Neutral Undertone: What It Really Means and Which Colours Work

A neutral undertone means your skin leans only a little warm or a little cool, so neither side clearly wins when you compare colours in daylight. It does not mean you have no season, and it does not mean you should dress in beige. In the twelve-season system it points to the subtypes that sit on the border between a warm and a cool season. And quite often, what feels like neutral is something else: colouring so soft that every test comes out blurred.

What neutral really means

Your undertone is the steady cast beneath the surface of your skin: golden, peachy or ivory if it is warm, rosy, pink or faintly bluish if it is cool. It is a scale rather than a switch, and most people sit somewhere along it rather than at either end. Neutral describes the middle stretch, where gold and pink are in close balance and the skin reads as beige, rose-beige or a soft golden beige.

Almost nobody is perfectly balanced. Nearly everyone with a neutral undertone still leans a little, and that small lean matters, so it is more useful to think in two halves: neutral-warm, with a quiet thread of gold, and neutral-cool, with a quiet thread of rose. Warm or cool undertone covers the home tests; here we look at what to do when they keep coming out even.

A neutral undertone and neutral colours are separate ideas. Beige, grey and taupe lean warm or cool like any other colour, and a neutral undertone does not limit you to them.

Where neutral sits in the twelve seasons

The twelve seasons are built on three qualities. Warmth is the undertone. Depth is how light or dark your colouring is overall, hair and eyes included. Clarity is how clear or soft it is: clear colouring has sharp contrast between hair, skin and eyes, so they stand apart, while soft colouring has features that blend into one another. Every subtype is named after the quality that leads it.

Four subtypes are led by warmth, and they are the furthest from neutral: Warm Spring and Warm Autumn at the warm end, Cool Summer and Cool Winter at the cool end. The other eight are led by lightness, depth, clarity or softness. They come in pairs across a season border, sharing their leading quality and differing mainly in warmth, and that is where a neutral undertone usually lands. On our subtype pages:

• The soft pair. Soft Autumn is warm-neutral, with golden beige skin that rarely looks obviously pink or obviously yellow. Soft Summer is cool-neutral, with rose-beige skin, sometimes with a faintly greyed or olive cast.
• The deep pair. Deep Autumn is warm or warm-neutral. Deep Winter is cool, though often only just.
• The bright pair. Bright Spring carries a lighter warmth than the other Springs, close to neutral. Bright Winter is cool, sometimes with a trace of neutral.
• The light pair. Light Summer is the Summer nearest to Spring, with a mild coolness and pink or neutral-pink skin. Light Spring is its warm counterpart, light first and warm second, with peach, ivory or pale golden skin. Light Spring is clearly warm on our pages, so a light colouring that keeps testing neutral is more likely to be Light Summer, whose mild coolness often gives the home tests a mixed answer.

So "neutral" alone does not give you a season; it tells you that warmth is probably not what leads your colouring. The twelve seasons shows how the pairs sit on the wheel.

Neutral-warm and neutral-cool

The lean is small, so you need comparisons that differ only a little. Coral against fuchsia tells you little. Try closer pairs, equal in depth and softness, in daylight by a window:

• salmon against dusty rose;
• camel against blue-grey;
• a yellow-based sage against a grey sage;
• brushed gold against pewter.

Neutral-warm usually looks more settled in salmon, camel and brushed gold, and a little grey in blue-grey. The hair, in sunlight, has a quiet gold or a faint copper glint, and the eyes may hold amber or golden flecks. This points to Soft Autumn, Deep Autumn, Bright Spring or Light Spring, depending on what leads.

Neutral-cool looks calmer in dusty rose, blue-grey and pewter, and faintly yellow in camel. The hair has an ashy or smoky sheen, and the eyes are often grey-green, grey-blue or a muted brown. This points to Soft Summer, Light Summer, Deep Winter or Bright Winter. If your skin also looks pink, My skin looks pink: am I warm or cool? shows how to tell a rose-beige undertone from surface redness, which can make a neutral face look cooler than it is.

Hair is a useful witness. In soft colouring, a neutral undertone often shows as hair that mixes ash and gold strands, so that it looks slightly sun-faded, or as a mushroom brown with no obvious gold or red; in deep or bright colouring, look for a faint warm or ashy glint in sunlight.

Neutral and soft: why the two travel together

A lot of people decide they are neutral because every home test gives them a mixed answer. Often the more useful message is that their colouring is soft as well: both soft subtypes sit close to neutral on our pages, and softness, not the undertone, is what leads them.

Softness is the quiet end of the clarity scale, the quality sometimes called chroma: how much grey is mixed into a colour; in a face, how closely hair, skin and eyes blend. Soft colouring has hair, skin and eyes close together in tone, eyes in several blended shades, and little contrast. On such a face, the warm and the cool member of a vivid pair both look a little off, because the clarity is wrong before warmth even comes into it. A bright coral and a bright fuchsia can both overpower soft colouring, and the conclusion drawn is "neutral". Our Soft Summer page makes the same point: muted colouring makes the undertone harder to read, and the vein and jewellery tests often come out neutral.

The check is to change clarity, not warmth. Hold a clear colour against a muted version of it: a clear turquoise against a dusty teal, a pure red against a brick, fuchsia against dusty rose. If the muted version wins on both the warm and the cool side, you are soft, and your small lean then decides between Soft Autumn and Soft Summer.

If the clear colours win instead, look at the bright pair. If only the darkest colours carry you, look at the deep pair; if pale colours look best and dark ones heavy, the light pair. Why do I look washed out? shows how each of these qualities shows in the mirror.

Colours that tend to work on a neutral undertone

With a neutral undertone you can often wear a wider range of colours than people at either end, as long as they match your depth and clarity. What tends to fail is the far end of the side you do not lean towards: icy pastels and blue-grey on a neutral-warm face, orange, mustard and brassy gold on a neutral-cool one. The surest choices are the colours two neighbouring subtypes share, because they suit you whichever way your lean turns out:

• Soft pair: a muted teal, mushroom, stone, a soft charcoal and a rose-brown, with oyster or ecru in place of white.
• Deep pair: deep teal, a wine burgundy that is neither brown nor violet, and aubergine.
• Bright pair: a clear turquoise, deep navy and a clean, bright off-white rather than a creamy one.
• Light pair: light aqua, periwinkle and a softened mid-navy.

Neutrals follow the same logic: choose them by depth and clarity first, then by your lean. Wardrobe neutrals by season sets out which ones belong to each subtype.

Metals follow the same logic, with the finish chosen by your clarity; gold or silver goes through each subtype.

Hair colour for a neutral undertone

Your natural hair is the best guide, because it usually agrees with your undertone. With a neutral undertone it often sits between ash and gold, and the safest changes keep it there. The directions that tend to look wrong are the far ends of the side you do not lean towards: brassy gold and orange-copper on a neutral-cool face, platinum and icy ash on a neutral-warm one. Soft colouring tends to look wrong in both.

Within that, your lean picks the tone and your depth picks the level:

• Soft and neutral-warm: soft golden brown, honey-beige, caramel or a muted light auburn, with blended highlights that look sun-faded.
• Soft and neutral-cool: mushroom brown, soft ash brown or a soft ash blonde, blended rather than striped.
• Light: honey or light golden blonde if you lean warm, pearl or beige blonde if you lean cool. Very dark shades take away the lightness.
• Deep: stay close to your natural dark shade. Espresso or dark chocolate with fine caramel lights suits Deep Autumn, for whom blue-black is too cool; cool dark brown or a black-cherry tint suits Deep Winter. Lifting several shades loses the depth.
• Bright: keep the contrast and the shine, with a rich warm brown or chestnut for Bright Spring and a dark, glossy cool brown or black for Bright Winter. A flat mid-tone dulls the eyes.

Hair colour by season has the full directions for each subtype.

Where to go next

A neutral result is not a dead end: it tells you to look past warmth to depth and clarity, and then let your small lean settle the rest.

The natural next step is the free colour test: eight questions about your natural colouring, with no e-mail and no photo, after which it suggests which of the four seasons is yours. If two neighbours across the border still look equally right, the personal colour analysis works from a few questions plus one to three photos taken in natural light, and sends a PDF report naming the colours to wear and the ones to avoid.