The Pros Tell All: The Key To Choosing A Lip Color That Complements Your Skin

If you've ever bought a lip color just to realize it doesn't complement your skin as expected it would post-purchase, you're not alone. This is a universal experience for lipstick wearers everywhere—and it's frustrating, to say the least.

Lipstick shopping sounds like a walk in the park until you realize that navigating the vast world of a million different shades of pinks, peaches, berries, reds, wines, and browns isn't easy—like at all.

To narrow down the search a bit, you can call on the undertone matching method—something plenty of makeup experts and wearers do on the regular.

But just remember, makeup should be fun! When you overthink the shades and second-guess all your choices, all of a sudden it becomes belabored. Life can be stressful enough, let's not add "lipstick undertones" to the list of things that may give you pause.

Skin tone has to do with the richness of your skin color (fair, medium, and deep for example). Undertones are the colors shining through under your skin.

Each skin tone can have different undertones—the main four being cool, warm, neutral, and olive. When lip color doesn't match the undertone, there may be a clash.

"It does matter, because when people wear pink lipstick, the pink lipstick can look completely different for each individual person," celebrity makeup artist & SHEGLAM Partner Allan Avendano tells mbg. "Some pinks can turn orange, some can turn bubblegum pink…It all depends on your undertone."

However, like everything in beauty, the end-all-be-all is personal preference, as makeup is an art and not a science. If you like a shade of lipstick and it makes you feel good, that's all that matters, undertones or not.

You may have figured out what undertones your skin has, but what about the lipsticks themselves? Yes, makeup has it's own undertones too. For example a red may have more blue undertones (making it a cool shade) or more coral (making it warm.)

One way to figure out if the lip color is more warm or cool is to default to the paper test above: Compare the shade to red paper versus blue paper, and see which one it better blends with.

However, a word of warning: Identifying undertones in reds and pink lipsticks can be a bit easier than doing so in nudes.

Cool undertones give the skin a pink, blue, or red hue. If silvery jewelry complements your skin best, you just might have cool undertones.

Warm undertones have a base of yellowish, gold, and peach hues sneaking through.

If gold jewelry complements your skin better than silver, you may have warm undertones.

Neutral undertones have the luck of the draw, as most colors will complement a neutral undertone.

This means you'll have both yellow and blue undertones, so you can pick from a wide variety of colors without worrying about clashes.

Olive undertone is different from neutral (though they're often confused for the same). Olive undertones have a green, gray, and sometimes ashy undertone.

If you've been hunting for the perfect lipstick for your skin but haven't had any luck, hopefully, this guide will serve as a road map.