Olive Skin Undertones: Warm, Cool and Neutral Olive Explained

People with olive skin get told they are warm, cool and neutral by different people, sometimes in the same month, and none of those people were careless. Olive skin does something the standard warm-or-cool tests were not designed for. Its green-gray cast reads slightly cool next to warm colors and slightly warm next to cool ones, so a peach top makes the face look gray and an icy pink makes it look yellow. Neither result is the real answer.

This guide separates the cast from the undertone, gives five daylight tests for working out whether your olive is warm, neutral or cool, and then lists the colors, makeup, hair and color seasons for each. If you are not yet sure your skin is olive at all, the short checklist below settles that first, and the olive skin tone guide goes deeper.

What "olive" actually means

Skin color has two separate layers:

• Depth: how light or dark the skin is, from fair through light, medium and tan to deep.
• Undertone: the temperature underneath. Warm is golden or peachy, cool is pink or slightly blue, and neutral is a balance of the two.

Olive is neither of those. It is a cast: a green-gray tint that lies over the base like a sheer wash, at any depth from fair to deep. Under the wash there is still a warm, neutral or cool base, which is why "olive" and "warm" are not opposites. Warm olive, neutral olive and cool olive all exist, and they behave differently in front of a mirror.

The green comes from melanin and the skin's natural yellow softened by a little gray. That is why olive skin rarely flushes pink, why it tans evenly, and why so many foundations turn orange, gray or pink on it. Once the cast is understood as separate from the undertone, every contradictory test result starts to make sense.

First, check that your skin is olive

Four signs, and most olives have at least three of them:

• The veins at the inner wrist look teal, or a mix of green and blue, rather than clearly green or clearly blue.
• Foundation is a struggle: pink-based shades turn gray and yellow-based shades turn orange, and the closest match is usually labeled neutral.
• The skin tans quickly and evenly to bronze or brown and rarely burns.
• Pale pastels (baby pink, powder blue, pale lemon) make the face look sallow or faintly green.

If that describes you, the rest of this page applies. If your skin flushes pink easily and looks good in pastels, you are more likely a standard warm, cool or neutral type without the olive cast.

The three kinds of olive

Warm olive is the version most descriptions of olive skin have in mind. The green cast has gold in it, the skin tans to bronze rather than brown, and earthy colors such as rust, mustard, olive and terracotta look as if they were mixed for it. Gold jewelry makes the face glow; silver looks a little tinny. Warm olives usually land in True Autumn or Deep Autumn.

Neutral olive is the one that gets every test "wrong." Gold and silver both look fine. Cream and white both look fine. Rust looks good and so does burgundy. What neutral olives cannot wear is anything pale and pastel, because a color with no depth of its own leaves the green cast doing all the talking. Their range is muted, mid-to-deep color: teal, plum, olive green, peacock. Neutral olives often type as Soft Autumn or a warmer-leaning Deep Winter.

Cool olive is the least common and the least understood. The cast reads ashy or slightly gray-green, the skin never really goes golden in the sun, and warm colors make it look sallow. Silver, white gold and crisp white flatter it; berry, raspberry, emerald and slate blue light the face up; rust and mustard do the opposite. Cool olives are usually Deep Winter or, if softer and lower in contrast, Soft Summer.

How to tell which olive you are

Run all five tests in daylight, near a window, with no makeup. One test can mislead; five rarely do.

1. The metal test. Hold a gold piece and a silver piece against the side of the jaw. Warm olive: gold wakes the skin up and silver looks flat. Cool olive: the reverse. Neutral olive: both look fine, and that is the result, not a failed test.
2. Cream versus white. Drape a cream top and a stark white one under the chin. Cream flatters warm olive; white flatters cool olive; if neither is clearly worse, you are neutral.
3. Rust versus berry. The most decisive pair for olive skin. Hold a rust or burnt-orange top against a raspberry or berry one. Warm olive glows in rust and looks tired in berry; cool olive is the opposite. Neutral olive looks decent in both and best in something between them: cranberry, wine, plum.
4. The foundation stripe. Swatch a warm (golden) shade, a cool (pink) shade and a neutral shade on the jaw and leave them for ten minutes. The one that disappears is your undertone. On most olive skin the warm and cool stripes both look wrong, one gray and one orange, and a neutral or olive-labeled shade wins.
5. The pastel test. Hold a baby-pink or pale-lemon top to the face. If the skin instantly looks yellow-green, the skin is olive, whatever the undertone. Pastels flatter very few olives; when one does work, it is a cool pastel on a cool olive.

Score it: three or more "warm" results and you are warm olive; three or more "cool" and you are cool olive; a mixed scorecard means neutral olive, which is a genuine, common result. If you would rather not judge your own face in your own bathroom, a photo-based color analysis reads undertone, depth and contrast together and places you in a season, which is the most useful answer of all.

Light, medium and deep olive

Depth changes the answer as much as temperature does. A fair olive, common in parts of southern Europe and the Middle East, can look almost sallow in the wrong color and shows the green cast most clearly; it needs the softer end of its palette and rarely wears black well. A medium olive has the widest range and is the depth most of the advice below assumes. A deep olive carries black, bright white and the strongest jewel tones without any trouble, and its main risk is the opposite one: muted, dusty shades can make it look flat. When a color in the table below is marked as suitable, assume a medium depth and adjust a step lighter for fair olive or a step stronger for deep olive.

The palette for olive undertones

Ten colors that harmonize with the green cast, with the shift each undertone should make.

Neutrals: Cream #EFE4CD (warm and neutral olives), Camel #B68A52 (warm), Chocolate #4A3526 (all three), Charcoal #3B3B40 (neutral and cool) and Navy #1E2A44 (all three, and the most flattering dark for every olive). Cool olives can add crisp white; warm olives should keep white for trousers rather than tops.

Metals: gold for warm olive, silver or white gold for cool olive. Neutral olives can wear both, and a mixed-metal stack is a natural look for them rather than a compromise.

Colors that fight olive skin (every kind)

• Pale pastels: baby pink, powder blue, pale lemon, mint. They have no depth to balance the cast, so the skin reads sallow.
• Yellow-beige and khaki that match the cast: sand, stone, khaki and camel right at the face on a neutral or cool olive. When the garment is in the same color family as the cast, the skin disappears into it.
• Orange-toned reds on cool olives, blue-toned reds on warm olives. Red is olive skin's best color when the temperature is right and its worst when it is not.
• Pure black on lighter olives. It throws gray shadows onto the green cast. Navy, charcoal and aubergine do the same job more kindly. Deep olives are the exception and wear black well.

Makeup for each olive undertone

Foundation is where olive skin suffers most, so start there. Look for shades labeled olive, golden-olive, neutral-olive or "yellow-green" in the description; several brands now carry a small olive range, and ordering samples of two shades is cheaper than a wrong full bottle. Warm olives want a golden-olive; cool olives a neutral-to-olive with no peach; neutral olives a true neutral. If a shade sits slightly pink, a drop of a green-leaning color corrector mixed in usually fixes it. There is a full method in how to find your foundation shade.

Blush: brick, terracotta and warm apricot for warm olive; muted rose-brown and cranberry for neutral olive; cool berry and plum-rose for cool olive. A peachy-pink blush turns muddy on most olives; see best blush for your skin tone.

Lips: warm olive, brick, tomato and warm nude-brown; neutral olive, cranberry, wine and rosewood; cool olive, raspberry, berry and blue-based red. The nude that works on every olive is a muted rose-brown a shade deeper than the lips themselves.

Eyes: bronze, copper and moss on warm olives; taupe, plum and teal on neutral olives; slate, aubergine and silver-gray on cool olives.

Hair color by olive undertone

Warm olives look best in warm chestnut, caramel, golden brown, copper-brown and warm espresso, anything with gold or red in it, and ash tones make a warm olive look unwell. Neutral olives suit rich neutral browns, dark chocolate, mushroom-brown and soft black, with either warm or cool dimension in small doses. Cool olives look best in cool dark brown, espresso, blue-black and, for the brave, cool aubergine; brassy or golden highlights are the one thing to avoid. Whatever the olive, keep the depth close to natural: very light blonde over olive skin tends to make the cast look greener rather than the hair look brighter. There is more in best colors for olive skin and olive skin and brown eyes.

Where olive undertones land in the seasons

Because olive skin usually comes with dark hair and eyes, it clusters in the deeper, more muted seasons:

• Warm olive: True Autumn if rich and golden, Deep Autumn if very dark.
• Neutral olive: Soft Autumn if muted and medium, Deep Winter if high in contrast.
• Cool olive: Deep Winter if dramatic, Soft Summer if soft.

A fair olive with lighter hair can occasionally type as Light or True Summer; a very deep olive almost always sits in Deep Autumn or Deep Winter. Each season page gives the full palette with hex codes.

Once you know which olive you are

Buy the three colors every olive can wear first: teal, plum and navy. They work whatever the tests said, and they make a small capsule that nothing else in the wardrobe will clash with. Then let the undertone pick the accents, rust and mustard for warm, cranberry and olive green for neutral, berry and emerald for cool, and match the metal to the same answer. The pastels in the wardrobe can go, and so can the foundation that looked right in the shop and gray at home.