What Are You Actually Seeing? Rethinking Colour, Skin and Complexion.

There is an experience I have had as a makeup artist that I think many artists can relate to.

I had just finished working on a bride.

I stepped back from my client and everything looked right.

I took out my phone to film her. Beautiful.

The compliments from the photographers and family members started rolling in. When I finally handed my bride the mirror, she became teary. She was so, so happy with her look.

And so was I.

Her foundation appeared beautifully matched. Her skin looked even, dimensional and polished.

I was happy with the finish and, at that moment, there was nothing that made me question the complexion I had created.

She changed from her robe into her wedding gown and went outside for her exclusive wedding portraits.

About two hours later, she came back to me for a touch-up.

I looked at her.

Something had changed.

I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was.

The problem wasn't the makeup. The problem was how we were seeing and reading the skin.

What am I looking at? What am I seeing?

I asked the photographer if I could look at some of the close-up images through his lens.

And there it was.

The complexion I thought I had matched perfectly looked different.

It was warmer than It should have been. Slightly too red.

Yet this was the same bride. The same foundation. The same makeup that had looked beautiful in my chair and on my phone only a couple of hours earlier.

So what had happened?

Experiences like this have become some of my most important lessons as an artist because they have forced me to ask a different question.

Not simply:

“Which foundation shade should I have used?”

But:

“What am I actually seeing?”

That distinction has shaped so much of the way I now think about complexion, teach makeup artists and approach colour.

We need to learn to see skin before we learn to cover it

Beauty education is understandably very product-driven.

We learn foundation systems. We memorise shade numbers.

Ask many artists who regularly work on deeper skin about certain popular foundation or powder ranges and they can probably call out their go-to numbers without even looking at the bottle.

We learn which products are described as warm, cool or neutral and which shades are supposed to work for which complexions.

All of that is useful.

But products change.

Products oxidise. Brands reformulate or discontinue products. Shade systems differ from one brand to another. Trends change.

And eventually, someone will sit in your chair whose complexion doesn’t fit neatly into the system you have memorized.

What doesn’t change is the need to see and understand colour.

Before deciding what product to put onto someone’s face, an artist should be able to look at the skin and begin asking:

• What depth am I seeing?

• What colours am I seeing?

• Where does the complexion change across the face?

• How does this person’s skin respond to the sun and tanning?

• How does the face relate to the neck, chest and the rest of the body?

• What actually needs correcting and what should I leave alone?

That is where complexion artistry really begins.

Complexion, skin tone and undertone are not the same thing

One of the foundations of complexion work is understanding the distinction between complexion, skin tone and undertone.

Complexion refers more broadly to the overall appearance and colouring of the skin.

Skin tone describes the visible colour and relative depth of the skin—how light or deep it appears.

Undertone describes the underlying colour influence that affects how we perceive that skin.

And this is where foundation matching becomes far more interesting than simply finding something that is “dark enough” or “light enough.”

Two people can appear to have very similar skin depths and require completely different foundation colours.

You can therefore get the depth right and still get the complexion wrong.

So why does this matter to the woman buying foundation or the artist applying it?

Well, for a long time a foundation that technically appears to be the right depth, may feel disconnected. It might appear too orange, too red, too yellow or strangely dull.

In these instances, the problem isn’t always depth.

Sometimes the problem is colour.

Deeper skin isn’t simply a darker version of lighter skin

This becomes even more important when working with deeper skin because of the range of colour and variation that can be present within one complexion.

Working across diverse skin tones has taught me that we have to move beyond treating deeper complexions as simply darker versions of lighter ones.

There can be extraordinary complexity within deeper skin.

Colour theory is really about learning to observe

This is why I believe colour theory should occupy a much bigger place in complexion education.

And I don’t mean simply memorising a colour wheel.

Colour theory becomes useful when we can translate it into what is happening on an actual human face.

When artists understand colour, they become less dependent on being told exactly which product to use.

They can look.

Assess.

Mix.

Adjust.

Correct.

And make decisions based on the person sitting in front of them.

After years of working across different complexions, environments, countries and types of production, this is increasingly what interests me about beauty education.

Not simply teaching artists how to recreate a look.

And then there is light

Another important lesson throughout my career has been understanding that colour doesn’t exist in isolation from its environment.

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We see colour through light.

A complexion viewed beside a window in daylight is not necessarily going to appear identical under warm hotel lighting, backstage lighting, LEDs or studio flash.

Then put a camera between the artist and the subject and another set of variables enters the conversation: exposure, white balance, flash, lenses and post-production.

Think back to my bride.

She didn’t remain in the controlled environment where I had applied her makeup.

She changed into her wedding gown and spent the next two hours outside being photographed.

Different light.

Different surroundings.

Different cameras.

And importantly, her skin itself was not necessarily behaving exactly as it had when she first sat in my chair.

This is why I encourage artists not to think of complexion as something that only needs to look beautiful at the moment we put our brushes down.

Ask yourself:

Where is my client going?

Is she walking onto a red carpet?

Standing under television lighting?

Being photographed with flash?

Getting married outdoors?

Will she move between daylight, warm indoor lighting, professional cameras and dozens of phone cameras throughout the day?

The environment matters.

The best artists aren’t simply applying makeup for the face sitting immediately in front of them.

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They are anticipating where that face is going next.

Fifty foundation shades don’t necessarily mean fifty people are being served.

The beauty industry has made significant progress in expanding complexion ranges, particularly for deeper skin.

But I think we now need to have a more sophisticated conversation about what inclusion actually means.

A foundation range having 40, 50 or 60 shades makes a compelling headline.

But I want to know what happens when we look more closely.

Where are those shades distributed?

How many meaningful depths exist at the deeper end?

What undertones are available within those depths?

Are the differences between shades actually useful?

How does the formulation perform once applied to deeper skin?

Does the pigment remain true?

How does it oxidise?

Does the complexion retain its dimension, or does it become flat?

Shade count is not the same thing as shade diversity.

True inclusion isn’t about being able to say that a large number of shades exists.

It is about how many different people can genuinely sit in front of that range and find themselves represented within it and how well those products actually perform on their skin.