Your Color Style

Cool Undertones

August 07, 2019 Jen Thoden Season 1 Episode 10
Your Color Style
Cool Undertones
Show Notes Transcript

Determining your undertones is a hot topic in color analysis. Most people believe that it’s the magic pill to figuring out what colors you should wear. I think that learning your undertones helps you know what colors to avoid. 

In this episode we take a deep dive into understanding cool undertones. How do you know if you have cool undertones... what does that actually mean... what colors you should wear and what colors to avoid.

Please visit Your Color Style to discover more info and products on learning your best colors. And please email support@yourcolorstyle.com with any comments or questions you may have.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the your color style podcast where we believe the more you know about color, the more you'll know what colors flatter you best. I'm your host Jen[inaudible]. We are continuing the series on the your color style color analysis methodology. So the last episode on this topic we talked about undertones, specifically warm undertones. So I'm going to continue that topic in this episode focused on cool undertones, and then there'll be a third one for neutral undertones. So keep an eye out for that one as well. And if you missed the one on warm undertones, you might want to go back and listen to it. There's a lot of great information if you're trying to learn or figure out what undertones you have, you'll want to listen to that one also. Okay, you might have a light bulb moment there. So what does it mean when I say undertones? The definition is the coloring that is just underneath your skin. It directly affects your overall coloring. Determining your undertones is a really hot topic in color analysis. Most people believe that it's the magic pill and if you know your undertones, then you can figure out what colors you could wear. I definitely think that learning what your undertones are helps you know what colors to avoid. One of the things that I get a lot, and I totally get it because I'm the same way, you know, what am I, what are my undertones? Am I warm or am I cool? I feel like I'm neutral and if I can just figure out this one thing that I'll know what colors to wear. The reality is is that there's a lot of colors that we can wear for warm water tones, cool undertones. If you feel neutral, there's a lot of colors that you can wear. And so I like to think about learning about your undertones as helping you to learn what colors to avoid. Because really what we're looking at is not only what colors really make you glow, but also just what colors don't look good on you at all. I think that would be more of the focus. So I created these episodes on undertones to help you figure out where you fit, but also to give you some guidelines to help you know and understand what colors you might want to avoid because they might, you know, make you look a little tired or sick or just kind of drain you overall. So there are warm undertones, cool undertones, and people argue with me for sure that there are neutral undertones and we'll definitely have an entire episode focused just on neutral because I know that a lot of people feel very neutral. They don't really feel like they look warm or cool. So we'll definitely address that. How do you know if you have cool undertones? What, what is that? So for lighter skin individuals, you're likely going to have a very pink quality to your skin. You could have a very porcelain, like almost white quality to your skin or maybe even a gray ish quality to your skin. Really you have kind of the absence of warmth as the, especially the lighter your skin goes, the, the more that this is true, the really of an absence of warmth. Okay. For darker skin individuals. It may be that you have a blue or red quality to your Brown skin. It's not going to be yellow and it's not going to have a golden quality. It's going to be more of a blue tent or red tent to it. Okay. In general, silver really works well on you. Gold doesn't seem to look as good as silver and in fact, in many cases gold may not look good at good on you at all. It just may not look right, but silver for sure, no matter what. Alright, your eyes could also be a clue. You could have cool blue eyes, blue, gray eyes, a cool Hazel. This is the kind of eye that really trips people up. Hazel is an eye color that isn't really a color. It's a blend of colors and typically it's a blend of Browns, blues, yellows, greens. It's not really green. It's really combination of yellow and blue in your eye. And so you have this mix of an eye color that can feel very earthy and therefore feel very warm. And so someone who is trying to figure out if they have warm undertones or cool undertones sees their eyes as this warm Hazel and gets very confused and rightly so because I've met many people who have cool undertones, but they have these beautiful, almost golden quality of eyes and it sort of contradicts the definition. The best way I can describe a cool Hazel versus a warm Hazel is in many cases someone who has warm Hazel eyes is when when the light hits it, their eyes almost look have a golden yellow quality about them. For someone that's got cool Hazel, you could almost see like a blue tint to their eye, even though it's Browns and yellows and stuff. So it's, it's, it really did take some practice to see which ones are cool and which ones are warm. But I kind of hope that that helps that Hazel having Hazel eyes does not mean that you have warm water tones. You could still have cool undertones with Hazel eyes. Okay. Also, let's not forget about super dark eyes. Eyes are almost black usually, or people with cool undertones. All right, your eyes basically for the most part have an absence of warmth compared to someone with eyes. Um, again, why they usually have some kind of warm quality to it, some kind of golden quality to it. All right? So there are definitely exceptions to these rules because someone with a coppery red hair and blue eyes may actually have warm undertones. I've actually seen it both ways. I've seen people with red hair and blue eyes that have cool undertones and I've seen people with red hair and blue eyes to have a woman or tone. So it's not always black and white when it comes to this. There are rules that definitely are broken. Let's talk about the hair quality now. Hair, um, color can definitely influence your color palette. So we have white hair or gray hair that really, um, typically implies that you have cool undertones, shiny black hair, ashy Brown hair. Those are all qualities of cool undertones, especially when you pair those, those, uh, hair colors with cool eyes. It's really hard to be anything else. If you've got kind of those, the lack of pigment in your hair and you've got cool eyes, like blue eyes, you'd likely have cool undertones. Uh, gray hair blends, uh, like gray with blonde hair or with Brown hair. That can definitely confuse things. Um, like my husband for example, he has a blend of gray and like a Brown and like almost like a blonde all in his hair. He has cool undertones, but I can definitely see how that blend of hair can definitely confuse things cause you have this a little bit of warmth in your hair, right? So more often than not, um, I find people that had that great blend to be more cool than warm. But again, not always the case. I've seen many women with gray hair that fall into all three categories. Warm, cool and neutral. In fact, just the other day, um, I, I, we went to this winery and there was this a woman that was pouring the wine and she at first glance had white hair, very fair light eyes, light skin. But you know, I'm always secretly color analysis people and as I'm looking at her I realize that she does not have cool undertones. She's actually very warm. She didn't necessarily have like obvious warmth in her skin, but her eyes had a very nice soft green, blue qualities, a lot of warmth and her hair actually Rose it really white, had a little bit of a yellow quality to it, a blog, a very faint blonde quality to it. And so she, even though her hair was uh, air quote white really had more of warm undertones. So the bottom line here is this, I'm going to give you a lot of information to help you figure out what your undertones are and if you have cool undertones or not, but please treat these as guidelines because everybody's very unique. And although there is, you know, main categories of people, there are so many unique combinations that come my way that these are just guidelines just to help you and especially to help you know what colors to avoid.

Speaker 2:

I'll get back to talking about cool undertones in just a moment. If you've been trying to figure out what colors flatter you best, but all that information out there is confusing. Take the quiz@yourcolorstyle.com slash quiz it's absolutely free and has lots of photos to help you figure out what types of colors will look best on you. So go to your color style.com/quiz

Speaker 1:

there are myths about determining your, your undertones that I honestly just don't agree with. Let's talk about vain color. This is one that I get all the time and I think it really confuses just about everyone. I get questions like my veins are blue, but I am pretty sure I have warm undertones. I personally can't tell what color my veins are. I mean, I totally get why people like it. Like, like this rule. I mean if your skin is very yellow, your veins will look green. Um, but for darker skinned women, they really can't use this rule. All of skin tone. Women definitely can't use this rule because their skin's already kind of neutral and a little on the green side, the vein, the test doesn't work. So it really only works for people who are very fair and are on the extremes of warm and cool. And you look at your veins and yeah, okay, maybe that will be an indicator. If you have very fair skin and your veins are obviously very, very blue, maybe you have cool undertones, but I'm not a fan of the vain test. Silver versus gold can also be something that a is misleading. If you are fair and cool, you can likely wear both silver and gold. The lighter you go and the darker you go, you tend to kind of fall into these neutral categories. Um, so, and what that means is that you can kind of span the spectrum of colors from warm to cool, a little easier than someone that's more in the middle range of, of a color types. Okay. So if you're very fair, even if you have cool undertones, you'd likely can wear gold jewelry and silver jewelry. Okay. And so saying that you can wear gold doesn't always mean that you have warm undertones burning versus tanning. This another one, every one is different. Being able to tan does not mean that you have warm or cool undertones. I have warm undertones and I burned pretty easily. Again, also in this rule, we leave out the Brown skin and all skinned women in this description. I mean I would absolutely agree that if you are very fair, you have, if you have pink or porcelain skin, you probably don't hand you just proud. You probably just get a little Pinker. Then you probably have cooler tones, but outside of that, I'm not convinced that that's an indicator, a true indicator of cool or warm undertones. Okay, so colors that will help you know if you have cool undertones. If you can wear like a blue purple or magenta pink really well, you likely have cool undertones. Those colors really don't flatter people with warm undertones and colors that well. There are colors that you'll say that you can wear, so you must have warm undertones or cool undertones. But honestly they're just universal colors and they really don't help. These are colors like true red, true yellow, green, blue and purple are all colors that really don't tell you whether or not you have warm or cool undertones. I get a lot of people that tell me that I can, you know, Oh I can wear blue really well so I must have blue undertones or I can wear blue really well, but so I don't understand how I could possibly have warm undertones. These are just universal colors there. They're the primary colors. They're perfectly balanced. If you can find them and they're just, they don't really tell you if you were, if you can wear that color, whether or not you have warm or cool undertones. Cause anybody can wear a true red, not necessarily a warm orangy red or a blue red. That's when things get a little funny. But a true red anybody can wear. Um, now if you're thinking for one moment that, well, the colors you're mentioning actually don't look good on me, but I don't think I've got woman or tones. Well, the reality is is that it's possible that those colors might be too bright. So one of the things that's really important to know when you're trying to figure out the colors that are gonna flatter you really well and the colors that you should avoid is to know if you are soft or bright. All right? If you're soft, then you can wear the more muted colors. So you may look really beautiful in a soft magenta, pink or a soft blue purple, that kind of a thing, not the bright colors because um, this just may not work on you if you've got soft tones. And the same is true if you are bright, if you wear brighter colors really well, you have brightness to your eyes and hair and the brighter colors look really well than the bright colors might might work well. So make sure that you know, if you are brighter, soft, there's lots of information about this on the website@yourcolorstyle.com. If you're trying to figure out brighter soft effect, the quiz will help you also understand this concept little bit more because a lot of times when colors don't look good, it's not because it's the wrong temperature, it's because it's the wrong chroma. It might be too bright or too soft for you. Okay. So I know lots to think about, but it's kind of important. Also colors to avoid. If you have cool undertones, my number one recommendation is to, is to avoid colors with golden Hughes, golden oranges, golden Browns, camel Browns, uh, that kind of, you know, even reds that are really more orangey reds. Those kind of things are just really not going to look good on you. Stick to the cool colors on the color wheel. There's lots of information out on the blog about that. And um, and then the warm colors that you definitely can. Where is the true red in the true yellow? Okay. Um, if yellow is starting to look orange, then it's probably not the right color for you. Next week on the your color style podcast, we're going to continue the series on undertones and we're going to be talking about neutral undertones and olive skin tone. So if you fit into that category, you don't want to miss it. If you're trying to figure out your color type, take the quiz@yourcolorstyle.com slash quiz it's absolutely free, and we'll walk you through step by step with photos to help you figure out what colors will flatter at you best. Thank you so much for listening to the your color style podcast, where we believe the more you know about color, the more you'll know what color

Speaker 3:

[inaudible].