A beautiful DEEP/warm+clear colour type

The short answer to that is no.

I’ve worked with thousands of clients since becoming a certified colour consultant in 2021, and I acknowledge the struggle it can be to figure out what your best colours are due to limited resources online, specifically for people of colour. It’s become a mission of mine to help improve and challenge this very part of colour analysis as best as I possibly can – because colour analysis is and should be inclusive for everyone. Everyone deserves to find the palette that makes them glow! And people with darker skin tones look just as unique and different from one another as people with lighter skin tones.

Traditional colour analysis first appeared in the 80s, and to this day we still often see people with lighter skin at the forefront of ressources on the topic. One of the reasons I fell in love with Tonal Colour Analysis is that we have lots of different options to create a unique palette across different skin tones, including deeper ones. Sure, one of your characteristics could be deep if you have darker skin, it’s something we often see for sure, but it doesn’t have to be the most significant factor to everyone with darker skin. Your clarity for example, can either be soft and muted or it could be clear and contrasting, and then that becomes the dominant factor for your look and your colour palette. There’s ways to work around this with seasonal colour analysis too by the way (here’s a great ressource on that), so I’m not necessarily saying one technique is better than the other. But as that is not a system I personally work with, we’re going to take a different point of view with tonal analysis here.

To help you better understand all this, let’s just dive a little into colour theory, more specifically the Munsell Colour System which is the tool we use to understand colour characteristics across colour analysis techniques:

There are 3 main factors we need to consider when deciding on a person’s colouring or simply when describing the character of a single colour.

DEPTH
(also known as value)
Lighter colours, often referred to as pastels, will be more delicate and have more white added to them. Deeper colours become darker and stronger because they have more black added to them. If you’re a light colour type you likely have fair skin and light blonde hair. On the opposite side of that, if you have dark hair and dark coloured eyes, you could be a deep – it’s important to note here, that skintone can vary all the way from black to porcelain though; the depth of your look is very much present in your hair and eyes.

UNDERTONE
(also known as hue)
Warm colours will have more yellow in them, making them look more golden whereas cool colours will have more blue added to them, giving them their cool and icy look. Now the discussion around undertone is often what people find most confusing, but it really doesn’t have to be so tricky. Did you know that most people are more neutral in undertone than just warm or cool? That’s right. No wonder why people can’t seem to figure out whether they look better in gold or silver, because chances are you could very well pull off both to a certain extent (one might still look a little more striking than the other though). If however your look is clearly warm – for example reddish hair and a golden skin tone, or clearly cool – grey or pitch black hair and a blueish or rosey tinge to your skin – undertone of course becomes the most significant factor about your look, and you’d look your very best in colours that generally match your undertone, warm or cool.

CLARITY
(also known as chroma)
Clear or bright colours will be strong but not dark – they are vivid and pure, they almost bring a tingling sensation to the eye. Whereas soft colours are more muted and calm to look at, thanks to the fact that they have more grey added to them. I always like describing the soft colours as being slightly “punctured” compared to their clear counterpart. If you’re a clear colour type, you may have similarities with a deep, but you will have more contrast in your look between hair, skin and eyes. If you have dark skin, the white in your eyes might pop or you have a big, pearly white smile. And if you’re a soft you will have lower contrast between your features, for example medium depth skin, light brown hair or hair with highlights and a muted eye colour.

There are of course many examples we could include because we all have our unique features – but above you’ll hopefully get a better idea of just how different people of colour could be typed with the tonal system.

I also want to add that there’s a reason why colour consultants love their technical coloured testing drapes so much: whenever you’re in doubt, forget about the stereotypical guidelines you may find online, use your eyes and try colours of different characteristics on in real life instead, exactly as we would do during in-person colour analysis testing. Pigeon-holing yourself into a stereotype can be more confusing than helpful, and at the end of the day it’s all about how the different colours impact your face in real life. We’re looking to create harmony and balance with the colour you wear and in that way enhance your natural beauty.

A few more examples

Both these women have similar features: dark hair and dark eyes, meaning they would both look striking in deep and rich colours. However, the woman on the left side has slightly more warmth in her look and the dominant DEEP palette (which has a mix of both warm and cool colours – their main factor is simply that they are deep and strong) would look absolutely amazing on her. The woman to the right has little to no warmth in her look (olive skin, pitch black hair and cool brown eyes), and therefore the dominantly COOL palette would be a more striking choice for her. Because of the depth in her look though, she might still look her very best in mid- to deeper colours, and the lighter shades could be worn in combination with a slightly darker one.

In this example we yet again have two women with similar, deep features. However, in this case the dominant DEEP palette would look heavy and overpowering on both of them. That’s because the most significant factor about both each their look is the clarity, and therefore depth becomes more of a secondary keyword. The woman to the left has high contrast between her skin, hair and eye colour – especially the iris of her eyes really pop. She would look more striking in a palette made up of clear and contrasting colours. On the opposite side we have a woman who has a significantly softer look: her medium depth skin tone with the highlighted hair gives her a soft appearance which would look lovely with the SOFT colour palette.

In this post we’ve explored the 6 dominant colour types for tonal colour analysis – in reality, we actually have 24 types in total with this way of analysing! That’s because once we’ve established your dominant – the most important colour descriptor for you – we’ll move on to your secondary characteristics to finetune your unique palette further. So for example, you could be a DEEP/warm+clear (like the woman in the first few photos of this post) or a SOFT/cool+light like me. If you’d like to learn more, have a look here.

Want to learn more?