The Undertone Test: Find Your Self-Tan Shade in 30 Seconds

Most people choose a self-tan by depth. Light, medium, dark. Depth matters, but it is not the thing that makes a tan look convincing. Undertone is. It is the colour running underneath your skin, and when a formula fights it, the result goes brassy or grey no matter how carefully you applied it.

Here are three tests that take about thirty seconds between them. Do all three, because any one of them can be misread on its own.

Test one: the wrist check

Turn your forearm over and look at the veins on the inside of your wrist in daylight, not under a bathroom bulb. Veins that look blue or purple point to a cool undertone. Veins that look green point to a warm one. If you genuinely cannot decide, you are probably neutral, and if your skin has a faint green or grey cast over the veins, that reads olive.

Test two: gold or silver

Hold a gold chain against your skin, then a silver one. Warm undertones look brighter and healthier next to gold. Cool undertones look better against silver. Neutral skin carries both without much difference, which is its own answer.

Test three: the white shirt

Put on a pure white shirt in natural light and look at your face. Warm skin takes on a yellow or peachy cast against true white. Cool skin looks slightly pink or blue. Olive skin often looks faintly sallow next to pure white, which is not a flaw, it just means your undertone is doing something more complicated than warm or cool.

Reading your result

Undertone does not change. You can be very fair with a warm undertone or very deep with a cool one, so ignore depth while you are doing this and come back to it after.

If you are warm or neutral

A green-based or neutral formula sits well on you. Green tempers red, which keeps warm skin from flushing as the tan develops. Noir Chocolate is the straightforward choice here, a classic dark that develops overnight and suits first timers. Coconut Fudge is the other, built on real coconut water and neutral enough to work across most skin tones, which is part of why it has been our most ordered shade.

If you are cool or olive

You want a violet base. Violet sits opposite yellow, so it cancels the yellow before it can surface and turn brassy. Mocha Melt is the one to start with, a cool toned dark bronze built for warm and olive skin. Black Forest Cake is the same idea with the violet turned all the way up, for a deeper and cooler result.

If you are fair, or new to this

Start with Blondie. It lands as a soft, sun warmed medium, enough colour to read in daylight without announcing itself, and it is buildable, so you can go deeper on the second coat instead of committing on the first.

If you want maximum depth

Espresso Burn is our deepest golden mousse, layered up on a green base correction. It suits medium and deep skin and rewards a bit of experience, so it is worth having a couple of applications behind you first.

One last thing about depth

Once you know your undertone, pick depth one step lighter than you think you want. Self-tan keeps developing for hours after you rinse, and a second coat the following evening is easy. Going too dark on the first pass is the one mistake that cannot be undone quickly.

Every shade above is $39.99, and the full range sits here.