How to Find Your Skin Undertone: Cool, Warm, Neutral or Olive

To find your skin undertone, look at bare skin in daylight from a window and compare a few clues: vein color on your inner wrist, whether gold or silver jewelry flatters you, and whether bright white or off-white fabric suits your face. Pink or bluish hints suggest cool, yellow or golden hints suggest warm, a mix suggests neutral, and a muted greenish or gray-gold cast suggests olive.

No single test is reliable on its own, and all of them get distorted by bad lighting. Below is how to run each test, why each one can mislead, a table to combine your answers, a section on olive undertones, and why undertone matters for tinted sunscreen, foundation and judging redness in photos.

What is a skin undertone?

Your undertone is the subtle hue that sits beneath your surface skin color: pinkish (cool), golden or peachy (warm), a balance of both (neutral), or a muted green-gold (olive). Your surface tone, from very fair to very deep, can change with a tan, while undertone describes the color cast that stays roughly the same. Two people with the same depth of skin can have opposite undertones, which is why "medium" foundation looks right on one and gray or orange on the other.

Undertone is a makeup and color-matching idea. Dermatology and color science don't use the words cool and warm; they measure color on scales such as L*a*b*, where L* is lightness, a* is redness and b* is yellowness. Roughly speaking, more a* reads as pinker and more b* reads as more golden. Those values come from melanin, blood and other pigments in the skin, and some of them shift: a review found that eating more fruit and vegetables can perceptibly change skin color within weeks through carotenoid pigments, which add yellow. For how undertone differs from skin tone and from oily or dry skin type, see skin tone vs undertone vs skin type.

How do I set up the tests so they're accurate?

Use natural daylight, a clean bare face and a plain background. Every undertone test depends on judging subtle color, and the light source changes color more than people expect: warm indoor bulbs push everything toward yellow, cool LEDs and overcast shade push toward blue, and a colored wall or top reflects onto your skin.

1. Stand facing a window during the day, out of direct sun.
2. Wash off makeup, tinted SPF and self-tanner. Tinted products are designed to change how your skin color reads.
3. Wear a neutral gray or black top, or drape a towel of that color around your shoulders.
4. Pull your hair back if it's strongly colored, since red or golden hair reflects onto the jawline.
5. Check your jaw and neck, not only your cheeks, which may be flushed or tanned.

Our guide to the best lighting for skin photos covers window light in more detail, and the same setup works here.

Does the vein test for undertone work?

The vein test is a rough clue at best. Look at the veins on the inside of your wrist: mostly blue or purple is said to suggest cool, mostly green suggests warm, and a mix or hard-to-tell suggests neutral or olive.

The reason it misleads is that veins aren't actually blue or green. Blood is dark red, and a physics study of why veins look blue showed that their apparent color depends on how skin scatters and absorbs different wavelengths, how oxygenated the blood is, how wide and deep the vessel sits, and how the eye perceives it. A "green" vein is often a bluish vein seen through skin with more yellow in it, which is why the test loosely tracks undertone, but vein depth, wrist thickness and the room's light all change the result. On deeper skin tones the veins can be hard to see at all, so the test may give no answer.

Does the jewelry test work?

Hold a gold piece and a silver piece against your bare wrist or neck in daylight and see which one makes your skin look clearer and more even. Silver or platinum that looks brighter on you suggests cool; gold suggests warm; both looking good suggests neutral. Olive skin often suits gold and also looks fine in muted, antiqued metals.

The weakness is that it's a taste test. You may be used to one metal, and a yellow-gold piece next to a white-gold one differs in more than color, including shine and size. Have someone else judge with the metals held side by side.

Does the white vs off-white fabric test work?

Hold a bright white piece of fabric or paper under your chin, then a cream or ivory one. If bright white makes your skin look fresher and the cream makes you look sallow, you lean cool. If cream makes you look warmer and healthier while bright white makes you look washed out or slightly gray, you lean warm. If you can't see a difference, you're likely neutral.

This test is the most sensitive to lighting. Under a warm bulb, bright white turns creamy and the difference vanishes; under a cool LED, ivory looks dingy. Do it only in daylight and use fabric that is clean and similar in texture.

Does how I tan reveal my undertone?

Partly. People who burn pink and tan little are more often cool, and people who tan golden or bronze without much burning are more often warm or olive. That said, your burn and tan pattern mostly reflects your Fitzpatrick skin type, which researchers have found doesn't line up neatly with measured skin pigmentation. Treat it as a supporting clue.

Don't sunbathe to run the test. The FDA says the extra melanin that produces a tan is a sign of skin damage, so use your memory of past summers instead.

How do I combine the results?

Run all four tests and go with the majority. The table shows how the clues usually line up.

If your answers split evenly, you're probably neutral. If cool tests come back gray, warm ones come back too orange and nothing quite matches, read the next section.

What is an olive undertone?

Olive is a muted undertone with a greenish or gray-gold cast, common in light-to-medium and medium skin but found across many depths. It's often missed because it doesn't fit the simple cool-warm split: the vein test looks "green," which points to warm, but warm golden foundations then look too orange, while pink-based ones turn ashy.

Signs you may be olive:

• Your skin looks slightly gray or green under fluorescent or office lighting.
• Most foundations look either too pink or too yellow, and neutral shades are closest.
• You tan easily and your tan looks more bronze-green than golden-orange.
• Cream fabric suits you better than bright white, but warm orange tones don't.

When shopping, look for shades labeled olive or neutral, or with a yellow-green base. Some people with olive skin mix a neutral foundation with a drop of a more golden one to find the match.

Why does undertone matter for tinted sunscreen and foundation?

A tint has to blend with your skin to work and to be worn. Tinted sunscreens use different amounts of iron oxides and pigmentary titanium dioxide to create shades for all skin types, and that tint is what protects against visible light; a review in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology explains that for a sunscreen to block visible light, it must be visible on the skin. The AAD recommends a tinted sunscreen with iron oxide for people with dark spots and says to pick one that blends with your skin tone to avoid a white cast. A shade with the wrong undertone looks gray or orange, and a sunscreen you dislike wearing is one you'll skip. For the wider choice of filter and formula, see how to choose sunscreen for your skin type.

For foundation, swatch three shades of the same depth along your jawline, one cool, one warm and one neutral or olive, and check them in daylight after 10 minutes, when the formula has settled. The shade that disappears into your skin matches your undertone.

Why does undertone matter when reading redness in photos?

Redness looks different depending on what it sits on, so knowing your undertone helps you read your own photos. Cool skin can look flushed when it's just its normal pink, while warm or olive skin can hide mild redness that a camera picks up as a brownish or muted patch. On darker skin tones, the AAD notes that rosacea redness may look violet or brown instead of red and blood vessels are hard to see. Researchers building a tool to detect erythema in darkly pigmented skin found that combining multispectral images raised the contrast of redness by an order of magnitude over an ordinary digital photograph, a sign of how much a normal camera can miss.

The practical rules: compare photos of yourself in the same light, judge redness against your own baseline, and don't mistake a warm white-balance shift for a flare. More on this in our explainer on the redness score in skin analysis.

Can a selfie scan help with undertone and tone tracking?

A scan doesn't name your undertone. What it does give you is a consistent record to compare. Pori, an iPhone app, reads a selfie region by region using a 468-point face mesh and scores categories including Pigmentation & Tone, with before/after comparison and progress charts, so you can see whether uneven tone or blotchiness is changing over weeks. Taking each scan in the same window light makes the comparison far more reliable. The Pro ingredient scanner flags each ingredient in a tinted sunscreen or foundation as beneficial, use with caution or avoid for your skin type.

An app is not a diagnosis. Redness that lasts for weeks, flushing or patches that keep darkening are worth showing to a dermatologist.