Gentlemen- Colours For Your Skin Tone

Probably your friends have told you a million times that bright yellow shirt you bought doesn’t look good on you; and even though you like it, the colour just doesn’t work for your skin tone.

Wearing colors that just don’t flatter you will make you look washed out and tired, even if you’ve had a good eight hours of sleep.

Finding colors that suit you and don’t clash with your skin tone are an important part of presenting yourself as a stylish person and we here at 1 Africa are going to help you never look like a giant rainbow mess ever again.

Determining your Skin Tone

Every person has a natural undertone and it can usually be divided into three categories – warm, cool and neutral. Determining your skin’s undertone can be as simple as these couples of steps.

Sit in front of a mirror and make sure you have plenty of natural light. From there, you should be able to obviously see what tone your skin naturally emits.

There are also a number of other tricks to help you determine what your skin tone is, like if your skin looks better against silver jewellery, chances are you have a cool undertone. If it looks better against gold jewellery, you have a warm undertone. Darker skin tones tend to have warmer undertones like olive and gold and fairer skin tones have more pink and cooler undertones.

Once you figure out what undertone you have, you’re ready to move on to better and wiser fashion choices.

Color and Your Skin Tone

If you have a golden or olive skin tone, you’ll want to stick to warm colors. Warm skin tones mean warm colors, and cooler skin tones mean cool colors.

However, that’s not to say that if you want to wear that purple pullover, you can’t anymore. It’s more of a guideline to help you pick colors that will complement your skin.

Because each color has different shades to it, these shades may suit your specific skin tones. For example, purple can be plum, lavender or magenta. Lavender would look better on someone with a cooler skin tone whereas a darker and rich plum would look best on a warmer skin tone.

Warm Skin Tones

Like we said, warmer skin tones like olive or gold tend to look better suited to warmer colors. Reds, golds, oranges, yellows, camels, dark browns all look great on your skin type.

Next time you’re shopping for a pullover, why not try a rich red or dark orange? That will complement your skin tone.

Neutral Skin Tones

Usually most neutral skin tones will sway to either warm or cold, but overall you can pretty much wear any color your little heart desires. Our hat is off to you if you want to wear that terribly bright pink shirt.

Cool Skin Tones

If you’ve determined that you’re a cooler skin tone that falls within the pinks, blues and purples, colder colors will look best on you. That being said, purples, blues, greens and pinks look great with your skin.

Why not try a purple shirt with your grey suit for a pop of color that brightens your overall appearance? So when you walk into your office Monday morning looking bright, you can thank this skin color guide for those extra compliments.