Find your foundation shade from one photo

What it reads

Questions people actually ask

How do I find my foundation shade?

Two things have to be right: depth and undertone. Depth is how light or deep your skin is; undertone is the colour underneath it — warm, cool, neutral or olive. Most mismatches are an undertone error rather than a depth error, which is why a shade can look correct on your wrist and wrong on your face. Photograph your bare face in daylight, without a filter, and match against a brand's real shade range rather than a generic chart.

What is my foundation shade?

There is no universal answer, because shade names are not standardised — a 'medium beige' in one brand is not the same colour as another's. Your shade is only meaningful against a specific brand's range. That is why this reads your skin and then matches it to one brand's actual stocked shades, rather than giving you a number that means nothing anywhere else.

How do I know my undertone?

The vein test and the jewellery test are the usual advice, and both are unreliable under artificial light. A photograph measured colorimetrically is more consistent, because it separates the colour of your skin from the colour of the light falling on it. Warm skin skews golden or peach, cool skews pink or red, neutral sits between them, and olive carries a green cast that most shade ranges handle badly.

Does this work for Indian and deeper skin tones?

Yes, and it is the case worth being careful about. Many shade ranges are thin at the deep end and many matching tools are trained mostly on lighter skin, so both fail in the same direction. Measuring depth and undertone from the photo rather than inferring them avoids that, and where a brand's range genuinely does not cover a skin tone, the honest answer is to say so rather than to recommend the nearest wrong shade.

Is my photo stored anywhere?

The measurement runs on your own device. The photo is used to take the reading and is not needed afterwards.