You’ll see that red is also directly between blue and yellow it’s just that you have to go the other way around the color wheel (see color wheel above to see what I mean). Before we go any farther, let’s break down the important difference between undertone and overtone using the graphic below.Īt the top, you can see a gradient from warm (yellow) through neutral (red) to cool (blue.) You might think that neutral should be green because it's in between yellow and blue, but so is red. A lot of this difficulty can be explained by the confusion around overtones.
#White with pink tones skin#
I get it- sometimes it’s obvious, but other times it can be pretty tricky, especially for those with very fair, olive, yellow, or black skin tones.
It seems pretty straightforward, yet people often struggle with undertone. Note: True red, green, blue, and yellow are technically universal or "neutral" colors. You can see where all the colors in the spectrum sit on the color wheel in this graphic. So, if you’re warm, you can eliminate all the colors on the cool side, and if you’re cool, eliminate warm colors.
Once you know your undertone, you can eliminate any colors that have the opposite undertone. Everyone’s undertone sits somewhere on the spectrum of cool (more blue) to warm (more yellow.) I say it’s a spectrum because it is-some people are obviously richly warm and some are very icy cool, but most are somewhere in the middle, and a few are true neutral, a perfect balance of warm and cool. As the name suggests, your undertone is the color that is under the skin (not to be confused with overtones).