Colors for your features
Best colors for brown hair
By the Skintonic team · SKINTONIC LLC · Updated
Brown covers more of the depth scale than it gets credit for. Light brown and near-black brown are four or five levels apart, and four levels is the distance between two different color types — so "best colors for brunettes" is a question about which brown, not about brown.
That is visible in the sweep. Medium brown across 840 combinations returns Deep Autumn, Cool Winter, Bright Spring, Warm Autumn, Cool Summer, Deep Winter and Soft Summer, while light brown shifts the answer toward Soft Summer and Cool Summer. The useful move for anyone with brown hair is to stop asking about the color and start asking about the level, which is the thing a colourist would ask first anyway.
The honest key point
Brown hair is a reading on depth, and together with your skin it sets contrast. It is not a palette by itself. Colouring brown hair changes the answer at once, because depth and contrast are both measured across the whole face with the hair in it, while undertone and chroma are untouched. A dyed head of brown hair is genuinely a different reading from a natural one, and the result worth having is the one taken as you look now.
Brown hair with cooler skin
Where the skin underneath leans cool, brown hair points at Cool Winter, Cool Summer, Deep Winter and Soft Summer. Eight of their published colors:
- True Red
- Deep Raspberry
- Deep Emerald
- Muted Burgundy
- Royal Purple
- Blueberry
- Wine
- Deep Sage
Brown hair with warmer skin
Where it leans warm instead, brown hair points at Deep Autumn, Bright Spring and Warm Autumn instead. The shift between the two sets is direction rather than weight, which is why this eight looks related to the eight above and behaves nothing like it against brown hair:
- Warm Deep Burgundy
- Shocking Pink
- Deep Rust
- Pine Green
- Bright Turquoise
- Forest Green
- Chestnut
- Violet
Shades to keep away from brown hair
Extremes in either direction
The types brown hair points at disagree with each other about undertone, so no single category of shade is wrong for all of them. The very warmest shades will be wrong for some of them and the very coolest for others, so until brown hair has been narrowed to one type, the middle of any range is where to shop.
Three outfits for brown hair
Assembled from the brown hair chips above rather than from a lookbook — the first piece sits nearest your face and has to be right, the second is forgiving, and the third is small enough to be a bag, a scarf or a shoe.
- TopTrue Red
- BottomWarm Deep Burgundy
- AccentDeep Raspberry
- TopDeep Emerald
- BottomDeep Rust
- AccentTrue Red
- TopShocking Pink
- BottomDeep Raspberry
- AccentDeep Emerald
Natural against dyed
Colouring brown hair changes the answer at once, because depth and contrast are both measured across the whole face with the hair in it, while undertone and chroma are untouched. A dyed head of brown hair is genuinely a different reading from a natural one, and the result worth having is the one taken as you look now.
If you are about to book a colourist, the per-season hair pages give the level and the direction to ask for rather than a shade name: Deep Autumn hair · Cool Winter hair · Bright Spring hair · Warm Autumn hair · Cool Summer hair · Deep Winter hair · Soft Summer hair.
Your exact palette depends on all four factors, not on brown hair alone. The scan reads undertone, depth, contrast and chroma from one photo, shows you the three colors it took off your face so you can correct them, and names your type — free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded.
Get my palette from one photo — free
Questions
What colors suit brown hair?
It depends which of Deep Autumn, Cool Winter, Bright Spring, Warm Autumn, Cool Summer, Deep Winter and Soft Summer you turn out to be, and brown hair alone cannot settle that. The two shortlists above take both sides of the undertone split, because that is where the real difference sits — 7 types came up across 840 runs, and that is the honest size of the answer for brown hair.
Does dyeing brown hair change my color type?
Colouring brown hair changes the answer at once, because depth and contrast are both measured across the whole face with the hair in it, while undertone and chroma are untouched. A dyed head of brown hair is genuinely a different reading from a natural one, and the result worth having is the one taken as you look now.
Which metal works with brown hair?
Gold, Silver, Gold or bright silver and Soft / brushed silver, depending which type brown hair turns out to belong to. Where those types disagree about it, the disagreement is itself a test for brown hair: hold both metals against your jaw in daylight, and whichever stops the skin reading gray is pointing at your half of the split.
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