Skin Tone Chart:
Names, Shades, and How to Find Yours

The rows are depth: fair, light, medium, tan, and deep. Depth is what most people mean by "skin tone," and it changes with a tan. The columns are undertone: cool (pink, rosy, or blue-red), neutral (balanced), warm (golden, peach, or yellow), and olive (muted green or gray-green). Undertone doesn’t change with the seasons.

Read across a row and you’ll see why depth alone tells you so little. Cool medium and warm medium skin are about equally deep, but one looks best in plum and the other in rust. When you work out what to wear, both axes matter, and your hair and eye color add a third.

Fair skin burns before it tans, if it tans at all. Light skin burns first and then tans a little. At this depth undertone is easy to spot: cool fair skin looks pink or rosy, warm fair skin looks cream or peach, and olive fair skin looks faintly gray or sallow, which people often mistake for being tired.

Depth on its own doesn’t pick your colors, but it does set a ceiling on how much contrast you can wear without the clothes taking over. Fair and light skin usually looks best in light-to-medium shades, unless dark hair and eyes add contrast of their own. That’s the difference between a Light Summer and a Bright Winter, who can both have very fair skin.

Medium skin tans easily and rarely burns badly. This is where the undertone families pull furthest apart: honey and golden skin read clearly warm, olive reads green-gray, and cool medium skin has a rosy or slightly red cast that can look almost neutral in artificial light.

Medium skin handles a wide range of color depth, so undertone and chroma do most of the work. Warm medium skin usually wants earthy, golden colors; cool medium skin looks better in berry, plum, and blue-based reds.

Tan skin is golden-brown to brown and almost never burns. Caramel, almond, and bronze all sit here. Olive gets its own column on the chart because the green-gray cast shows up at every depth, from fair olive to deep olive, and because it’s the undertone most standard "warm or cool" advice gets wrong.

If pink foundation turns chalky on you, gold jewelry looks right but silver looks faintly gray, and your veins are hard to call blue or green, you’re probably olive. Olive skin usually looks best in moss green, bronze, terracotta, and deep jewel tones.

Deep skin ranges from rich chestnut to ebony. The vein test is hardest to read here, so undertone shows up more clearly in other ways: a red or golden glow (warm), a blue or violet sheen (cool), or an even, balanced brown (neutral). Mahogany and ebony often lean cool; bronze often leans warm.

Deep skin carries saturated, high-chroma color well, and the old idea that it should avoid bright colors is simply wrong. Pastels can work too, as long as the undertone matches. What matters more is whether the color is clear or muted, and warm or cool.

Start with depth. Stand by a window in daylight, with no makeup, and compare your jawline (not your hand, which is usually tanner) to the rows on the chart. If you’re torn between two rows, pick the lighter one in winter and the deeper one in summer. That gap tells you how much you tan.

If you still can't decide, sun reaction is a good tiebreaker: fair skin burns and barely tans, light skin burns then tans, medium tans easily, and tan and deep skin rarely burn. Dermatologists use a version of this, the Fitzpatrick scale, to sort skin by sun reaction. Your last well-matched foundation also helps, since most brands number their shades from light to deep.

Depth won't tell you your column, though. For undertone, use the vein test, the gold-versus-silver jewelry test, and the white-paper test, or let the quiz run them together.

Undertone decides temperature: warm skin suits golden, earthy colors, cool skin suits blue-based ones, and olive and neutral sit somewhere in between. Depth, together with your hair and eyes, decides how much contrast and saturation you can carry.

Put those together and you have most of a color season. A fair, cool person with ash-brown hair is probably a Summer; the same skin with near-black hair is more likely a Winter. Seasonal color analysis is really just this chart with hair, eyes, and chroma added.