Colors for your features
Best colors for medium skin
By the Skintonic team · SKINTONIC LLC · Updated
Medium and tan skin sit in the middle of the depth scale, and the middle is the most forgiving place to be. A great deal of the standard advice for this range amounts to "you can wear most things", which is almost true and completely useless when you are standing in a shop.
What the analysis actually returns is more specific. Across 1,120 combinations containing a medium skin tone, the types that keep coming back are Light Summer, Bright Spring, Light Spring, Cool Summer, Cool Winter, Warm Autumn and Bright Winter. Depth is not what separates them — they share it — so the answer comes down to undertone and clarity, and that is where this page spends its time.
The honest key point
Medium skin is one reading on one of the four axes, and on its own it cannot name a palette — undertone, depth, contrast and chroma name it together. So what follows is two medium skin shortlists, split by undertone, rather than one list of shades.
Medium skin with a cool undertone
At the cool / rosy end of the medium skin range, the analysis returns Light Summer, Cool Summer, Cool Winter and Bright Winter across 448 runs. Eight medium skin colors drawn from them, each already published on its own season page:
- Rose
- Deep Raspberry
- True Red
- Shocking Pink
- Cool Berry
- Blueberry
- Royal Purple
- Electric Blue
Medium skin with a warm undertone
At the warm / golden end, the same sweep over 448 runs returns Bright Spring, Light Spring, Warm Autumn, Warm Spring and Soft Autumn instead. Hold this eight against the eight above: they barely overlap, and both belong to people with medium skin, which is the whole argument against treating depth as the question.
- Shocking Pink
- Poppy Orange
- Deep Rust
- Poppy Red
- Deep Rust
- Bright Turquoise
- Warm Turquoise
- Forest Green
What usually works against medium skin
In words rather than in shades, because standing in a shop with medium skin what you need is a category that applies to a garment nobody has photographed. With 7 types in play for medium skin, these hold across most of them, and where they disagree the disagreement is itself the answer.
Extremes in either direction
The types medium skin 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 medium skin has been narrowed to one type, the middle of any range is where to shop.
Three outfits for medium skin
Assembled from the medium skin 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.
- TopRose
- BottomShocking Pink
- AccentDeep Raspberry
- TopTrue Red
- BottomDeep Rust
- AccentRose
- TopPoppy Orange
- BottomDeep Raspberry
- AccentTrue Red
Where to go next with medium skin
Each type has its own page with the whole explanation, including what its contrast wants and which metal sits better against it: Light Summer, Bright Spring, Light Spring, Cool Summer, Cool Winter, Warm Autumn and Bright Winter. For how medium skin sits against the other four depths, the skin tone overview puts them side by side.
Your exact palette depends on all four factors, not on medium skin 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
Does medium skin mean I am a Light Summer?
Not on its own, no. Light Summer came up most often in the 1,120 runs behind this page, but Bright Spring, Light Spring, Cool Summer, Cool Winter, Warm Autumn and Bright Winter all came up a good deal too. The depth of medium skin is one reading out of four, and the remaining three are what actually settle it.
How do I tell whether my medium skin is warm or cool?
Hold a gold chain and then a silver one against your jaw at a window, watching the medium skin rather than the metal — cool or rosy skin is lifted by the silver and warm or golden skin by the gold. The undertone test walks through three more of these for medium skin. If the two metals look equally fine against medium skin, you are probably in the neutral middle, which is common and is not a failure to decide.
Can I wear black with medium skin?
Yes, and with medium skin more easily than most people manage it — black needs coloring deep enough to meet it, and the types medium skin tends toward have that depth to spare — so here it behaves like the neutral it is sold as rather than the loudest thing in the room.
Related
Colors for olive skin · Colors for brown skin · Colors for deep skin · Every feature
Color analysis quiz · Undertone test · Check a single color · All 12 color types