Makeup for Your Skin Tone: Tips for Transitioning To Spring Colors

Changing weather does not mean only an increase or decrease in temperature. The light outside changes throughout the year, the humidity creeps up or down, and all of that means that you need to continually update your “look”. While the arrival of spring means lighter clothing and shorter hemlines, it also means that you will want to update your makeup look for the season.  We’ll guide you here on finding the best makeup for your skin tone and transitioning to Spring Makeup.

Winter to Spring Makeup 101

While the spring season is a perfect time to use traditional spring cleaning methods on the wardrobe, why not also apply to your spring makeup bag or vanity table? Discard everything that is past its expiration date. This ensures a few things:

Expired makeup is not going to have the same consistency as new product. Things get clumpy, thicker and dried out. This is true of foundation as it is of lipstick, mascara and all of the rest. Even SPF expires, so that great foundation with SPF may be far less effective if it is expired.

Once you have purged the makeup bag, though, you may need to re-stock, and spring is a good time to make a transition from darker and nude shades to the more, well, springier looks and colors!

In other words, go towards the rosier and peachier hues with blush rather than wines or darker colors for your spring makeup routine. Find some pastels that work with your complexion and have some fun with shinier and brighter lip colors that add a bit of pop to your lips. Coral tones work with many complexions and are great for that hit of color at the lip!

More Great Tips

As for your eyes, it may be time to ditch the darker eyeliner or mascara and have a bit of fun with more brightly colored options. If you are someone who loves that smoky eye, you can keep it, but try to lighten it up with a bit of gold and brown rather than the wintery grays and blacks.

Remember too, that your spring season probably means warmer weather. This is why you will want to consider the best ways to prepare your skin for makeup applications. Now is the time to choose a primer (go for matte or radiant) as it makes makeup applications much smoother and effective. Then, reconsider your foundation. It is likely that a lighter amount of coverage is better for warmer conditions.

Finally, with the brighter outdoor light, it is a great time to master the art of contouring and highlighting. Figure out the right shades or level of “heat” (don’t worry, we’ll discuss that in a moment) to use for your contouring and highlighting, and start to experiment with this trendy technique.

Keep in mind that you can also look at the spring season as a time to work on the radiance or glow of your skin with the use of a bronzer or even a gradual tanner. Of course, to choose the right products means knowing more about your skin and its tone.

Related: Everything You Need to Know about Makeup Primer

How to Determine Your Skin Tone/Undertone

Just a moment ago, you saw the word heat used when discussing contouring and highlighting. Another way to look at it is temperature or tone. Every skin has tone and undertone, and as one makeup expert said, “Used to be we needed to know our skin tone mainly for foundation, but now we also need it for all the various creams—BB, CC, etc.—and for making good choices when it comes to other colors, like those in eye shadows, blushes, lipsticks, and even clothes.”

So, knowing your own skin tone (and its undertone) can help you to make nearly flawless makeup choices for any season. The tone of your skin is at the surface and it can change all of the time. Sit out in the sun and your skin’s tone changes. Have dry skin or a condition like rosacea, and it can change again. Yet, you need to get a good fix on your natural tone.

How to Find your Natural Skin Tone

To do that is simple – look at the area of your face around your jaw. This is the area least affected by changes. It will be fair, light, medium or dark.

Fair is the pale skin that burns easily, light is a bit more beige or yellow than fair, medium is a bit darker with olive undertones and dark skin is simply a gorgeous deep complexion.

Undertones are those subtle hues that many describe as a shading in your general skin’s tone. While the tone changes, that undertone doesn’t, and that is why so many use their undertones as a stronger, guiding factor. Why? If you select makeup that clashes with your undertone, it is never going to look right when you wear it.

Again, as that one beauty expert said, “It’s important to understand that these two colors can be different. Whereas the surface color of your skin may appear reddish or ruddy, your undertone may be golden or yellow.” How do you know yours? There are three general “heats” or temperatures:

• Cool – These are red, pinks and blues.
• Warm – These are golds, peaches and yellows
• Neutral/Moderate – These are olives or a balance of both cool and warm hues

How on earth do you gauge your undertone? Let’s follow advice from experts:

• Veins as a key. You can flip your wrist up to the light and if your veins are blue or purple, you are cool, but if they are green, it is a warm undertone. A blend of blue to green? Neutral!
• Compare yourself to pure white. Take a blank sheet of white paper and place it close to the face. If this dulls your complexion, you are probably warm. If there is no difference, you are probably neutral, and it improves your complexion, you are cool.
• Gold or silver? If you look better in silver jewelry, you have cool undertones. If you look best with gold, you have warm tones.
• Are you a burner or a bronzer? Most people who can be exposed to the sun without burning, but instead who bronze are often warm
• Back to basics. Take basic colored garments such as black and white as well as tan and brown tops. The cool undertone skin looks best in black and white, while the browns are better for those with warm undertones.

What Do You Do Next?

Once you have figured out your tone (fair, pale, medium or dark) and your undertone, you can start to make much wiser choices in makeup. Some also look to a third concept – seasonal coloring. This requires you to first understand your undertone and also your general features (light hair and eyes or dark hair and eyes).

For instance, someone with dark eyes and hair and cool undertones falls into the winter category. Someone with light hair and eyes with cooler undertones is a summer. The dark haired and dark eyed person with warmer undertones is an autumn and the light hair and eyes with warmer undertones is a spring. Of course, you could be fair haired and dark eyed, which would require you to use your undertone as a guide and consider seasonal palettes to help you make informed choices in makeup and clothing.

Do keep in mind that you should avoid just going with any product’s description (such as a highlighter that self-identifies as “warm”) but instead make choices that reflect your dominant undertone.

Related: The User’s Guide to Our Contour and Highlight Kit – Plus 4 Great Ways to Use It!

Choosing Your Foundation Shade

One beauty expert explained this perfectly, “The goal is to select neutral foundation shades that have only the slightest hint of your skin’s undertone. You never want your foundation to be too pink or too yellow or too ashen…If you have cool undertones, the foundation should look slightly… pinkish in the bottle. If your undertone is warm, then the foundation shade should have a subtle yellow or golden tone.”

Some experts say that one of the best ways to figure out the ideal shade for you, in regards to foundation and other bases, is to apply a bit of pink based foundation to your cheek and a bit of a yellow based formula on the other. Spreading them out evenly, just as you would wear them, helps to reveal which works best. How do you know which works best? The one that looks as if it were painted on is the one to avoid, and whatever formula seems to blend right in with your natural tone is a winner.

Making the right choice here helps to give all of your makeup applications the most natural and appealing look. Of course, everyone can always use some extra help with this, so let’s take a look at some basic tips for dark and fair complexions.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Makeup Sponges

Makeup for Dark Skin

As one beauty writer has said, “Finding the right makeup for dark skin can be a challenge.” This is due to a few issues. First and foremost is that dark skin works beautifully with richly pigmented hues, but dark skin also has undertone. That means you need to always work first with your undertone rather than choosing any trendy colors.

A good method for the person with darker skin to determine their foundation, concealer and other base shades is to start with the jaw area. Then, when selecting eye, lip and blush hues, work with the natural undertones and any seasonal coloring palettes…spring makeup palettes for example.

Although you will hear, repeatedly that plum, deep mauve and berry hues look great, your undertones may work better with other shades, and you may even prefer a bronzer rather than blusher. You may prefer blue to turquoise shadows and nude lips…the point is that you must start with your undertones and build from there.

Makeup for Fair Skin

While the pale and medium complexions have a lot of flexibility in terms of makeup choices, those with fair skin have to put the same effort into makeup choices as those with darker skin. After all, and as one writer sympathized, “Not only is it important to wear at least SPF 30 every day to protect your complexion, but it can often be a headache trying to find the right makeup. It can be hard to find a shade of blush or lipstick that won’t look clownish against fair skin, and things like foundation and bronzer often look fine in the store but then quickly take on an orange cast on the skin.”

What to do? A few basic tips would have to include using a translucent primer, a pearlescent luminizer and a more luminous or radiant concealer. Ivory is often a term associated with bases for fair skin, but undertone is important. If you have a pink undertone, it may be that words like “vanilla” with its richer brown influences is for you.

Remember too that fair skin benefits from a bit of shimmer to overcome the flatness of many makeup applications. And don’t avoid blushes with brighter hues – especially in your shift to spring makeup colors. Your cheeks are a place where you can play with hues and have a bit of fun, so use your undertone to guide you towards the right pop of color for spring makeup.

Neutral Spring Makeup Colors for All Skin Tones

Of course, there are a few universal colors that can work with almost any skin tone. As one beauty and fashion expert said, “true red, blush pink, and teal—also happen to bring out the natural flush in a face…eggplant, is such a deep, versatile shade that it can take the place of a neutral…making it a great…staple.”

While you don’t ever want to take a neutral spring hue and use it heavily, such as teal eye shadow with a teal top, you can use it with the right base colors, such as a black ensemble with pops of neutral hues if you are a cooler undertone or a beige to tan piece with a bit of blush pink if you are a warmer tone.  Just some quick tips for spring makeup.

In Conclusion

To make a potent transition to spring makeup, find your skin tone and undertones, and use them to really update your makeup look to reflect the changing temperatures, light and seasonal conditions.