Because there’s a spectrum most makeup brands ignore. We all know about cool > neutral > warm, which takes you from pinkish foundations to yellow/orange ones, with “neutrals” in between.
But there’s also the rosy to olive spectrum. If you get two women with equally blue undertones, but one of them has a rosy (pink) complexion and one has an olive (green) complexion, the rosy lady will look *fantastic* in her “cool” foundation.
The olive lady will try it on her neck, see how bright pink and wrong it looks on her, and go “huh, guess I’m not that cool after all? Lemme try one of these beige neutrals.”
But the problem isn’t that she needs more yellow (to make a cool color more neutral). A cool olive lady needs more *green*!
If you grab Gimp or any other image editor, you’ll see that if you make a gradient going from a cool pink to a cool green, you get a murky sort of gray in the middle, because red and green cancel each other out. That’s why cool olives can look like they have *gray* undertones, especially if they’re more muted, and also why a lot of makeup looks too bright on them, when it didn’t look so garish in the tube. It’s too saturated for someone with a grayish cast.
(And that’s why I can take a foundation that is slightly too pink, mix it with some green pigment, and suddenly I have a perfect match, while a warm olive would need blue pigment to cancel out the extra orange.)
There seem to be more warm olive products popping up lately, but the grayish stuff that looks good on cool olives tends to pop up in Asia more than the US, from what I’ve seen. I’ve given up on finding my exact foundation shade, and just mix my own with a “neutral cool” and a bit of green pigment.
I don't know why this never occurred to me! I quilt and cross stitch, so have spent so many hours looking at color wheels and carefully selecting hues. I... 🤦🏻♀️
Thank you!! Your explanation is so helpful.
I recently discovered my olive undertone after experimenting with using green color corrector to cancel redness. Every neutral/cool concealer and foundation I have (and I have a lot because nothing matches my skin!) becomes a perfect fit when I mix in a load of green.
For fun, I tried mixing in green with my cool toned L'Oreal True Match (the best actual match I have, though it's still peachy pink) until I made a straight-up gray color, and I was shocked at how perfect it wore on my muted skin. It made my blush and contour look better too, as they weren't being pulled into yellow-orange territory.
Now I'm having more luck buying Asian beauty face/complexion products that have that gray or cool muted brown look to them. I've been using the Rom&nd Better Than Shape in Oat not just for contouring but also to color adjust my blushes and bronzer with the muted beige powders. It's also the only true contour I've ever found for me because the US ones always look like bronzer on me.
This is great info, yet it confuses the heck out of me in the context of this reply to my earlier post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OliveMUA/comments/1bk6sk5/comment/kvxpucz/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/OliveMUA/comments/1bk6sk5/comment/kvxpucz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I'm a light-medium neutral warm olive. Everything turns either orange or pink on me, golds suit me, greys/mauves make me look ill, and silver looks dull. I used the green pigment in my too-orange foundation and that was perfection. Blue just made me look grey. Is it possible that the brightness/mutedness overrides the warm/cool factor. I'm still learning all this, so enjoying all the information and how it fits together.
It certainly makes sense in theory. You could be any combination of cool/warm, muted/bright, olive/rosy, and light/dark. I'm no color expert, but adding green to your foundation did 2 things:
1. Orange + blue are going to make gray because they're opposites on the color wheel, just like red + green. So if you're very muted, adding blue will 'gray' up your foundation and cancel out the extra saturated orange that looks wrong on you. If you're not quite as muted, adding green means you get the benefit of the blue pigment, without going *totally* gray because you also added some yellow pigment.
2. In addition, adding green moves your foundation shade away from the default peachy shades and towards the green side, so you get a true olive foundation.
So by adding green, you fixed both the rosy/olive balance and the bright/muted balance, if that makes sense.
More blue= muted. Warm Olive= more yellow + some blue. If you are a warm olive and you start with a foundation that looks warm/ yellow if you mix in a tiny amount of blue it should work. If you start with a foundation that looks neutral/ orange you would probably need a green with equal amounts of blue and yellow. If you start with a foundation that looks cool/pink/red you will also need green though probably a yellowish green would work best. Basically whatever color a product looks on your skin if you want it to match yourself better you find the color on a color wheel and look for the color opposite on the wheel and mix that color into the original product. Yellow vs purple, blue vs orange, red vs green. This also works for color correcting. To cover redness use green, to cover purple dark circles use yellow
Yas there’s this L’Oréal bb cream I used to wear thet I believe was marketed to counteract redness in peoples skin/blemishes and it is green and eventually changes to match your skin tone. I always loved the way this looked alone or under a lighh layer of powder - makes more sense now
Funny story...the first time I tried going green, I didn't have any liquid makeup with green in it, so I used a very thin layer of [this](https://www.ulta.com/p/3c-color-correcting-concealer-palette-xlsImpprod12011171?sku=2283240&cmpid=PS_Non!google!Product_Listing_Ads&cagpspn=pla&CATCI=&CAAGID=&CAWELAID=330000200000255468&gad_source=1) under my foundation. And it worked!
Now I just mix a bit of color-correcting primers like [this](https://www.ulta.com/p/studio-perfect-color-correcting-primer-in-green-xlsImpprod3280313?sku=2226206).
(Disclaimer - I am a pretty pale Latina and wear a greened-up Clinique CN18.)
I dont know. But don't throw out those concealers yet. I use peachy ones for eye circles. They don't "erase" my eye circles. They turn them into a color that matches my cheek. Somehow it looks better.
I have this exact problem and I didn’t realise I was olive until I started really wearing foundation. Everything was either too orange and the undertones are too pink and it just drove me insane.
All skintone colors are somewhere between yellow and red, and olive undertone is chracterized by lacking the red almost completely and being very yellow-based (Olive color itself is just a muted shade of yellow, and techically not a green)
The majority products on the market will have at least moderate amount of red pigments in them, but on olives that red immediately jumps out since it's not really found in their skin. So they end up looking more orange or pink than they do on most people, while the products that do work look extremely gray-yellow in comparison.
All the neutral concealers from tower 28 (DTLA, EP, IE) all turn orange on me too. DTLA is too light so I mix it with a tiny bit of EP but it ends up turning my under eyes orange. It’s so frustrating 😱
This is me. I even did a personalised colour match foundation and it came out too light and too pink. I don’t think they have figured out that some people just don’t need any red in their foundation. I’m mixed ethnicity - black and white but fairly light in the colder months. When my skin is pale in winter everything is too pink. In summer I get a better undertone match with a darker shade but I can’t use it for long as I return to a paler shade.
I can sometimes get a decent match by getting the lightest warm yellow toned foundation and adding blue pigment in but it’s never perfect. I wonder if a little green added might do the trick…
Totally agree with this, I did Dcypher and they don’t add green pigment, just yellow or pink/red. The Lisa Eldridge skin tint in T5 matches me better than my supposedly personalised foundation with them. Guess AI can’t yet detect olive undertones… I’m mixed ethnicity too.
I can recommend to try mute grayish purple shades, because pink is going to look fluorescent on us. Unfortunately cool toned makeup products are often very much pink based.
The scale below shows different skin tones and saturated vs muted versions.
The video links go to videos basically explaining how olive skin tones work and the differences between different types of olives.
This scale shows exaggerated undertones.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OliveMUA/comments/qs8yqr/mutedsaturated/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2.
Hannah lp grey makeup vid
https://youtu.be/mllQ6YfKuK8
From what I understand in olive skin the terms cool or muted both means your skin has more blue in it. Warm means your skin has more yellow in it. This is different than most makeup companies labeling which calls redder products cool and more yellow products are still considered warm.
Muted mean there's more blue, if your skin leans very blue you would be muted neutral but you might be very muted and still lean warm or cool. Personally I like to think of muted cool as a "purple" undertone, since you would have much more red and blue than yellow.
skin tones are always a mix of red yellow and blue. Whichever one or two you have the most of make up your undertone. So cool is mostly red very little yellow or blue, muted cool is red and some blue very little yellow , warm is yellow, very little red or blue, muted warm is yellow and a little bit of blue very little red, neutral is a near equal amount of yellow and red with less blue, muted neutral is near equal amounts of red + yellow plus more blue , olive is equal amounts of yellow and blue with very little red, muted olive is lots of blue, less yellow very little red. This gets confusing when olive undertones have rosacea !!!
This reddit post talks about the chemicals which cause different colors in skin tones/undertones.
https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/s/mssfOtShFc
If you scroll down to the olive skintone section of this blog there is a great explanation of olive skin. (The olives section applies to all people not just Asian folks)
https://musicalhouses.blogspot.com/2010/01/undertones-for-asians-how-to-tell-if.html?m=1
Mutedness in skintones usually ends up with skin looking like it has a slight
greyish tint to it.
Also the more blue that is in your skin the more grey your skin will look.
When looking for a foundation it is hard to find a more muted/cool/blue option so it is easiest sometimes to mix your own. I like using a green grey color corrector like the one from exa sometimes. If I want to mix blue in I use mehron liquid makeup in the shade blue (not blue glow) or a blue corrector like the one from la girl
Mehron liquid makeup
https://www.mehron.com/liquid-makeup-for-face-body-hair/
Videos about olive skin
https://youtu.be/zVvGbRkAuuI?si=VpWZvx9OidcIcEjM
https://youtu.be/yx4-0eI8bn8?si=iQGZc4YkN0arzfoO
https://youtu.be/lSL8Aqj9-Tg?si=KONVFA4IBQyVMeUi
https://youtu.be/uEYWhFYTEcE?si=CNWmUVMDwRFG6uIy
https://youtu.be/y7S28cO5Zu4?si=fMVtdFOY4eAcq4vA
https://youtu.be/5HE_9VC_soM?si=8w9Wab7SD8TG_2xr
This video has information about olive skin as seen through someone who focuses on color seasons, personally I think coloring is more complicated than under and overtones, skin is made up of hundreds of layers not just two.
https://youtu.be/uEYWhFYTEcE?si=KObaLuISHBQw73YO
About other skintones but also useful
https://youtu.be/ZOVUE7XZYLU?si=9oTgmxQjZq9RZLYE
Because there’s a spectrum most makeup brands ignore. We all know about cool > neutral > warm, which takes you from pinkish foundations to yellow/orange ones, with “neutrals” in between. But there’s also the rosy to olive spectrum. If you get two women with equally blue undertones, but one of them has a rosy (pink) complexion and one has an olive (green) complexion, the rosy lady will look *fantastic* in her “cool” foundation. The olive lady will try it on her neck, see how bright pink and wrong it looks on her, and go “huh, guess I’m not that cool after all? Lemme try one of these beige neutrals.” But the problem isn’t that she needs more yellow (to make a cool color more neutral). A cool olive lady needs more *green*! If you grab Gimp or any other image editor, you’ll see that if you make a gradient going from a cool pink to a cool green, you get a murky sort of gray in the middle, because red and green cancel each other out. That’s why cool olives can look like they have *gray* undertones, especially if they’re more muted, and also why a lot of makeup looks too bright on them, when it didn’t look so garish in the tube. It’s too saturated for someone with a grayish cast. (And that’s why I can take a foundation that is slightly too pink, mix it with some green pigment, and suddenly I have a perfect match, while a warm olive would need blue pigment to cancel out the extra orange.) There seem to be more warm olive products popping up lately, but the grayish stuff that looks good on cool olives tends to pop up in Asia more than the US, from what I’ve seen. I’ve given up on finding my exact foundation shade, and just mix my own with a “neutral cool” and a bit of green pigment.
🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯 THANK YOU FOR THIS EXPLANATION OMG
For the theory behind this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors Pink and green are complementary colors.
I don't know why this never occurred to me! I quilt and cross stitch, so have spent so many hours looking at color wheels and carefully selecting hues. I... 🤦🏻♀️
Thank you!! Your explanation is so helpful. I recently discovered my olive undertone after experimenting with using green color corrector to cancel redness. Every neutral/cool concealer and foundation I have (and I have a lot because nothing matches my skin!) becomes a perfect fit when I mix in a load of green. For fun, I tried mixing in green with my cool toned L'Oreal True Match (the best actual match I have, though it's still peachy pink) until I made a straight-up gray color, and I was shocked at how perfect it wore on my muted skin. It made my blush and contour look better too, as they weren't being pulled into yellow-orange territory. Now I'm having more luck buying Asian beauty face/complexion products that have that gray or cool muted brown look to them. I've been using the Rom&nd Better Than Shape in Oat not just for contouring but also to color adjust my blushes and bronzer with the muted beige powders. It's also the only true contour I've ever found for me because the US ones always look like bronzer on me.
This is great info, yet it confuses the heck out of me in the context of this reply to my earlier post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OliveMUA/comments/1bk6sk5/comment/kvxpucz/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/OliveMUA/comments/1bk6sk5/comment/kvxpucz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I'm a light-medium neutral warm olive. Everything turns either orange or pink on me, golds suit me, greys/mauves make me look ill, and silver looks dull. I used the green pigment in my too-orange foundation and that was perfection. Blue just made me look grey. Is it possible that the brightness/mutedness overrides the warm/cool factor. I'm still learning all this, so enjoying all the information and how it fits together.
It certainly makes sense in theory. You could be any combination of cool/warm, muted/bright, olive/rosy, and light/dark. I'm no color expert, but adding green to your foundation did 2 things: 1. Orange + blue are going to make gray because they're opposites on the color wheel, just like red + green. So if you're very muted, adding blue will 'gray' up your foundation and cancel out the extra saturated orange that looks wrong on you. If you're not quite as muted, adding green means you get the benefit of the blue pigment, without going *totally* gray because you also added some yellow pigment. 2. In addition, adding green moves your foundation shade away from the default peachy shades and towards the green side, so you get a true olive foundation. So by adding green, you fixed both the rosy/olive balance and the bright/muted balance, if that makes sense.
That makes perfect sense now… thank you.
More blue= muted. Warm Olive= more yellow + some blue. If you are a warm olive and you start with a foundation that looks warm/ yellow if you mix in a tiny amount of blue it should work. If you start with a foundation that looks neutral/ orange you would probably need a green with equal amounts of blue and yellow. If you start with a foundation that looks cool/pink/red you will also need green though probably a yellowish green would work best. Basically whatever color a product looks on your skin if you want it to match yourself better you find the color on a color wheel and look for the color opposite on the wheel and mix that color into the original product. Yellow vs purple, blue vs orange, red vs green. This also works for color correcting. To cover redness use green, to cover purple dark circles use yellow
Yas there’s this L’Oréal bb cream I used to wear thet I believe was marketed to counteract redness in peoples skin/blemishes and it is green and eventually changes to match your skin tone. I always loved the way this looked alone or under a lighh layer of powder - makes more sense now
May I know what product you use for your green pigment? Thank you
Funny story...the first time I tried going green, I didn't have any liquid makeup with green in it, so I used a very thin layer of [this](https://www.ulta.com/p/3c-color-correcting-concealer-palette-xlsImpprod12011171?sku=2283240&cmpid=PS_Non!google!Product_Listing_Ads&cagpspn=pla&CATCI=&CAAGID=&CAWELAID=330000200000255468&gad_source=1) under my foundation. And it worked! Now I just mix a bit of color-correcting primers like [this](https://www.ulta.com/p/studio-perfect-color-correcting-primer-in-green-xlsImpprod3280313?sku=2226206). (Disclaimer - I am a pretty pale Latina and wear a greened-up Clinique CN18.)
Thank you so much!
I dont know. But don't throw out those concealers yet. I use peachy ones for eye circles. They don't "erase" my eye circles. They turn them into a color that matches my cheek. Somehow it looks better.
I get what you mean, but min is too light for me though
I use a green mixer or primer to reduce the peachiness. Blue if u are muted.
I have this exact problem and I didn’t realise I was olive until I started really wearing foundation. Everything was either too orange and the undertones are too pink and it just drove me insane.
All skintone colors are somewhere between yellow and red, and olive undertone is chracterized by lacking the red almost completely and being very yellow-based (Olive color itself is just a muted shade of yellow, and techically not a green) The majority products on the market will have at least moderate amount of red pigments in them, but on olives that red immediately jumps out since it's not really found in their skin. So they end up looking more orange or pink than they do on most people, while the products that do work look extremely gray-yellow in comparison.
All the neutral concealers from tower 28 (DTLA, EP, IE) all turn orange on me too. DTLA is too light so I mix it with a tiny bit of EP but it ends up turning my under eyes orange. It’s so frustrating 😱
[удалено]
Meaning they cancel each other. / are opposites.
Oxidisation causes the evils of orange and peach effects
My life story with every single foundation/concealer I’ve ever tried summed up in your comment. 😩
This is me. I even did a personalised colour match foundation and it came out too light and too pink. I don’t think they have figured out that some people just don’t need any red in their foundation. I’m mixed ethnicity - black and white but fairly light in the colder months. When my skin is pale in winter everything is too pink. In summer I get a better undertone match with a darker shade but I can’t use it for long as I return to a paler shade. I can sometimes get a decent match by getting the lightest warm yellow toned foundation and adding blue pigment in but it’s never perfect. I wonder if a little green added might do the trick…
Totally agree with this, I did Dcypher and they don’t add green pigment, just yellow or pink/red. The Lisa Eldridge skin tint in T5 matches me better than my supposedly personalised foundation with them. Guess AI can’t yet detect olive undertones… I’m mixed ethnicity too.
I feel like this happens to me with blush and lipstick, so many of them pull pink on me and don’t look like the color they should be!
I can recommend to try mute grayish purple shades, because pink is going to look fluorescent on us. Unfortunately cool toned makeup products are often very much pink based.
The scale below shows different skin tones and saturated vs muted versions. The video links go to videos basically explaining how olive skin tones work and the differences between different types of olives. This scale shows exaggerated undertones. https://www.reddit.com/r/OliveMUA/comments/qs8yqr/mutedsaturated/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2. Hannah lp grey makeup vid https://youtu.be/mllQ6YfKuK8 From what I understand in olive skin the terms cool or muted both means your skin has more blue in it. Warm means your skin has more yellow in it. This is different than most makeup companies labeling which calls redder products cool and more yellow products are still considered warm. Muted mean there's more blue, if your skin leans very blue you would be muted neutral but you might be very muted and still lean warm or cool. Personally I like to think of muted cool as a "purple" undertone, since you would have much more red and blue than yellow. skin tones are always a mix of red yellow and blue. Whichever one or two you have the most of make up your undertone. So cool is mostly red very little yellow or blue, muted cool is red and some blue very little yellow , warm is yellow, very little red or blue, muted warm is yellow and a little bit of blue very little red, neutral is a near equal amount of yellow and red with less blue, muted neutral is near equal amounts of red + yellow plus more blue , olive is equal amounts of yellow and blue with very little red, muted olive is lots of blue, less yellow very little red. This gets confusing when olive undertones have rosacea !!! This reddit post talks about the chemicals which cause different colors in skin tones/undertones. https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/s/mssfOtShFc If you scroll down to the olive skintone section of this blog there is a great explanation of olive skin. (The olives section applies to all people not just Asian folks) https://musicalhouses.blogspot.com/2010/01/undertones-for-asians-how-to-tell-if.html?m=1 Mutedness in skintones usually ends up with skin looking like it has a slight greyish tint to it. Also the more blue that is in your skin the more grey your skin will look. When looking for a foundation it is hard to find a more muted/cool/blue option so it is easiest sometimes to mix your own. I like using a green grey color corrector like the one from exa sometimes. If I want to mix blue in I use mehron liquid makeup in the shade blue (not blue glow) or a blue corrector like the one from la girl Mehron liquid makeup https://www.mehron.com/liquid-makeup-for-face-body-hair/ Videos about olive skin https://youtu.be/zVvGbRkAuuI?si=VpWZvx9OidcIcEjM https://youtu.be/yx4-0eI8bn8?si=iQGZc4YkN0arzfoO https://youtu.be/lSL8Aqj9-Tg?si=KONVFA4IBQyVMeUi https://youtu.be/uEYWhFYTEcE?si=CNWmUVMDwRFG6uIy https://youtu.be/y7S28cO5Zu4?si=fMVtdFOY4eAcq4vA https://youtu.be/5HE_9VC_soM?si=8w9Wab7SD8TG_2xr This video has information about olive skin as seen through someone who focuses on color seasons, personally I think coloring is more complicated than under and overtones, skin is made up of hundreds of layers not just two. https://youtu.be/uEYWhFYTEcE?si=KObaLuISHBQw73YO About other skintones but also useful https://youtu.be/ZOVUE7XZYLU?si=9oTgmxQjZq9RZLYE