Is Olive Skin Warm or Cool?

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Olive skin tone can be confusing when trying to figure out your undertones. Olive skin tone can have a dominant green or yellow hue. You may be incorrectly typed with warm undertones because of the yellow in your skin. But the yellow is not a golden yellow and is not necessarily warm undertones. Watch this video to hear Jen's explanation of undertones for olive skin tone.

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Is olive skin tone warm or cool?

If you have olive skin tone, it can be very confusing when you are trying to figure out whether you have warm or cool undertones when you're trying to figure out your color palette within Your Color Style. Many color analysis systems will take a look at someone that has olive skin tone and immediately say that they have warm tones and give them a warm color palette. Then, that person will try wearing those golden yellows and mustards and colors with yellow in it and not feel very good in them. That's because those yellow based colors are enhancing and bringing out more of the yellow and potentially green in their skin, making them look sallow.

There's no hard rule to say whether or not someone has warm or cool undertones if they have olive skin, but I do have some guidelines for you that we use within Your Color Style that might help when you are dominant in a color.

What does olive skin look like?

Olive skin has a greenish hue to it. It have a dominant green cast to it or even a dominant yellow cast to it. An olive complexion can be misperceived as warm because of the dominant yellow tones.

Regardless of your undertones, when you're dominantly green, wearing colors that are similar are going to enhance that color and make you look more green or more yellow, and that may not be desirable.

What colors look good on olive skin tone?

Wear colors that are on the opposite side on the color wheel from green and yellow. These colors will balance out your dominant color and neutralize it in appearance.

So for example, if someone were to have very strong pink tones in their skin and they wanted to neutralize that, you would look on the color wheel and opposite the color wheel would be green, green-blues and turquoises. When you wear one of those colors with that pink skin tone, it neutralizes the pink.

If your skin tone has a dominant green hue, look across the color wheel and you will see, on the Your Color Style color wheel, magenta pinks and true reds. Wearing those colors will neutralize and balance that green and be very flattering.

It turns out that those magenta pinks are part of the cool color palettes. If you have olive skin tone, I highly recommend that you take a look at the cool color palettes within Your Color Style because olive skin tone tends break the rules of whether or not you have warm or cool undertones. You're kind of an even blend, a blue and yellow, and you're right there in the middle, but yet it's not always advisable to wear all the colors.

I would highly recommend you take a look at the cool color palettes, so that you can see the colors that are going to balance out those green and yellow tones in your skin, and I think you're really going to find some success.

To learn more about the cool color palettes, you may like:

Jennifer Vax

Jen Vax is the founder of Your Color Style. She is a best selling author, speaker, artist and entrepreneur. She helps women learn how to wear color in a way that expresses their true nature. Take the FREE color analysis quiz to get started.