Have you ever wondered if that shimmery silver eye shadow or that bright pink lipstick that caught your eye is the right colour for your skin tone? We often buy what appeals to the eye, without taking a moment to consider whether that is truly the right colour for our skin tone; resulting in the colour looking horrendous. Makeup is an art. Knowing your colour wheel is vital to good application.

Mastering the art of makeup is about understanding undertones; there are two types, cool and warm undertones. The colours are classified exactly with what one associates with the names – red and orange are reminiscent of heat, so they denote warm undertones while blue and green are reminiscent of the sea, and therefore are “cool”. Also, for an easier way to determine your skin undertone, you can do a vein test.

Once you have established your skins undertone, it will then be easy for you to choose the colours that look best on you; for example, when choosing a foundation shade, if you’re warm you will choose a shade that leans more towards yellow and for cool, you will choose one that leans more towards pink.

The key is to choose complementary colours, if you want to conceal those dark, bluish under eye circles, since orange is the opposite of blue, you can go for a peachy or orange toned corrector, to cancel those circles out. If you want your eyes to pop, use anything that contrasts with your eye colour.

For your lips, this is where I find it is most critical to use the right colour – you can’t ignore it, no matter how hard you try – the focus is on your lips, so wearing a wrong colour for your undertone can make you look sick, whereas the right one for your undertone can look very flattering on you.

There are no rules when it comes to makeup but the colour can affect how you look.

There are a few tests that you can do, to ascertain you skin undertone:

1. Look at the veins on the underside of your wrist, if they are green – that denotes that you are warm, if they are blue, you are cool and if you have a hard time telling, then you are neutral.
2. Ask yourself if you look better in silver or gold jewellery. If you look better in silver that denotes you are cool, and if gold looks better on you then you
3. Put a white cloth next to your bare face and observe what tone your skin takes on. Skin with warm undertones will appear yellowish, while skin with cool undertones will seem bluish or pinkish. If your test results are coming out mixed, you may in fact have neutral undertones