How many undertones are there?
Building on our previous post about skintones, here’s a quick look into undertones. Among the 253 unique undertones we identified, neutral is the most popular, followed by warm and golden.
Zooming into each major undertone group (excluding undertones that don’t have cool, neutral or warm labels associated with them), we found 54 neutral undertones, 43 warm undertones, and 33 cool undertones.
Neutral
It’s great to see brands bringing nuance to the debate about being purely neutral. If it’s a mix of cool and warm colors, then you can definitely lean toward either direction. Personally, I thought neutral was about saturation as I’m a neutral, golden who shifts more golden in the summer (a fact I can confirm with my neutral, golden and warm, golden concealers).
Some of the neutral undertones overlap with skintones (i.e. truffle, ebony, ivory, caramel, brown, porcelain) and a few rare ones, like neutral, white and neutral, silver, are used to describe very fair and fair skintones.
Warm
I suspect many of the warm-only undertones are yellow and golden. Looking at the rest, you’ll find unique variations like ‘warm, pink’ and undertones that again overlap with skintones (i.e. brown, toffee, tan). Interestingly, the more nuanced the description, the less common it is.
Cool
Cool undertones have less variety, but contrary to popular belief, shades like cool yellow, cool peach, and cool golden do exist! This group is also unique for having purple undertones, such as plum and violet, which are typically associated with dark and very deep skintones.
Across all undertones, there’s a real need to understand the ordering of tones. Is “cool, neutral” and “neutral, cool” the same? What about “golden, peach” and “peach, golden”? From analyzing blush shades, it appears that the second listed tone is the base, modified by the first. For example, “golden, peach” would primarily be peach with hints of golden. The photos below seem to confirm this theory.
Top skintone + undertone combos
I was curious if neutral was the most popular undertone for each skintone group so I visualized the top 100 combinations of skintone and undertones. It turns out neutral tones are predominant, even in deeper skintones where I expected more warm or red undertones.
More highlights
Takeaways
About those skintone filters on Pinterest and Google… kinda limited eh?
Despite complaints on Reddit and other platforms about the dominance of warm-toned foundations, most foundations are actually neutral-toned.
Be consistent in punctuation:
Use “/” to signify “and/or” suggesting equivalent choices between two terms. This is suitable when any of the terms, both, or a combination could apply, though it's often confusing and should be used sparingly. For example, “light/medium” could mean light, medium, or both (i.e. light to medium). “Cool/pink” could mean either cool or pink.
Use “to” in lieu of “-” to denote a range, ideally for products covering multiple skintones in one formula, like “light to medium.”
Use “,” to describe a product with multiple traits, where one trait modifies another:
undertones: “neutral, golden” signifies a neutral version of golden.
skintones: “deep, tan” or “deep, medium” indicates a "deep" version of "tan" and “medium” respectively.
Specify the actual pigment underlying the skin, such as yellow, golden, or pink rather than labeling the temperature, like “warm.”
But clearly define the dominant pigment in the tone. For example, specify whether a “golden peach” undertone is mainly peach, mainly golden, or an equal mix of both.