Personal Colour Analysis — How to Find the Makeup Palette That Is Made for You

Colour analysis is one of those concepts that sounds complicated and turns out to be transformative. Once you understand your personal colour palette — the specific range of shades that harmonise with your natural colouring — you stop buying the wrong things. You stop wondering why that lipstick everyone loves looks wrong on you. You stop feeling like you are failing at makeup when the problem was never your skill.

What colour analysis actually is

Colour analysis is the process of identifying which colours complement your natural colouring — your skin tone, your natural hair colour, your eyes — and which ones fight against it.

It is based on two main principles: undertone and depth.

Undertone is whether your skin reads as warm (yellow, peach, golden), cool (pink, blue, red) or neutral (a balance of both). Depth is how light or dark your overall colouring is — a very fair person with light hair reads differently to a very fair person with dark hair and brows.

From these two factors, you can identify the broad family of colours that will make your skin look bright and healthy — and the ones that will make you look tired, sallow, or washed out.

Warm versus cool — the basics

Warm undertones are common across Southeast Asian skin. If you have golden, peachy or yellow-cast skin — if you tan easily and go golden rather than red — you likely have warm undertones.

For warm undertones: bronzy, peachy, golden and warm neutral shades tend to work beautifully. Camel, terracotta, warm brown, peach, coral and warm red lip colours. Eyeshadow in bronze, gold, warm brown and olive.

Cool undertones present differently — skin that has a pink, rosy or bluish quality, people who burn easily or go pink rather than gold in the sun.

For cool undertones: pink-based, mauve, berry and blue-toned shades tend to be more flattering. Rose, raspberry, plum and true red lip colours. Eyeshadow in grey-brown, mauve, silver and cool taupe.

Neutral undertones — which are common — have the most flexibility and can wear both warm and cool shades, though they still have a leaning.

How to use colour analysis beyond makeup

The results of colour analysis extend well beyond what you put on your face.

The same principles that determine your best makeup palette also determine which clothing colours genuinely suit you — and which ones you keep buying, wearing once, and pushing to the back of the wardrobe.

If you have ever noticed that some colours make you look bright and healthy without any makeup at all, and others make you look tired even when fully made up — that is your palette at work.

Colour analysis explains both. And once you understand it, you apply it instinctively — to makeup, to clothing, to the colours you choose to stand next to in photographs.