The Monk Skin Tone Scale Explained

A foundation counter once told a client of mine she was "medium," handed her three bottles, and every one of them turned faintly orange by lunchtime. The word medium was doing far too much work, it was trying to cover a quarter of all the skin on earth. That gap, between the blunt labels we reach for and the actual range of human skin, is exactly the problem the Monk Skin Tone Scale set out to fix.

Most color tools were never built to describe skin evenly. The Fitzpatrick scale, the one most of us have bumped into, was designed to predict sunburn, not to name a complexion, and it squeezes an enormous span of deeper skin into a couple of boxes. The Monk scale takes a different starting point: ten shades, spaced to reflect how skin color actually varies around the world. Here's where it came from, how it improves on what came before, how to find your own shade, and the part that matters most for getting dressed, what it does and doesn't tell you about your colors.

What the Monk Skin Tone Scale is

The scale was created by Dr Ellis Monk, a sociologist at Harvard who studies how skin color shapes lived experience, and released openly by Google in 2022 as part of an effort to make technology, cameras, search results, beauty filters, work fairly across all skin tones. It's deliberately simple to use: ten shades, numbered 1 to 10, running from the lightest to the deepest.

What makes it useful isn't the count alone but the spacing. Earlier scales clustered their detail at the lighter end and left everything from tan to deep brown sharing a handful of labels. Monk's ten shades are spread to give roughly even steps across the whole range, with proper resolution in the middle and deeper tones where people are most often misjudged, the very stretch my "medium" client fell into. Each shade has a defined color, so a Monk 6 means the same thing to a camera engineer, a foundation chemist and a color analyst.

One thing to be clear about from the start: the scale measures depth: how light or deep skin is, and nothing else. It doesn't claim to capture undertone, and it isn't a medical tool. Hold that in mind, because it's the key to using it well rather than expecting too much of it.

How it improves on the Fitzpatrick scale

If you've ever filled in a skincare form, you've probably met the Fitzpatrick scale. Dermatologist Thomas Fitzpatrick devised it in 1975 to answer a specific clinical question, how does this person's skin respond to ultraviolet light?, and it sorts people into six types by how readily they burn or tan.

That makes it excellent for what it was built for and awkward for everything else. Two limits stand out:

• It describes behavior, not color. A Fitzpatrick type tells you about sunburn risk, not the shade you'd match a foundation to. Two people who both "tan easily and rarely burn" can look quite different.
• It's coarse where it matters most. Six types, with the deepest skin tones compressed into roughly the last two, means a vast range of brown skin gets flattened into a couple of categories. People in that range are routinely under-served by tools calibrated on it.

The Monk scale answers both. Ten shades instead of six give nearly double the resolution, and crucially that extra detail lands in the middle and deeper range rather than being piled at the light end. And because each Monk shade is a defined color rather than a sun-reaction category, it describes how skin looks, which is what you actually need when you're choosing clothing, makeup or a camera setting. Neither scale is wrong; they answer different questions. For naming a complexion fairly, Monk is the sharper instrument.

The ten shades

Here's the scale laid out as a reference, ten graduated shades from light to deep, plus a set of neutral foundation-style tones to anchor the steps in between.

The ten Monk shades, light to deep

Neutral references: Porcelain #F1E6D8, Sand #D8C0A0, Honey #B68F63, Chestnut #6E4C39 and Espresso #332A24 sit alongside the numbered shades as familiar anchors, the kind of names a foundation range uses, so you can place yourself by feel as well as by number. These are illustrative steps, not official Monk values; the point is to show how evenly the depth climbs from one end to the other.

Metals: depth alone doesn't decide gold versus silver, that's an undertone question, so both belong on the chart. As a rough start, warm complexions of any depth tend to glow in gold and cool ones in silver, but read your own undertone before you commit. If you're unsure which way you lean, our guide to gold vs silver, and which suits you walks through the test.

How to find your Monk shade

Finding your shade is refreshingly low-tech, and the method matters more than the swatch.

1. Bare skin, daylight. Go makeup-free and self-tan-free, and stand near a window in bright but indirect light. Artificial bulbs skew warm and will push you a shade or two off.
2. Read the inside of your forearm. The inner arm is shielded from sun, so it shows your skin's truer baseline than your face or the back of your hand, which catch more weathering.
3. Find the shade you disappear into. Compare your skin to the ten and pick the one it melts against, not the one you wish you were. People reliably read themselves a shade lighter than they are; resist it.
4. Take more than one reading. Surface tone drifts with sun and season, so check on a couple of different days and take the shade that keeps coming up.

A caution worth repeating: the Monk scale captures depth, full stop. It will tell you that you're, say, a Monk 5, but not whether you're a warm Monk 5 or a cool one. That second question is undertone, and it's the one that decides whether camel or charcoal is your friend. If you've not pinned yours down, our guide on how to find your undertone runs through the vein, jewelry and white-paper tests I use on clients.

What your Monk shade means for your colors

Here's where a color analyst gets excited and also a little cautious. Your Monk shade is genuinely useful, it names your depth, and depth is one of the three dials that decide your palette. A deep Monk 9 can carry rich, saturated color that would swamp a light Monk 2, while lighter shades often look freshest in clearer, less weighty tones. Knowing your depth already tells you how much color your skin can hold.

But depth is only one dial of three, and this is the part the scale can't do for you:

• Undertone: warm, cool or neutral, decides the temperature of every color you wear. Two people on an identical Monk 6 will suit opposite reds if one is golden-warm and the other blue-cool.
• Contrast: the gap between your skin, hair and eyes, decides how bold your combinations should be. High contrast carries crisp pairings; low contrast prefers blended ones. There's more on this in our guide to value and contrast in color analysis.

Put those together and you get a season rather than a shade. Depth plus a warm undertone and softness might land you in True Autumn; the same depth with a cool undertone and high contrast points toward True Winter. The Monk scale gets you cleanly through the first door; undertone and contrast open the rest. You can see how all three combine across our color analysis guides, or skip the guesswork and start your own analysis, which reads your depth, undertone and contrast from a photo and hands you an actual palette.

Why a fairer scale matters

It's tempting to file the Monk scale under "tech housekeeping," but the reason it exists is human. When a beauty range stocks forty foundations clustered at the light end, or a camera brightens darker faces into a smudge, or a search for "skin tone" returns one narrow slice of humanity, the cost lands on real people. A scale with even steps and proper depth at the darker end is a small, concrete way of saying every complexion deserves to be described as precisely as any other.

For your wardrobe, the takeaway is friendlier still: depth is your first dial, and the Monk scale is the clearest way to read it. Find the shade you disappear into, then layer undertone and contrast on top, and "what suits me" stops being a counter assistant's guess and starts being a palette built around the skin you're actually in.