The secret to finding the perfect shade of foundation

Finding a foundation that works for your skin tone is game-changing. There’s a reason it’s called foundation: it’s usually used as the first step in make-up, so if your shade is off, it will throw off your whole look. A good foundation should enhance your skin and liven it up; it should even it out without looking cakey or obvious. And it should certainly not leave any telltale tidemarks along your jawline.

For a good foundation, you need something that doesn’t look too ashy, too pinky or too yellow: a colour that disappears into your skin seamlessly. But you can’t simply pick from light to dark. To truly find your perfect match you need to know your undertone, which is the actual hue of your shade, rather than whether your skin is light, medium or dark. The importance of undertones was something I discovered while researching for my new book South Asian Beauty (HQ, £25, out 18 July).

To work out if your undertone is cool, warm, neutral or olive, the most tried-and-tested method is looking at the veins on your wrist; the colour of your veins is influenced by the way light interacts with your skin. So, for example, if you have a golden (warm) undertone, a pink-toned foundation (whether you’re fair or dark) will make you look immediately ashy and grey. Likewise, if you have a pinky (cool) undertone and wear a foundation with a yellow tone, your skin will lose all vibrancy and look dull. I’m a ‘neutral’ undertone, which means my skin is neither very cool, nor very warm-toned.

• Cool: Veins on the wrist appear blue and purple. Skin appears pink in tone
• Warm: Veins on the wrist appear mostly green in colour. Skin is tinged with yellow
• Neutral: Veins on the wrist are a mix of cool and warm, so some blues and greens – it can often be hard to tell

Analysing her clients’ undertones is something that 62-year-old make-up artist Ruby Hammer has been doing for decades; she knows first-hand how tricky it is to find base products that work for every skin colour.

‘Back in the day brands were just making foundations darker without thinking about the undertone,’ she tells me. ‘But it’s not just those with dark skin who need to think about undertones, it’s every shade. Whether you’re very pale or very dark-skinned, you could have a neutral undertone that changes as you get darker, between the winter and summer.’ She suggests going to a department store and physically trying a few different foundations in the natural daylight – they should simply disappear into the skin.

There are now brands that make a big song and dance about undertones, which is much-needed. One of my favourite all-rounders is Seamless Skin Foundation by Lisa Eldridge. It is a classic foundation: medium coverage, not too glowy or too matt. Lisa takes undertones seriously, which you can tell from her website – each foundation is described in both colour and undertone.

Seamless Skin Foundation, £44, Lisa Eldridge

Studio Radiance Serum-Powered Foundation by Mac is another favourite (and, in fact, Mac was one of the very few brands to really understand undertones back in the 1980s). It has more of a dewy finish and, because they’ve nailed the undertones (again, each shade is described by both its colour and undertone), this is truly a ‘your skin, but better’ foundation.

Studio Radiance Serum-Powered Foundation, £39, Mac

If you prefer a lighter base, try True Match Super-Blendable Foundation by L’Oréal Paris. Each of the 48 options handily has a ‘C’, ‘W’ or ‘N’ following the shade number.

True Match Super-Blendable Foundation, £11, Look Fantastic 

So that’s it. Simply find your undertone and you’ll never buy a badly matched base again.