Choosing Your Skin Tone and Enhancing Your Hair Color

Skin Tone Categories

Skin, just like your hair and nails, is made up from a protein known as keratin. Inside the keratin chain, melanin or pigment types in varying amounts determine what color skin we all have. While there are a variety of complexions, all complexions fall into two different skin tone categories - warm or cool.

Warm: Those with a yellow or golden skin undertone have a warm skin tone. When reddish and golden tones combine, the result is a "peaches and cream" complexion. When there are less red tones, the result is a creamy complexion. What this all means is that hair colors that have a warm overtone will generally look natural and much better on you. This color rule also extends to make-up, accessories, and clothing - hence the importance of getting it correct!

Cool: Those with pink or blue skin undertones fall into the cool category. Depending on the pigment mix, many skin overtones are produced. The most common ones include pink blushing cheeks on fair skin (where the skin is very pale/white and almost colorless, it's the blood in the skin that gives the pinkish white complexion) and where red pigments cluster together (causing what we call freckles) giving us ruddy complexions. This all means that hair colors that have a cool overtone will generally look much more natural on you. Again, remember that this color rule also extends to make-up, accessories, and clothing. Mother Nature always gets it right, so we should stick to her rules!

How To Choose Your Skin Tone

The quickest way to work out if you're warm or cool is to take a look at the veins in your arms while in natural light. If the color looks green then you are warm, if it's blue you are cool.

For those after a more thorough confirmation you can try wrapping a white article of clothing around your neck after freshly washing your face and looking in a mirror to see if your skin looks yellow (warm) or blue (cool). Holding a white piece of paper up to your face also does the trick, as does seeing if a bronze/orange (warm) or a hot pink (cool) colored piece of clothing looks better up against your skin. The same goes for silver (cool) or gold (warm) jewelry.

How To Use Your Skin Tone To Enhance Your Hair Color

Once you've established your skin tone you can then use it to find a hair color which will suit you and bring out the best in your facial features.

To understand the importance of knowing your skin tone and how it will help you to enhance your hair color; you really just have to look at the proof. Below are examples of a warm complexion and a cool complexion and how different they look when teamed with a warm or cool hair color.

Warm Complexion with a Warm Hair Color

By matching this copper blonde hair color with this warm peaches and cream complexion, we end up with a hair color that looks natural and blends well with the color of the skin.

Warm Complexion with a Cool Hair Color

When we switch the warm hair color for this cool violet, we can see straight away that the cool hair color drains the skin tone and leaves our model with a very boring, underrated hair color.

The same results are also obvious with our cool complexion model.

Cool Complexion with a Warm Hair Color

By mixing this cool fair to light complexion with a light titian hair color, we really demonstrate how the wrong tone can make a dramatic difference to the color of the skin (in this case turning it yellow) and proving that the wrong hair color just really does nothing when it comes to enhancing a look.

Cool Complexion with a Cool Hair Color

When we try this cool light hazelnut brown hair color, however, the cool complexion really brightens up and we're left with a hair color that is really suited to our model's skin tone.

There are of course some exceptions where combinations of warm and cool hair colors can be used together in various techniques for contrast or specific purposes, but this should be left to the care of highly trained hair colorists only.

Now that you know your skin tone, why not use it to find the right hair color for you with TheHairStyler.com color chart? The THS chart features a warm or cool symbol next to the color name to let you know whether the color is warm (red), cool (blue) or both (red and blue)! You can also use TheHairStyler.com to upload your photo so that you can see instantly what your chosen color will look like on you. Finding a new hair color and making sure that it's right for you has never been so easy!