Lipstick and makeup by season

Makeup is the one place where a colour season pays off immediately, because the products are small, they sit closer to your face than any garment, and a wrong one is obvious within a second of putting it on. It is also where the most money gets wasted, for a reason that has nothing to do with the shades themselves: almost everyone tests them in the wrong place.

Why swatching on your hand misleads

The back of the hand is a different colour from the face — usually deeper, often a different temperature, and with none of the redness around the mouth and eyes that a shade has to contend with. A lipstick that looks perfect on a hand is being judged against skin it will never touch.

Worse, the hand test answers the wrong question. A lipstick is not trying to look good on its own; it is trying to sit next to your teeth, your natural lip colour and the shadow under your lower lip without arguing with any of them. None of that is visible on a wrist.

Swatch on your fingertips or your inner wrist if you must compare two shades to each other. For deciding whether a shade is yours, it has to go near the mouth, in daylight.

Reading a shade before you buy it

You can place most lipsticks on two of the three axes just by looking at the bullet, which is enough to reject the clearly wrong ones without opening a tester.

Temperature. Does the red lean orange or blue? Corals, brick, terracotta, warm nudes and anything described as "peach" are warm. True reds with a blue cast, berry, plum, fuchsia and rose are cool. This is the axis that matters most and the one shade names obscure most — "nude" is a texture description, not a temperature.

Depth. Hold it at arm's length and half-close your eyes. A shade that nearly disappears is light; one that reads as a solid block is deep. Light colouring is usually overwhelmed by a very deep shade, and deep colouring usually swallows a very light one.

Chroma is the hard one to judge in a tube, because packaging and finish both interfere. A muted shade looks slightly dusty or greyed next to a clear one. If your palette is a soft season, the clear shades will look "cheap" on you in a way you can see but not name; if it is a bright season, the muted ones will make you look tired.

These are the same three axes the whole twelve-season system runs on — the guide on what colour analysis actually is explains why those three and not others.

Which product carries the most weight

In order: lipstick, blush, then everything else.

Lipstick wins because it is a large area of concentrated colour on a part of the face people look at while you speak. A wrong lipstick is the fastest way to make correct clothes look wrong.

Blush is second, and it is the product most likely to be quietly wrong for years. It sits on the part of the cheek where your own colour already lives, so a mismatched temperature does not read as "bad blush" — it reads as your skin looking slightly off. A warm coral on cool colouring looks like sunburn; a cool pink on warm colouring looks like a bruise. Neither gets blamed on the blush.

Eyeshadow matters least, which surprises people. It is a small area, it is often deliberately neutral, and the eye's own colour dominates it. Spend your attention on the first two.

Foundation is a separate problem from all of this. It is trying to match your skin rather than flatter it, so it answers to your undertone directly rather than to your palette — see the undertone guide for finding that.

The direction, by family

Spring. Warm and clear. Coral, warm pink, poppy, peach, clear warm red. Avoid anything dusty or blue-based; muted shades go grey against clear warm colouring.

Summer. Cool and soft. Rose, soft berry, cool mauve, muted raspberry. Avoid orange-based shades and anything with high shine and high chroma at once, which is louder than this colouring.

Autumn. Warm and rich. Brick, terracotta, warm brown-red, deep coral, spiced nudes. This family carries genuinely deep warm shades that would flatten anyone else. Avoid icy pinks and blue reds.

Winter. Cool and clear, often deep. True red, blue-red, fuchsia, deep berry, plum. This is the only family that reliably carries a full-strength red without it wearing them. Avoid muted, dusty and warm-brown shades, which sit dead against high-contrast colouring.

Your own season's page narrows these further, because a light summer and a soft summer want noticeably different intensities of the same rose. The twelve are laid out here.

The one test that settles it

Put the shade on, stand at a window in daylight, and look at your teeth and the skin just under your eyes.

A shade in your temperature makes teeth look whiter and the under-eye area look more even. A shade fighting your temperature makes teeth look yellow and pulls shadow forward. This is a real, visible effect and it is much easier to see than "does this suit me", because you are looking at two specific things rather than a general impression.

If you are between two shades, this test separates them in about five seconds. If both pass, buy the one you like — at that point the system has finished being useful and preference takes over.

A note on what this cannot do

A season narrows the field. It does not pick the product, and it says nothing about finish, formula, wear or whether a brand suits your skin. Two shades with identical temperature and depth can behave completely differently on the lip.

Use the palette to walk past four fifths of a counter without testing, then test the rest properly. That is the whole benefit, and it is a real one.

Get your season in three questions if you do not have one yet.