Olive
undertone

How to recognise it

In daylight, on bare skin, with your hair tied back. Olive is the undertone the standard home tests handle worst, because they are built to ask one question — gold or silver — and a green cast answers neither.

• — Against plain white paper, the skin reads slightly grey or grey-green rather than clearly yellow or clearly pink.
• — Neither gold nor silver is obviously better. Antique or brushed metals look better on you than bright polished ones.
• — Foundations match for an hour and then turn orange, or sit on the skin looking somehow too peachy from the start.
• — In poor indoor light people describe your skin as sallow or tired.
• — You have been told you are warm, bought warm shades, and found them all a little too warm.

Olive is not a depth and it is not a region. It appears on very fair skin, on deep skin, and everywhere between, which is why the old habit of treating it as a synonym for Mediterranean or for a tan misses most of the people who have it.

Measure it rather than guess

A green cast is faint by definition, and holding jewellery to your jaw is not a test that can find it. The undertone finder reads the colour of two patches of your cheek from a photograph and places it on the axis directly, which is the only way a slight green is going to show up as anything other than confusion. Free, in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.

Foundation

Where a range names an olive or neutral-olive shade, start there. Where it does not, which is most of them, the practical route is to buy a warm shade and a cool shade at your depth and mix them: the mixture lands closer to olive than either bottle does alone, because the pink in one cancels some of the gold in the other. Avoid anything described as peachy, and treat beige-rosé with suspicion.

The twenty-minute wait matters more here than for any other undertone. Olive skin shows oxidation fastest and most visibly, and a shade that looked correct at the counter is the one that turns up orange in photographs later. Swatch along the jaw and onto the neck, leave the shop, and look again in daylight before you commit. If two shades both look plausible, the less warm of the two is usually the survivor.

Blush, bronzer and lips

Colours with a little brown or grey in them settle onto olive skin as though they belong there: terracotta, brick, rose-brown, muted coral and dusty rose. Bright clear pink is the one to be careful with, because a clean cool pink against a green cast reads chalky, and baby pink reads chalkier still. Bronzer should be a neutral or olive-leaning brown rather than an orange one, which is the same problem as the foundation in a smaller pan.

Lips are where olive skin has an easy time: brick, rust, brown-rose, warm berry and a true red all sit well, and a brown-based nude is more likely to work than a pink-based one.

Metals

Yellow gold, antique gold, brass and bronze all work on the warm base. The useful exception is that olive is the one undertone that also carries oxidised silver, pewter and gunmetal comfortably, because there is grey in the skin for the grey in the metal to answer. Bright polished silver is the one that tends to look cold. For eyes, olive, bronze, warm taupe and deep brown shadows lean on what is already there.

What is a myth

That olive is simply warm, or simply tanned. It has a warm base, which is why warm shades get recommended and why they are always slightly too golden. The green sitting over that base is a separate thing, it does not wash off, and it does not arrive with the summer.

The second myth is that olive skin needs a green colour corrector. Green correctors exist to cancel redness, and applying green to a green cast flattens the skin further and is the fastest route to looking grey. If you have redness in a particular patch, correct that patch and leave the rest alone.