like next to each color swatch.
When you are done, hopefully you will see a trend throughout. This will likely be your undertone.
Our foundations are made with the primary colors in mind. In case you didn’t take art in high school. The primarys are Red, Yellow, and Green. From these 3 colors, all other colors are made.
Foundation #1 – all foundations with the # 1 are in the cool tone range. They have a blue or green base which is also refered to as ash. I’ve found this to be great for anyone with a lot of ruddines (red) in their natural skin tone or if they have rosacea.
We treat our #2 foundations as our neutral shade but it does have a bit more pink to it. This really does fit about 80 percent of all skin tones out there and even if you arent’ sure of what shade to pick, this will blend the best on everyone.
Foundation #3 – this is yellow. Not only yellow! but for those who get tans easily. Some people just have yellow tones though even if they are light skinned and don’t ever tan.
So, not any one of our 3 shade bases is a perfect match? It’s ok, you can blend your own!
Say you started with the Medium #2 and while it is dark enough, you need a little more yellow to match your tan. No problem! Using an empty jar, or even a small glass bowl, mix about 1 part #3 to 2 parts #2. Shake, stir, mix it up. Test it. Continue adjusting til you get as much yellow as you need.
This works with all combinations of our foundations, even mixing light to medium or medium to dark. For those times between winter and summer when you aren’t really sun kissed yet, but you aren’t pasty snow white either.
Happy Mixing!
