Colors for your features
Best colors for red hair
By the Skintonic team · SKINTONIC LLC · Updated
Red is the only hair color with real saturation in it. Every other shade on the chart is a brown, a blonde or a black at some level of lightness; auburn carries actual chroma, and that single fact does more to narrow a palette than anything else a head of hair can do.
Measured, the auburn range in our data sits at a chroma of 5 out of five, the top of the scale. Across 840 combinations containing it, the analysis returns Deep Winter, Bright Spring, Deep Autumn, Warm Spring, Light Spring and Cool Summer — and those are the warm and clear types, which is what a saturated head of hair implies. Redheads get a narrower palette than blondes and a much easier one to shop for.
The honest key point
Red hair is a reading on depth, and together with your skin it sets contrast. It is not a palette by itself. Colouring red 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 red hair is genuinely a different reading from a natural one, and the result worth having is the one taken as you look now.
Red hair with cooler skin
Where the skin underneath leans cool, red hair points at Deep Winter and Cool Summer. Eight of their published colors:
- Deep Emerald
- Deep Raspberry
- Wine
- Blueberry
- Royal Purple
- Plum
- True Red
- Cool Teal
Red hair with warmer skin
Where it leans warm instead, red hair points at Bright Spring, Deep Autumn, Warm Spring and Light Spring 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 red hair:
- Shocking Pink
- Warm Deep Burgundy
- Poppy Red
- Poppy Orange
- Bright Turquoise
- Pine Green
- Golden Amber
- Warm Turquoise
Shades to keep away from red hair
Extremes in either direction
The types red 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 red hair has been narrowed to one type, the middle of any range is where to shop.
Three outfits for red hair
Assembled from the red 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.
- TopDeep Emerald
- BottomShocking Pink
- AccentDeep Raspberry
- TopWine
- BottomPoppy Red
- AccentDeep Emerald
- TopWarm Deep Burgundy
- BottomDeep Raspberry
- AccentWine
Natural against dyed
Colouring red 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 red 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 Winter hair · Bright Spring hair · Deep Autumn hair · Warm Spring hair · Light Spring hair · Cool Summer hair.
Your exact palette depends on all four factors, not on red 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 red hair?
It depends which of Deep Winter, Bright Spring, Deep Autumn, Warm Spring, Light Spring and Cool Summer you turn out to be, and red hair alone cannot settle that. The two shortlists above take both sides of the undertone split, because that is where the real difference sits — 6 types came up across 840 runs, and that is the honest size of the answer for red hair.
Does dyeing red hair change my color type?
Colouring red 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 red 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 red hair?
Silver, Gold or bright silver and Gold, depending which type red hair turns out to belong to. Where those types disagree about it, the disagreement is itself a test for red hair: hold both metals against your jaw in daylight, and whichever stops the skin reading gray is pointing at your half of the split.
Related
Colors for brown hair · Colors for black hair · Colors for gray hair · Every feature
Color analysis quiz · Undertone test · Check a single color · All 12 color types