Why Some People Are Hard to Type — A Makeup Artist's Take

In part one I told you about my four color analyses — three Autumn, one Cool Summer, and the months I spent ignoring the one that turned out to be right. [part 1]

This is the part I actually find more interesting. Not which season I am, but why I was so hard to pin down in the first place.

Because if you dig into the comment sections and forums where people argue about this, you'll find plenty of people in the same position. Some read easily. Some don't. And a few have decided that if typing doesn't work cleanly on everyone, the whole system must be nonsense.

I don't think that at all. I think it's useful. But I do think we ask it to be more precise than it can be — and I say that as someone who has spent twenty years matching foundation to faces.

My coloring refuses to commit

My hair is fairly neutral. It can lean slightly warm or slightly cool depending on what's around it.

My overtone reads warm, and at a glance you'd stop right there and assume my undertone is warm too. That's the reasonable conclusion. But some people's skin is genuinely confusing. I tan easily, and a little color on my face is deceiving.

The part where I disagree with the process

Most draping covers your clothing with a neutral cape, pulls your hair back, takes your makeup off, and leaves the face as the only thing being read.

I understand why. But I think the chest, the shoulders, and the hands carry real information too.

I know that isn't how it's usually done. And to be fair, the popular shortcuts that do use the body — the wrist vein test especially — have earned their bad reputation. Vein color is mostly an optical trick of how deep the vessel sits and how the surrounding skin scatters the light, which is why the same vein can look blue in one spot and purple an inch further down your arm.

But I'm not suggesting we read the wrist instead of the face. I'm saying the face by itself doesn't give you enough.

Here's where I'm coming from. You cannot match foundation by looking only at someone's face. I always take the neck and décolleté into account, because otherwise you get what I think of as the floating head — a shade that matches the face perfectly and looks completely wrong against a body carrying more color.

Read more about foundation matching here.

And this is a widespread problem, not a fussy one. In one industry study, more than half of women said finding the right shade was the single hardest part of buying foundation, and nearly three quarters said finding the right foundation at all was a challenge. That's not a small group of picky people. That's most of us.

So in makeup, we have to be more fluid. We can't think only in warm or cool. We have to take the whole person into account.

Faces and bodies often disagree

I've worked with many women whose body reads red and deep while their face runs warmer and a little sallow. Medication and lifestyle tend to show up on facial skin far more dramatically than skin that's been protected by clothing.

And I've seen the reverse just as often — pigmentation on the face from hormones or sun, a neck two shades lighter, and a décolleté that's a third color entirely.

This is exactly why makeup can't always follow color theory to the letter. Occasionally we choose to work against someone's natural overtone in order to bring the whole person into harmony. That's not a failure of the theory. It's just a different job.

Where olive skin makes everything harder

I'll be honest — I mostly work in neutral, warm, and cool in my studio. There's a practical reason for that. Most people have a rough sense of what those three mean, and almost nobody agrees on where olive sits.

Some people call olive an undertone. Others insist it's an overtone, not an undertone at all.

My own view is that olive is the appearance created by a particular person's mix of undertone and overtone — a green or golden cast that shows up in how the skin's depth and its yellow tones read together, rather than a separate pigment sitting underneath. Olive skin spans a wide range of depths, tends to tan readily, and shows up across Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Latin American, and Southeast Asian coloring, among others. It isn't one thing, which is a large part of why it resists a tidy label.

The foundation formulators who build specialty olive shades have my complete respect, because it is genuinely difficult and not remotely straightforward. I'm going to stay in my lane on that one.

But I do think it matters here. If someone's skin carries that olive quality, I think it adds a layer of complexity to typing that could absolutely lead to a wrong read. That's my theory, not settled fact, and plenty of people would argue with me.

And then your skin changes anyway

If you tan easily, you can look genuinely different in July than you do in January.

I go quite warm in the summer. In winter I feel lighter and more neutral. Colors bounce off my skin differently depending on the season, which makes a single point-in-time analysis a snapshot rather than a permanent verdict.

Between the olive question and seasonal change, I think there's more movement in this than the confident labeling online would suggest.

What I actually hold onto

I do find color analysis helpful. I want to be clear about that, because none of this is me dismissing it.

If someone feels strongly that warm colors suit them, or cool ones do, I honor that. They've usually been paying attention to their own reflection for decades, and that counts for something.

What I care about more than the label is harmony. The eyes, cheeks, and lips should agree with each other. Things start to look off when a strong warm eyeshadow palette meets a cool-toned blush, or when the blush and the lip aren't in the same tonal family. That's usually the actual problem when someone tells me their makeup looks wrong and they can't say why.

Get those three talking to each other, and you can be a little less precious about which season you were assigned.

Now I want to hear from you

What do you think about color theory? Do you live by it? Have you been typed wrong? Do you think the whole thing is a crock?

Reply here and let me know — I read all of them.

xx, Leanne — Beauty Mix Studio ✨