Skin Tone Chart: Find Your Exact Shade and Undertone

A useful skin tone chart needs two axes, because your skin has two separate facts to name: how deep it is, and what hue runs underneath. Most charts only show you the first one. This one shows both.

Your skin tone is a coordinate, not a single word. The first axis is depth, the fair-to-rich scale that foundation numbers describe and tans move. The second is undertone: warm, cool, neutral, or olive, the fixed hue beneath the surface that decides which colors, metals, and foundation letters suit you. The chart below crosses 6 depths with 4 undertones into 24 named shades with hex codes. Find your row with a mirror, find your column with the undertone tests linked below, and the cell where they meet is your skin tone, named and usable.

The skin tone chart: 6 depths × 4 undertones

Depth runs down the side, undertone runs across the top. Every cell shows a representative shade name and its hex code. Skin is a continuous spectrum, so treat each swatch as the center of a neighborhood rather than a boundary line.

Swatches are screen approximations of real skin averages. Your monitor's brightness and color temperature shift them slightly, which is one more reason to confirm undertone with tests rather than by eye alone.

Two things this chart makes visible that single-axis charts hide. First, depth and undertone are fully independent: there is fair cool skin and fair warm skin, deep cool skin and deep warm skin, and every combination between. Second, olive is a full column, not a footnote. Olive skin exists at every depth and is the category most often mislabeled as neutral, which our guide to color analysis for olive skin covers in depth.

How to find your cell in 3 steps

Step 1: find your row (depth)

In indirect daylight with no makeup, compare your jawline, not your hand or arm, to the depth scale. Your jaw is the depth foundation should match and it tans less than hands and forearms do. Be honest about season: if you are tanned right now, your resting row is probably one step lighter. Depth is the easy half; most people land on their row within one step on the first try.

Step 2: find your column (undertone)

Undertone hides under the surface, so you find it by its effects. Check your wrist veins (green suggests warm, blue or purple suggests cool), compare gold against silver jewelry, hold pure white then cream fabric under your chin, and drape a warm and cool version of the same color against your face. Our step-by-step skin undertone test guide walks through all five tests and how to score them, and the at-home draping version lives in how to find your skin undertone at home. If the tests split, read the neutral and olive notes below before deciding.

Step 3: cross them

Where your row and column meet is your named skin tone: Golden Honey, Cool Cocoa, Light Olive, and so on. That cell is shorthand for everything downstream: your foundation depth and letter, your better metal, and the temperature half of your color season. The rest of this guide translates the cell into each of those.

The depth scale, row by row

Depth is how much melanin your skin carries at rest. The six bands used here match how makeup lines and analysts commonly slice the spectrum:

• Fair: burns easily, little visible melanin, often with visible capillaries. Foundation ranges usually label this 100 to 150 or "porcelain" and "ivory".
• Light: a step more pigment, may tan slowly. The "beige" band in most shade systems.
• Medium: visible warmth or rosiness with moderate melanin, tans predictably. The most crowded band in foundation lines.
• Tan: naturally sun-kissed at rest, rarely burns. Often labeled "caramel" or numbered in the 300s.
• Deep: rich melanin with clear depth, never burns casually. "Chestnut" and "mocha" territory.
• Rich: the deepest band, where undertone differences are most visible as blue-based versus golden-based depth.

Depth moves. Summer sun pushes you down a row, winter pulls you back up, and that is normal: it is why foundation wardrobes exist and why your chart cell is a home base rather than a prison. What never moves is your column, and mixing the two up is the root of most bad matches. The pair is explained head-on in our warm vs cool undertone guide.

The four undertone columns

Cool: pink, rosy, or faintly blue beneath the surface. Silver and platinum blend in, pure white looks crisp, and blue-based colors like fuchsia, emerald, and icy blue light the face up. Cool runs from Porcelain Rose at fair all the way to Espresso at rich.

Neutral: neither pink nor golden dominates. Both metals pass, most colors work at moderate intensity, and extremes in either temperature feel slightly off. True neutral is rarer than online quizzes suggest; many self-diagnosed neutrals are actually olive. The full picture is in our guide to neutral undertone skin.

Olive: golden pigment under a cool, faintly gray-green cast, present at every depth. Olive passes both metal tests, reads green in the vein test regardless of its true lean, and makes standard foundations run too orange or too pink. If that pattern sounds familiar, your column is olive even if every quiz has called you neutral or warm.

Warm: golden, peachy, or yellow beneath the surface. Gold, brass, and copper blend in, ivory flatters more than optic white, and colors like camel, rust, coral, and olive green feel harmonious. Warm runs from Golden Ivory at fair to Golden Mahogany at rich.

From chart cell to foundation shade

Foundation systems encode this exact chart in their shade names: a depth number plus an undertone letter. Your row predicts the number range; your column predicts the letter. Warm columns match W or G shades, cool columns match C or R, the neutral column matches N, and olive usually does best in olive-tagged or golden-neutral formulas because most lines still under-serve that column.

Three matching rules that save returns. Test on the jawline in daylight, never on the wrist, because wrists sit rows away from faces. Judge the shade after an hour of wear, since oxidation pushes many formulas warmer. And when you are between two shades, match the undertone letter first and adjust depth second: a slightly light shade with the right letter disappears, while the right depth with the wrong letter reads like a mask. The letter decoding by brand, MAC's NC and NW included, is covered in how to find your foundation undertone.

From chart cell to color season

Color analysts use the same two axes as this chart under different names, value for depth and hue for undertone, then add a third: chroma, how clear or muted your coloring is. Cross all three and you get the 12 color seasons. Your chart cell narrows the map before you ever take a quiz:

The chart gets you to the neighborhood; chroma picks the house. Two Medium Warm people can be a bright True Spring and a muted Soft Autumn, and only the clarity of their coloring separates them. How the three measurements interlock is the subject of seasonal color analysis explained, and the full route from chart cell to final palette is in our personal color analysis guide. If you want the shortcut, our find my color season guide compares every method.

Where every skin tone chart hits its limit

A printed chart, including this one, has three honest limits. Your screen shifts the swatches: brightness, night mode, and panel calibration all nudge hues warmer or cooler. Your eyes white-balance whatever they see, so you literally cannot see your own undertone the way a measurement can. And a chart cannot weigh a split verdict: it can show you the olive column, but it cannot tell you whether your skin belongs there or in neutral.

That is why the reliable order of operations is chart first, tests second, measurement third. The chart names the possibilities, the undertone tests narrow them, and when the tests disagree, software settles it. An AI skin tone analyzer samples hundreds of points across a selfie, corrects for the photo's lighting, and places your skin on both axes as numbers rather than impressions. Tone & Fit does exactly that in about 30 seconds, free, and then goes one step further than any chart can: it reads your chroma too, names your season, and hands you the palette. Your photo is discarded after analysis, and the result includes 40+ named shades with an avoid list, plus hair color guidance that pairs with our best hair color for your skin tone guide.

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