How to: Find Your Perfect Shade of Foundation
It sounds simple, right? You want to get a new foundation, perhaps the newest one that is out on the market, so you go online or out to the store and you buy it. However, it’s all fun and games, until you come home, put it on and your face is either too dark, too light, or worse… too orange!
Being a makeup lover myself, I always want to try the new foundation that every beauty blogger and makeup artist is raving about. I constantly find myself hopping online or running down to the nearest Ulta or Sephora and looking at all the different shades of the next foundation that is on “my list.” Besides being a makeup lover, I am also a perfectionist, meaning that I want this foundation to look near to perfect in every way. It needs to be smooth, radiant, full coverage, and most importantly - my color. So, I’ll do what the majority of makeup-buyers do, start swatching every shade that seems to look similar to my skin tone. I’ll eventually end up finding one that looks almost identical to my tone, and go ahead and buy it. Full of excitement, I go home and the first thing I will do is put on my new and “perfectly matched” foundation (after priming my face, of course). To my disliking, it almost always turns out to be either too dark, or just an odd color that didn’t match at all. I knew I couldn’t be the only one with this constant struggle…
So, what could I possibly be doing wrong? I’d try to avoid buying new foundations online, and I would personally go in and swatch every shade. But why am I always coming home with the wrong shade? Well, I started researching how does everyone get their foundation to match so perfectly with their skin tone. I began to understand that everyone has a specific undertone. And what an undertone is, is it’s a subdued tone of color that is under your skin tone. What that means is, you might have beautiful medium ivory color skin tone, but your undertone might be warm, cool, or even an olive, and that is what determines your foundation color. So, for example, if you are a medium tan with a warm undertone, you’ll appear to be slightly darker than someone who is also a medium tan, but with a cool undertone.
Finding out what your undertone is can be quite difficult for some people. For me, it wasn’t hard to figure out and understand that I have a more cool undertone. However, if you do have a very subtle undertone, I’d recommend going into your local Sephora or Ulta and having them match your undertone for you. Once you know your undertone, the rest is a breeze!
Before you start swatching your foundation, check the description of the foundation bottle, and see if it’s shear, medium, or full coverage. If it’s shear coverage, you can get away with the shade not being necessarily your color, but if it’s medium to full coverage, you’ll definitely want your perfect match! After reading the coverage of it, check to see if it says if the foundation will give you a glow, dewy or a matte finish. This will kind of be a big part in the color picking process. If the foundation is a matte finish, the shade will appear to be way more pigmented and will give a fuller coverage look, than if it were a glow or dewy finish. So, when buying a matte foundation, be more precise in finding your color, since it will be more noticeable against your natural skin tone.
Once you determine what the foundation claims to do and you are satisfied with its claims, you are ready to pick your shade(s) and start swatching. When swatching a new foundation, most of us swatch it on the easiest place - our forearm or the back of our hand. That can work, but 9 times out of 10, I guarantee that it will always be too dark. When you wear your foundation, you’re always looking for it to match your neck, so why are we still swatching our arms? I’d recommend getting the tiniest bit of foundation, and swatching it on your neck and look at the swatch in different lightings. If you don’t have foundation on when you walked in the store, then of course, swatch the foundation on the side of your cheek. But be sure to remember to check the swatch in different types of light, because I am convinced that every beauty store has the perfect lighting to fool you into thinking that your shade is three-times darker than your actual skin tone.
It’s also good to remember that sometimes cosmetic brands don’t always have a foundation to match your exact skin color. Since each one of us has a skin tone so beautifully unique, there won’t always be a guaranteed perfect match. However, that shouldn’t stop you from finding a foundation that is very close to your shade. I know a lot of people who actually combine two shades of foundation to get their perfect shade, but that can be costly, especially if it’s a high-end brand that sells their foundations for about $65 each. So personally, what I do when I can’t find a foundation that is the perfect match, I just blend the foundation down my neck. This will definitely use more product, but it will keep you looking one tone and off of the “makeup police” radar.
In short, the next time you decide to go out and buy a different foundation or foundation shade, keep these few questions in mind: what’s my undertone? What type of coverage is the foundation? What type of finish does it have? And, how does it look in different lighting?
If you remember those few questions, you should be all good and ready for your next foundation-picking endeavor.
And a little quick word-of-the-wise to leave you with - never buy a new shade of foundation online… I’ll leave that story for another day, however.
