how many skintones are there?
After Youthforia’s recent controversy and a series of investigative probes into how inclusive foundation shades are (shoutout to The Pudding), we got curious about all the different skintones and undertones out there. We found descriptions for 11,0071 foundation products, including cc creams, bb creams, and tinted moisturizers, and discovered 301 skintones and 536 undertones! But the descriptions were all over the place - “cool golden”, “cool, golden”, “cool-golden”, “cool and a golden tone”, and “cool with golden undertones” all mean the same thing. Once we cleaned up the list for consistency, we narrowed it down to 156 skin tones and 253 undertones.
Medium is the most popular, followed by light, deep, and light medium.
Grouping skintones, we see great variety in naming deeper complexions. Brands vary widely, using terms like deep, dark, rich, brown, or even food-inspired names like hazelnut, nutmeg, pecan, espresso, mocha, and caramel. The Pudding highlighted this in their 2021 piece on bias in naming deep complexions —> link.
very deep
deep to very deep
medium deep to deep
deep medium to deep
medium to deep medium
light to medium
fair to light
Popular skintone order
Overall, this seems to be the preferred order of depth (note most brands don’t start from rich, deep or dark skintones):
This order maps well with two major BIPOC brands (Danessa Myricks Beauty, Fenty Beauty by Rihanna)…
…as well as a few well known brands
kvd beauty has the most diverse name range (though can someone decode these??)
.. as do cover fx, milani and dior
Simply naming isn’t enough if the shade color isn’t there. Maybe that’s something we can dig up in a future post. But for now, how do you feel about shade/skintone inclusivity with foundations?
Stay tuned for our next post on undertones and key takeaways on naming.
our dataset contains 17,256 foundation products