Determining your skin tone before applying anything on your skin is essential. It helps you choose the appropriate color of makeup, lipstick or cosmetics you apply on your skin to make you look natural. Or if you are planning to contour through a self tanner, you will not regret it because you know it fits your color. It also helps you choose the perfect color for your hair if you want to change your hair color, accessories or the dress you wear. 
Take note, once you’ve used self-tanner to darken your complexion, you have to change also the shade of your makeups and foundation and even your hair color, to blend well with your new skin color. Here are some ways to determine whether your skin tone is cool, warm, or neutral. But before you do these steps, make sure your skin is clean and free from cosmetics and do it in the natural light.
- The fastest way to know your skin tone is by looking at the veins in your wrist. If your veins look blue or purple, your skin tone is cool. If your veins look green, your skin tone is warm. But if you can’t determine whether it looks green or blue, your skin tone is neutral.
- If you get tan effortlessly and do not burn, you have a warm skin tone. But if you burn easily and have difficulty in tanning, therefore you have a cool skin tone.
- Try using a gold or silver foil or jewelry to determine your skin tone. Just simply hold a sheet of gold foil towards your face so that it will reflect on your skin. If the gold foil looks best, your skin tone is warm. Then try silver foil too. If your skin’s reflection from the silver foil is glowing then you have a cool skin tone. If you can’t determine the difference, then you have neutral skin tone.
- You can also ask the help of someone to look at the skin behind your ear, right in the little crease at the back of your ear. If the skin is yellowish, you probably have a warm skin tone. But if your skin is pink or rosy, you have a cool skin tone.
If you have cool skin tone or fair complexion, you can blend your skin color with darker colors. If your skin tone is warm or you have a darker complexion, wear light or pale colors. And if you have neutral skin tone, you can use both.
Knowing your base color will help you in deciding about self tanners. You can also have an idea about what makeup or self tanners to get for contouring!
