The Easiest Way To Find Your Perfect Lipstick

There’s a lot of chatter online about how to find your perfect shade of lipstick. Do you have warm or cool undertones? What’s your colour season? Should the shade match your areolas?

And still, no matter how many online swatches or AI-style features that help you deduce which hue is best for you, what if finding your ideal lipstick was actually quite simple? In fact, the solution is right at your fingertips.

The Fingertip Hack For Finding Your Best Lipstick Shade

TikTok resurfaced this technique originating well before our current landscape of virtual ‘try-ons’ and YouTube swatch reviews.

The video, shared by TikTok account @underratedsimpsons, quickly amassed a viral viewership, with over a million people liking the clip. You can watch it below, with instructions to follow.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Squeeze just below the tip of your finger, so the tip turns pink.

2. Hold this against lipstick shades and match the colour of your finger tip to a lipstick shade on the shelf.

Et voila! You should have your perfect lipstick colour.

The downside, of course, is that it will still require you to go into a store to ensure the shade is reliable and not distorted by your computer or phone screen.

That doesn’t work for you? There are other ways…

Hacks for finding your perfect lipstick colour

The fingertip hack is not the only way to finding a shade that’s right for you.

In fact, it’s really only best for uncovering your best ‘nude’ or pink-toned lip colour.

If that method doesn’t tickle your fancy, here are some other tried-and-tested ways people suggest trying to find your lipstick shade.

Look at your undertones

Your undertones refer to whether the base tone of your skin colour is considered cool, warm or neutral. It has nothing to do with how light or dark your skin is — all skin colours can be cool, warm or neutral.

To find your undertone, the easiest way is to look at your veins on your wrist. If they skew more to the green side, you have warm undertones. If they are more blue, you have cool tones. If they’re purple, you could be a neutral.

So, how does this translate to lipstick?

Well, taking red lipsticks as an example, a cool tone means you’ll want a shade with ‘blue’ undertones, making your lipstick more of a ruby colour. Meanwhile, warm undertones might prefer a more orange-toned colour.

Colour theory

Colour theory or colour analysis is the art of matching your natural features to a colour palette that will best show them off.

Undertones also play a role in this method, but colour theory also takes into consideration the colour of your hair, skin and eyes to assign you to a seasonal colour palette: summer, autumn, winter and spring.

Similar to knowing your undertone, knowing your colour season can help you pick warm or cool toned nude lipsticks, and high or low contrast shades.

While a true colour analysis concedes there are subcategories to each season (many believe there are 12 colour seasons), here’s the basic rundown:

Summer: Cool toned eyes, hair and skin; low contrast features; eyes will usually be in the blue range; looks best in pastels (mauve, powder blue, pale pinks) and muted colours. You’ll most likely look best in a nude pink lipstick.

Autumn: Warm toned eyes, hair and skin; low contrast features; eyes will most likely be brown or green; looks best in khaki, burgundy, mustard (think autumn leaves!) and other muted warm tones. Lipstick wise, stick to a nude brown and pink palette.

Winter: Cool toned eyes, skin and hair; high contrast features; eyes can vary in colour but will contrast to that of your hair or skin, i.e. you could have ice blue with naturally dark hair. Black eyes are a common winter feature; looks best in jewel tones (ruby, emerald) and bright, high-contrast colours (fuschia, cobalt). Winters can get away with a lot of lipstick shades, but look especially good in berry pinks and blue reds.

Spring: Warm toned eyes, skin and hair; high contrast features; eyes could range in colour but will have a golden tone and be in low-contrast to your hair shade; looks best in those colours that remind you of spring fields, florals or sunsets. Think peachy or coral colours, golden yellows, and turquoise. Like autumns, you might look best in pinks and browns.

Remember, it can be easy to think sharing an ethnicity or hair colour means you share a colour palette — but that’s simply not true. It’s far more subtle. And given there are people who specialise in colour theory as their entire profession, the finer print can be much harder to discern.

Matching your lipstick to your areolas

This technique went viral in 2017 after a show called The Doctors resurfaced this little trick. Apparently your natural lip colour is probably close to the colour of your areolas.

Therefore, finding your perfect nude lipstick could be as simple as colour matching it to your nipples.

However, given we’re not about to whip out our breasts every time we need to stock up on the latest lip colour, we might try the fingertip hack first…

5 Lipsticks To Shop