What hair colour would look good on me?
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Undertone decides whether a hair colour leans warm or cool, and your natural level decides how far you can move from it. Eye colour only breaks the tie.
Two things decide which hair colour suits you, and most advice mentions only one. Undertone sets the direction: warm skin takes golden, copper and caramel, cool skin takes ash, beige and true browns. Depth sets the distance. It is how far you can move from your natural level before the colour outshouts you. Eye colour breaks a tie between two finalists. Everything after that is upkeep.
Why undertone alone gives bad advice
Undertone on its own produces advice you cannot act on. It tells a warm-toned person that copper suits them, which is true of a light golden copper and equally true of a dark auburn, and those two colours look nothing alike. Depth is what separates them.
How do I find my undertone?
Look at the skin on the inside of your forearm in daylight, not under a bulb. Veins that read green and jewellery that looks better in gold point warm. Veins that read blue or purple and silver beating gold point cool. How easily you burn is not part of this test. That is how much melanin you have, which is a separate axis from which way your undertone runs, and mixing the two is where most online quizzes go wrong. The vein test also gets unreliable on deep skin tones, where the jewellery comparison is the more useful one. If you keep switching answers, you are probably neutral.
What does hair colour level mean?
Most colourists count depth in levels, usually one for black up to ten for the palest blonde, though the scale is not standardised and some brands run to twelve. Your natural level is whatever grows out of your head at the root, not the ends, which are usually a level or two lighter from sun and wear.
Your skin has a depth too, and the useful question is how much contrast you want between the two. High contrast, meaning dark hair against fair skin or pale hair against deep skin, is a strong graphic choice and it shows every millimetre of regrowth. Low contrast is quieter and forgiving. If you are not sure which you want, take the low-contrast version. High contrast is a schedule as much as a look.
Undertone and depth together
Find the row that matches both. The last column is the failure mode for that row, and it is the useful half of the table.
| You are | Families that work | Named examples | What usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cool, fair to light | Ash, beige, cool blonde, soft cool brown | Champagne blonde, icy platinum, ash brown, mushroom brown | Golden and honey tones tend to bring out any pink in the skin. Overdone ash goes grey rather than blonde. |
| Cool, medium | Cool browns, cool reds, soft black-brown | Chestnut, cocoa brown, cherry red, burgundy | Caramel highlights turn brassy within weeks. Solid black leaves a hard line to grow out. |
| Cool, deep | Blue-black, espresso, cool reds and violets | Jet black, espresso, plum-black, deep burgundy | Honey balayage goes orange as it fades. Bleach stalls at orange before it ever reaches the target shade. |
| Warm, fair to light | Golden blonde, honey, strawberry, light copper | Honey blonde, golden beige, strawberry blonde, light copper | Heavy ash flattens the warmth in the skin. Platinum takes a lot of lift for a small visible change. |
| Warm, medium | Caramel, toffee, copper, auburn, warm chestnut | Caramel bronde, toffee brown, copper, auburn | Cool ash brown goes flat. Copper fades faster than most other families. |
| Warm, deep | Warm espresso, mahogany, chocolate with red in it | Mahogany, dark chocolate, dark auburn, warm espresso | Blue-black cancels the warmth. Lifting past mid-brown exposes an orange base that has to be toned every time. |
| Neutral, fair to light | Neutral blondes and light browns, either direction | Sandy blonde, bronde, neutral light brown | Not the colour, the flatness. Neutral on neutral in one process has no contrast anywhere. |
| Neutral, medium | Neutral and soft warm browns, muted reds | Walnut brown, soft caramel, rosewood, muted auburn | Pushing hard warm or hard cool looks like a costume rather than a colour. |
| Neutral, deep | Soft black, dark neutral brown, deep reds both ways | Soft black, dark chocolate, wine red | The root line is high contrast in either direction, because there is no natural halfway shade to blend into. |
Does eye colour matter when picking a hair colour?
Last, and only as a tiebreak. If two shades from your row are both plausible, pick the one furthest in tone from your eyes: copper and warm brown make green and hazel look stronger, cool ash and true brown do the same for blue and grey, and warm golds lift dark brown. This is the smallest of the three inputs. It is a reason to pick auburn over chestnut when you cannot choose. It is not a reason to override your level.
How far to move from your natural level
This is where the money goes, and it is not the same question as picking a shade. The same caramel is a gloss on one person and three bleach sessions on another. The intervals below are salon rules of thumb, not measurements, and your hair will argue with them.
| Distance from your natural level | What it takes | Root upkeep | How reversible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Same level, different tone | A gloss or toner | Almost none, the root is already the right depth | Easy, it fades out on its own |
| One to two levels darker | Demi or permanent colour, one appointment | Every 8 to 12 weeks, and the line is soft | Fair, though dark dye has to be lifted back out |
| One to two levels lighter | Highlights, or a high-lift permanent colour, usually no full bleach | Every 8 to 12 weeks | Easy |
| Three or more levels lighter | Bleach, often across more than one session | Every 4 to 6 weeks if it is solid | Hard, and the change in hair condition stays until it grows out |
| Pastel or fashion colour | Bleach to a pale base, then a deposit on top | Colour fades in roughly 4 to 8 washes | The colour goes, the lift stays |
The two-level rule is worth taking seriously. Within two levels of your natural depth the colour looks like it grew there, the regrowth is a soft shadow instead of a stripe, and a change of mind is a single appointment. Past two levels you are committing to a maintenance schedule, not choosing a colour.
How many levels lighter can I go without bleach?
About two, and only from a mid-to-light base. Highlights and a high-lift permanent colour will carry most people that far in one appointment. From a dark base the same two levels expose the orange sitting under the brown, so the result has to be toned at every visit, and anything past that is bleach whatever the box calls it.
All over, or balayage and face-framing
Start partial. Almost always.
Full single-process colour changes every hair on your head, including the ones at the crown where the regrowth line shows first. Balayage and face-framing put the colour where it does the work, which is the hair around your face that people see when they talk to you, and leave your natural level at the root. The grow-out is diffuse rather than a line, so the appointment gap stretches from weeks to months.
Should I get all-over colour or balayage?
Balayage, unless you are changing depth. Partial colour adds dimension to your hair, it does not move how dark your hair is, so going dark or covering grey evenly is a single-process job and there is no way around it. Test everything else as a face-framing piece first, including the copper you have been thinking about for a year.
What a photograph cannot tell you
None of the three things that settle this in real life show up in an image, rendered or otherwise.
How it grows out. Scalp hair grows about a centimetre a month, give or take. That is invisible in a photograph and it is the whole story six weeks later. A high-contrast colour on a straight parting starts showing a line inside the first month. The same colour, painted on as balayage, still looks intentional months in. Ask about the grow-out before you ask about the shade.
How much the roots will cost you. Root upkeep is a standing appointment and a standing bill. Before you commit, work out what your colour needs per year and say out loud whether you want that. Grey coverage in particular is not optional maintenance. Once the line shows, it shows.
Whether your hair will take it. Porosity, texture and history govern the result more than the swatch does. Previously box-dyed hair holds old pigment that fights the new one. Compound henna, the kind cut with metallic salts, can react with peroxide and heat up instead of lifting, which is how hair gets scorched. Pure body-art henna and most direct dyes resist lift rather than reacting, which is its own problem. Either way, tell the colourist everything that is already on your hair. Grey resists deposit, coarse grey especially, because the cuticle is tighter and there is no melanin for the colour to key to, so it needs a longer processing time or a filler. Lifting dark hair exposes warm pigment underneath, orange first and then yellow, which is why a cool ash target from a dark base needs toning at every appointment and drifts warm between them. Red is the other special case: red pigment molecules are the largest of the common dyes, so they sit shallower in the cortex and wash out sooner, and red and copper fade fastest of the common families. The fade goes towards orange rather than towards nothing.
Where trying it on your own face helps
Looksmith renders hair colour and dye placement onto your own face, so you can look at a full copper, a balayage or a single face-framing piece before you book anything. Two design facts matter more than the picture. Looksmith paints the colour into a photograph of you, in your pose and your lighting, instead of dropping your face into a model's photograph, so what you are comparing is your hair against your skin. And the cut is locked: Looksmith changes colour and placement, never length, layers, parting or a fringe. Looksmith is an app from Mirable Labs, Inc., coming soon to iOS. A look takes roughly a minute.
Can I see a hair colour on my own face before I book?
Yes, as a picture rather than a promise. Looksmith settles whether a shade sits well against your skin, which is the question the swatch book is worst at. It settles nothing about what your hair has to go through to get there. Looksmith has no idea what your porosity is. Take the picture to the consultation and ask the colourist the second question.
The short way to decide
- Work out your undertone, then your natural level, and go to the one row that matches both.
- Pick two shades from that row, and let your eye colour choose between them.
- Test the winner as face-framing before you test it all over. If you still want it in three months, go all over.
A colour that suits you and needs an appointment every four weeks is not a colour that suits you. Choose the shade and the schedule at the same time.
Looksmith renders a full makeup look onto your own face and lists the products it used. iOS, coming soon.
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