Skin Undertone Test
Your skin undertone is the color underneath the surface of your skin: warm (golden or peachy), cool (pink or blue), or neutral (a balance of both). It is different from skin tone, which is how light or deep your skin is. Undertone does not change when you tan or lose color, which is what makes it the most reliable single signal for which colors suit you.
Find your season
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Undertone is one half of the picture; the other is depth, covered on the skin tone chart. Undertone is the first thing a color analysis establishes, because it halves the field immediately. Warm undertones sit in spring and autumn; cool undertones sit in summer and winter. Get this wrong and every subsequent conclusion is wrong too.
Neutral is a real answer, not a cop-out. A meaningful share of people sit close enough to the middle that both metals look acceptable, and those people generally land in one of the four neutral-leaning seasons — Soft Summer, Soft Autumn, Dark Autumn or Dark Winter — where the palettes are built for exactly that.
One caution about how this is usually taught: several of the popular home tests are unreliable, and the most-recommended one is the worst of them.
Four tests, worst to best
Worst: the vein test. Look at the veins on your inner wrist — blue means cool, green means warm. This is the test everyone repeats and it is the least dependable of the four. Vein color is affected by how deep the vessels sit and how thick and translucent the skin above them is, both of which vary independently of undertone. Plenty of warm-toned people see blue. Treat it as a tiebreaker at most.
Weak: how you burn or tan. Burning easily is loosely associated with cool undertones and tanning easily with warm ones, but the correlation is with melanin rather than undertone, and there are too many exceptions for it to decide anything.
Good: the white paper test. Hold a sheet of pure white paper next to your bare face in daylight. Against true white, warm skin looks yellow or golden and cool skin looks pink or slightly blue. It works because the white gives your eye a fixed reference — which is the same reason draping works.
Best: the metal test. Hold gold and silver jewelry either side of your jaw in daylight, no makeup. One will look like it belongs to your skin and the other will look like it is lying on top of it. This is the closest thing to a professional drape you can do with things you already own, and when it disagrees with the vein test, trust this one.
The twelve seasons
Every season below has its full palette, its true neutrals, gold or silver, and what to avoid — with the reason why.