How to Choose the Right Makeup for Your Skin Tone

It can be tricky to choose makeup colors to suit your skin tone, but it’s worth the effort. The right shades will make your skin glow. For help in finding your perfect matches, we’ve turned to expert Tricia Cusden, founder of the Look Fabulous Forever makeup range. Here are her top tips:

Choosing the right makeup can be hard. There are many different brands on the market offering a range of colors, textures and formulations. What might work on your friend or relative, may not work for you, and usually this is because the formulation is not right for your skin type or the color does not compliment your skin tone.

Ensuring the makeup you wear complements your coloring is particularly important for older women, as wearing the wrong shade can give you a very unnatural look and leave you looking washed out. Understanding the right color palette for your skin tone will help to accentuate your features, make you look radiant, rested, and fabulous.

Know your tone.

First you need to assess whether your skin tone is warm or cool. Most white skin tones can be split into either warm toned or cool toned, this is regardless of hair color or eye color. The most important thing is to establish is whether your skin has a yellow base (warm) or a blue base (cool). If you choose the wrong tone, you can often look drained or unwell.

Use your clothes to help you find your skin tone. If you’re unsure about your tone, you can use clothing to help you work it out. If you are warm toned, you will look great wearing clothes in colors like browns, oranges, greens, coral, and peach. If you’re cool toned, you will look great wearing clothes in grays, blues, pinks, and red. The right clothing can also help complement your makeup and really make it pop.

Base

“Base color” does exactly what it says on the tin, providing a “base” for the rest of your makeup, therefore getting this shade right is essential. Although the prospect of choosing makeup online can be scary, at LFF we have reduced the number of color options, choosing to group the foundations into three colors. LFF’s base colors come in Base 01: for fair skins, Base 02: for medium/fair and Base 03: for skins which are lightly tanned or for people who spend a lot of time outdoors. These tones will complement most skin tones.

Blush

Although orangey tones complement a warm skin tone, avoid harsh bronzes and oranges for your blush. Once we get older, these colors can look very hard and harsh. Therefore, if you have warm-toned skin you should choose a peach-toned, pinky blush. If you’re cool-toned, use a pink-toned blush to complement your skin tone. Choosing the right blush can make you look healthier and fresher.

Eyes

If warm-toned, when it comes to eyeshadows, stick to soft browns and earthy colors to really make your eyes stand out. Cool-toned skin tones can experiment with grays and slightly brighter colors. Ensure you blend your eyeshadows really well to ensure your eye makeup is really soft and pretty.

Lips

When it comes to lipstick, if you are of warm coloring, choose a red with golden tones. If you are of cool coloring, choose a burgundy with blue undertones.