A Brand Standard for Foundation

Makeup brands make little to no sense with their classifications and color names for foundation products. What if we had a standard that all followed? It would be great for the consumer but...

You follow me and so you know that I am obsessed with color theory in skin and neutral. I have tools and classes that teach undertone and train our eye to see color in neutral. My work is focused on color theory and its use in makeup artistry and cosmetics.

I spend my days and nights thinking about it.

And every once in a while I have an “AH-HA” moment. Where something new becomes clear and I can create a new pathway of explanation between the science of color and how we use it in makeup.

That happened last week when I realized that brand foundation ranges were more successful when they focused on the general tone of their colors rather than try to hit specific undertones. And so I got to thinking about a standard that any brand could use to categorize their foundation ranges. A standard that would make purchasing makeup so much easier. What if they all followed the same standard?

Tone VS. Undertone

I spend a lot of time examining the undertone of skin. All skin is neutralized color and appears as some kind of brown/tan/cream color. The undertone of a skin is the color that is most visible within that brown/tan/cream. We use The Flesh Tone Color Wheel® or The Flesh Tone Fan™ to determine undertone. This is the most specific way to gauge color in skin.

But we can also look at skin color on a more generic map using warm and cool. This is looking at the overall tone of the skin. Warm skins run red-to-yellow and cool skins red-to-green. Warm skins tend to look ivory, golden, peachy, copper or terracotta-ish. Cool skins look porcelain, bronze, chocolate or olive.

Brands often will put their foundations into “warm” and “cool” and “neutral”. The issue with this is that warm can move from reddish to golden and so a generic warm foundation isn’t going to span that entire range. The same thing happens with cool. Cool colors of foundation tend to be blue based, but what about olive skins?

And then their is the old, tired neutral. Some brands have neutral colors that are olive, others are just bland and grey. Some are blue-pink. There is no consistency. And yet, I have so many clients in “neutral” foundations because they are the only options that don’t turn pink or orange on them. (Which is an entirely new blog post on why brands can’t seem to create foundation colors that actually are someone’s skin tone.)

So here is a standard that would work.

The Brand Standard for Foundation Color Ranges

First we break the warm side of a color wheel into 2 sections. The first sits in the reds from Red-to-Orange and we give it a name like Warm Red or Ruby. This will cover warm skins that have more red than yellow in their undertone. The second section of warm toned foundations will sit from Orange-to-Yellow. We call them Warm Gold or Golden.