Know Your Customers ‘Undertones’
Product recommendation based on cool, neutral, or warm skin tone
As many professional makeup artists’ techniques are revealed on social media, we often see many amateurs with professional-level makeup skills. Nonetheless, you should not blindly follow trending makeups because every individual has a different skin and hair colors/tones. Although beauty supplies typically carry a wide range of cosmetics including eyebrows, eyeshadows, lipsticks, and blushers, customers often find themselves facing a difficult decision to choose a color that looks good on them.
In fact, when I visited a beauty supply retail store for an interview, I met a customer who was taking a significant time to pick a lipstick product. Due to the Covid-19 restrictions, no tester or sample was offered, so she kept placing unopened lipstick products on her face to find the color she wanted.
Is there a way to help the customer so she can narrow down her choices? Why don’t you explain the concept of “undertones” to your customer? Undertone is slightly different than skin tone. It is a good start to remember cool tone, warm tone, and neutral tone. For warm tone skin, the base color of the skin is close to yellow. For cool tone, blue, pink or red. For neutral tone, you can find both characteristics of the above two. However, you should not presume that African Americans all have warm tone and Caucasians cool tone. In fact, the cool tone and warm tone distinction is often not related to skin color.
For people with warm tone skin, gold jewelries and peach color cosmetics/nail polishes work great whereas for cool tone, silver jewelries and pink color cosmetics/nail polishes work better and brighten their face for an uplifted mood. If you have brown hair, you get closer to a warm tone, and if your hair is more like black, then cool tone.
You can place peach vs. pink color makeup products in comparison to help customers identify their undertone, or you can go further and have gold vs. silver jewelries and matching products available for their self-test of undertones. If your customers can simply place their hands over or stand next to them to find more about their undertones, it will give them a better footing to find cosmetics that look great on them.
Beauticians also use a large gold/silver panel for identification of undertones before making color selections for makeup. From foundation to lipsticks, you can choose colors based on the undertone to bring the best result out of your makeup.
A front-and-back Gold/silver panel with a zipper
Foundation color chart based on cool, neutral, and warm undertones by Estée Lauder
Colors that go well with your skin undertones ©pinterest
How much difference does it make? We made purchases at a beauty supply and applied cool tone and warm tone makeup on each side of a model’s face.
The model had a warm undertone, which goes well with gold jewelry, and she received cool undertone makeup on her left side and warm undertone makeup on her right.
Certainly, the right side of the face with a warmer makeup looks much brighter and cheerful.
If you find a customer who is hesitating, ask them a question first! Then make a suggestion based on their undertones. It will be not only a great icebreaker but also an opportunity to get a regular customer.
