I cannot stress this point enough: Your skin and foundation should match exactly. If you are pale, that’s OK—accept the fact that you are pale and buy a light foundation that matches exactly. Whether you have red hair and fair skin or black hair and dark ebony skin, the foundation must match your underlying skin color exactly. Do not buy a foundation that will make your face look even a shade or two darker or lighter or change its underlying color in any manner. Even with a difference that slight, you run the risk of a more obvious makeup application than you really want, particularly for daytime wear. Find a foundation that matches your skin perfectly and goes on softly and smoothly.
When I tell you to match the foundation with your underlying skin color, you may be asking yourself, “Exactly what is meant by skin color?”
Traditionally, skin color has been defined by the basic underlying tone. These tones are described as olive when the skin appears ashen or green in color, sallow when the skin has a yellow or golden shade, and ruddy when the skin has overtones of pink or red. These categories hold true for all women, including women of color; your underlying skin color will always relate to one of those skin tones. You may have been told that you are a particular “season” and your wardrobe and foundation color should be a specific undertone, either cool (blue tones) or warm (yellow tones). Unfortunately, all that information surrounding skin tone can be misleading when it comes to choosing a foundation color.
If you are told your face has cool undertones, meaning blue undertones, should you wear a blue-toned foundation? Of course not. If your skin color is ashen, choosing an ashen foundation will just make you look greener. If your face is strongly pink or red, applying a pink foundation all over will make you look like you’re wearing a pink mask. If you have a sallow skin tone, applying a strong yellow-looking foundation will make you look more sallow. None of those would look natural and flawless the way foundation should look, and none of them would come close to matching your skin’s underlying, basic color.
So what to do? When you’re purchasing a foundation, it is important to identify your overall, exact skin color and find a foundation that matches it, regardless of the underlying tone. For the most part, regardless of your race, nationality, or age, your foundation should be some shade of neutral ivory, neutral beige, tan, dark brown, bronze brown, or ebony, with a slight, and I mean very slight, undertone of yellow but without any orange, pink, green, or blue tones. There are no orange, pink, green, or blue people, and buying foundations in those colors is absurd.
Why a slightly yellow undertone? Because skin color, more often than not, always has a yellow undertone—that’s just what the natural color of melanin (the pigment in the skin) tends to be. There are a few exceptions to this rule. Native North American or South American women, a tiny percentage of African-American women, and some Polynesian women do indeed have a red cast to their skin, and in those instances this information about neutral foundations should be ignored. Because their skin has a slightly reddish cast, they need to look for foundations that have a slightly reddish cast to them—but that’s only a hint of brownish red, and not copper, orange, or peach.
A few makeup lines are aimed at African-American women. Many lines also claim to meet the needs of darker skin colors, but often these lines actually have poor color selections or poor foundation types. It is best to find a foundation color and type that works for your skin type rather than limiting yourself to a special line claiming to serve a specific skin color.