Light Spring makeup: your shades, and how to apply them
Light Spring makeup is warm and light at once: peach, coral, apricot, every shade kept clean and a little sunlit. The coloring runs low in contrast, so the amount matters as much as the shade - a lipstick that barely registers on a deeper face can take over this one. Below: sixteen finished faces at four skin depths, the four products in the order they go on, and a shade list short enough to photograph.
- Four steps, in order
- Four complexions
- Everyday and evening
The order you apply it in
Start here
You are a Light Spring. Here is what to put on.
Everything follows from one fact: your hair, your skin and your eyes sit within a step or two of each other, and all three are warm and light. There is nothing dark on your face and nothing gray in it, which means there is also nothing already loud enough to absorb a full-strength product.
So the shades are warm, clear and light - peach, coral, apricot, gold - and the amounts are smaller than they look like they should be. Those two go together. Clear color at low volume reads as your own coloring turned up; the same color at ordinary volume reads as makeup, and a muted version of it reads as tired.
Keep the color clear and keep the amount small - this coloring is undone by dullness and by weight, never by brightness.
The same woman, on a medium complexion, at the two ends of what this coloring carries. Notice how little distance there is between them - that gap is the whole working range, and it is narrower than most advice assumes. All four complexions are in the very next section.
What is on this page
- Sixteen finished looks Four occasions on four complexions, each card naming the shade on every part of the face.
- Why these shades Four swaps, each beside the shade this coloring usually owns instead, and the mechanism for each.
- How to build it The four products in the order they go on, with the technique that matters on a low-contrast face.
- When you need more Two things move and four hold still. Day and evening photographed side by side at each depth.
- How to buy it The jaw test, the words on a label worth trusting, and the shade grid with your square marked on it.
- The shade list Every shade on this page in one block, with hexes. Made to be screenshotted.
Sixteen finished looks
A shade name is hard to picture and easy to get wrong, so the faces come first. Sixteen of them: four occasions across four complexions, each card listing what went where. Find the row closest to your own skin and read along it. The last card in each row is the ceiling - the most this coloring will take - and it is a good deal less than a tutorial would have you believe.
If you have fair skin:
- Base Base - peach ivory
- Blush Peach blush
- Lips Cream pink nude
- Base Base - peach ivory
- Blush Peach blush
- Eyes Champagne
- Liner Warm brown liner
- Lips Cream pink nude
- Base Base - peach ivory
- Blush Blossom pink blush
- Eyes Aquamarine
- Liner Peacock liner
- Lips Salmon
- Base Base - peach ivory
- Blush Apricot blush
- Eyes Papaya
- Liner Bronze liner
- Lips Coral
If you have light skin:
- Base Base - golden olive
- Blush Blossom pink blush
- Lips Peach nude
- Base Base - golden olive
- Blush Blossom pink blush
- Eyes Buttercream
- Liner Warm brown liner
- Lips Peach nude
- Base Base - golden olive
- Blush Apricot blush
- Eyes Papaya
- Liner Peacock liner
- Lips Coral
- Base Base - golden olive
- Blush Coral blush
- Eyes Copper peach
- Liner Bronze liner
- Lips Geranium
If you have medium skin:
- Base Base - honey beige
- Blush Apricot blush
- Lips Apricot nude
- Base Base - honey beige
- Blush Apricot blush
- Eyes Wheat
- Liner Warm brown liner
- Lips Apricot nude
- Base Base - honey beige
- Blush Coral blush
- Eyes Copper peach
- Liner Olive liner
- Lips Geranium
- Base Base - honey beige
- Blush Coral blush
- Eyes Golden olive
- Liner Bronze liner
- Lips Poppy
If you have deep skin:
- Base Base - golden mocha
- Blush Coral blush
- Lips Salmon nude
- Base Base - golden mocha
- Blush Coral blush
- Eyes Peach wash
- Liner Warm brown liner
- Lips Salmon nude
- Base Base - golden mocha
- Blush Coral blush
- Eyes Golden olive
- Liner Olive liner
- Lips Geranium
- Base Base - golden mocha
- Blush Coral blush
- Eyes Copper peach
- Liner Bronze liner
- Lips Poppy
Read down any column and the occasion holds still while the shade names move. A peach that passes for a flush on ivory skin has stopped showing up by the time you reach deep golden brown, so the name changes to keep the effect the same. What does not move is the warmth and the clarity - and that is the part worth explaining, because it is the reason half the shades already in your bag are working against you.
Why these shades, and not the ones you own
Strip those sixteen faces back and they run on four swaps. Each one is below, next to the shade this coloring tends to already own - usually bought on sound advice written for a different face. The color family is rarely the problem. The temperature is, or the weight.
Why these shades and not those
Tap a productYour lashes and brows stay close to your hair, so nothing on your face is actually dark. A black line is darker than anything you grew, which is why it stops looking like lashes and starts looking like a line drawn above them. Warm brown lands at roughly the depth your own lashes already have.
Taupe is a gray with a little brown mixed into it, and gray is the one thing missing from this coloring entirely. Put it on the lid and it sits next to a warm iris as a patch of dirt rather than a shadow, and the gold goes out of the eye behind it.
Blood under warm skin comes up peach and goes toward coral as the skin deepens. Mauve is a color your cheek has no way of producing, so rather than reading as a flush it reads as powder lying on top of one - and the dust in it pulls gray across the widest part of your face.
A berry lip brings more depth to the face than any feature already on it, so the mouth becomes the anchor and everything above it drops back. Its blue base also works against the warmth in your skin. A clear coral at half that depth reads just as deliberate and leaves the rest of the face where it was.
Watch which side moves. The shade that works changes name as skin deepens - champagne on ivory is a peach wash on deep golden brown - so there is no one correct hex, and yours is in the cheat-sheet. The shade that fails holds still, because it fails on warmth or on weight, and skin depth has no bearing on either. Liner is the exception, and a useful one: warm brown is warm brown on everybody. Hexes on the failing side stand for the mistake rather than for a measured product.
What the four have in common is the size of the step down, not the hue. Nothing on this face is dark to begin with - brows sit near the hair, the hair sits near the skin - so a shade chosen for its depth has nothing to be deep against and simply takes the face over. Gray behaves the same way: there is none in your palette, so the moment any lands on you it is the only gray in the frame.
That settles what to buy. It leaves the harder half - how much of it goes on, and in what order - which is quicker to show than to describe.
How to build it, step by step
So here are those swaps again, in the order they actually go on. Picking the shade is the easy half. What follows each one is the technique, and on a face where hair, skin and eyes sit within a step of each other the technique is what decides whether the makeup disappears or takes over.
-
Base
Thin enough to still see the freckles
Your base shades, by depth
The season fixes the undertone - golden, peach or honey, never pink and never ashy. How deep it runs is your own skin, and nothing else.
Fair - Foundation Base - peach ivory #F3E2CE
- Bronzer Bronze - light golden peach #D8A87C
- Highlighter Glow - peach pearl #F7D5BC
Light - Foundation Base - golden olive #D8BC96
- Bronzer Bronze - golden tan #C49468
- Highlighter Glow - champagne #F2E2C6
Medium - Foundation Base - honey beige #C99A6E
- Bronzer Bronze - warm honey #A87448
- Highlighter Glow - light gold #EFD59B
Deep - Foundation Base - golden mocha #8A5A3A
- Bronzer Bronze - golden umber #6F4527
- Highlighter Glow - golden bronze #D9A864
Coverage is the decision here, not shade. This skin is thin and it carries its color in patches - a golden flush across the nose, freckles that come up warm rather than gray - and all of that is doing structural work on a face that has very little contrast to spare. Full coverage takes it away and leaves a flat panel you then have to put color back onto. Sheer, pressed in with a sponge where the tone is uneven, nothing on the parts that were already even.
Bronzer and highlighter are placement problems rather than shade problems. The bronzer is sun, not a contour: a golden-peach one step under your own skin, along the top of the cheekbone and the hairline, worked until it has no edge. A taupe or gray-brown sculpting shade does the opposite of what this face needs, because it puts the one color your coloring lacks along its widest plane. Highlighter goes on a smaller area than feels right - the top of the cheekbone and nothing else - and it is warm: peach, champagne or soft gold, so it reads as the skin catching light rather than as a separate silver stripe.
Tip Check the match at the jaw in daylight, not on the back of your hand. A base that is right disappears there; one that is half a step too pink shows up as a line you will see all day and nobody will mention.
-
Cheeks
The step that does the most work
Blush goes on before the eyes, and on this coloring it carries more than it does on any other season. Your face has a small step between hair, skin and eyes, so there is no strong feature for the rest of the makeup to organize itself around - blush is what supplies it. Cream over powder on skin this fine: it sits in the skin rather than on top of it, and it moves when you smile, which powder does not. Two fingers, pressed high on the cheekbone, then walked back toward the temple until the edge is gone.
Blush
Peach at the lightest end, coral at the deepest. Pick the one nearest your own flush and put on half what you think, then look again in daylight before adding the rest.
Peach blush #F6BFA0 
Blossom pink blush #F2B7AE 
Apricot blush #F3B282 
Coral blush #F5A98F Tip If it reads as a color rather than as a flush, that is a quantity problem and not a hue problem. Press a clean finger over the middle of it and take half of it back off.
-
Eyes
Brows, one wash, a warm line, brown lashes
In that order, because each one sets the ceiling for the next. Brows come first: they decide how much weight the eye can carry. On this coloring they are light and often sparse at the tail, so they get filled with something at or just under your hair level and never above it - a brow darker than the hair is the single fastest way to stop looking like this season. After that, one flat wash over the whole lid, a warm line pushed down between the lashes rather than drawn on top of them, and brown mascara. The mascara is not a small point: black lashes on a face whose brows and hair are light become the only dark thing present, and the eye reads as two heavy fringes with nothing behind them.
Brows
Sit at your hair level or one step under it. Fill with short strokes at the sparse end and leave the front of the brow almost alone - a solid front is what makes a light brow look drawn on.
Wheat brow #C7A97A 
Golden blonde brow #B99664 
Light caramel brow #B08A5F 
Honey brown brow #98704A Everyday eyeshadow
One wash over the whole moving lid, no crease work. These are close to your own skin on purpose: the job in daylight is to even the lid out and give it a little light, not to add a color.
Champagne #EFE0C6 
Buttercream #F2DFA8 
Wheat #E4CFAE 
Peach wash #F5C9A8 Eyeliner
Four colors rather than four depths - all of them work at any complexion. Warm brown is the everyday one; peacock and olive are for when you want the eye to be the color on the face, and bronze is the dressed-up version of brown.
Peacock liner #3E9E92 
Bronze liner #9C7340 
Olive liner #6E7043 
Warm brown liner #8B6244 Mascara
Brown, in the version that matches your own lash root. One coat in daylight. If you have ever been told your lashes look sparse, the answer is a second coat on the outer third and not a darker tube.
Golden brown mascara #7A5730 
Bronze brown mascara #6E4E33 
Soft brown mascara #6B4A34 
Deep brown mascara #4A3424 Tip If you own one liner, make it the warm brown. It is the only one of the four that goes with every other decision on this page, and it is the one that photographs the way it looks in the mirror.
-
Lips
Your own mouth, turned up slightly
A nude on this coloring is a warm one - peach, apricot, salmon - and it is chosen by matching your lip rather than by cancelling it. The beige-gray shade sold as a universal nude does something specific and bad here: it puts a cool, low-saturation block in the middle of a warm face, and the result reads as a mouth that has been switched off. Apply from the center outward with a finger and stop just inside the edge, so the line stays yours.
Nude shades
Warm all the way across, from cream-pink up to salmon. The right one is roughly the color your lip already is on a good day, half a step up.
Cream pink nude #E7AFA0 
Peach nude #E9A98C 
Apricot nude #EDA97E 
Salmon nude #EC9E8A Tip Balm over any of the four on a day you cannot be bothered gets you most of the way. This is the one product on the page where the cheap version and the expensive version look the same from more than a foot away.
That is the whole daytime face, in order, and it is a short list. Which leaves the question that gets asked next and answered badly almost everywhere: what actually has to change when the light drops?
Your evening face: what changes, and what must not
Two things move and four hold still, which is a smaller change than the word evening usually implies. This is not a darker face - this coloring has no darker to go to. It is the daytime one carried further in the direction it was already pointing, with a short list of things that are not allowed to shift at all. Each depth below, twice, the same woman in both frames.
Eyes
Nothing here gets darker, because there is nothing dark in this coloring for it to get darker toward. The shade you wore all day stays exactly where it was, across the middle of the lid, and the evening shade arrives only at the outer end - crease, outer corner, the outer half of the lower lashes. The move is more color, not less light.
- Start with the lid exactly as you wore it all day, edge to edge, nothing removed.
- Lay the evening shade into the crease and bring it down to the outer corner.
- Carry it beneath the outer half of the lower lashes, and stop there.
- The middle of the lid stays the brightest thing on the eye.
- Put the line inside the lashes, then blend each join until none of them has an edge.
The rule Warmer and clearer inside the same family, with the color placed at the outer corner. What breaks this face after dark is not a shortage of depth, it is reaching for depth at all: a gray smoke or a black line at eight in the evening throws away everything the daytime version was built on.
Champagne holds the middle of the lid, aquamarine takes the crease and the outer corner, and the peacock line sits inside the upper lashes. On skin this pale the aqua is the entire event - it is doing the job a smoky shadow does on other coloring, using color instead of weight.
Deepest at the outer corner
Center of the lid stays lightest
Lower lashes: outer half only
Buttercream stays on the lid and papaya does the crease and the outer corner. This is the depth where a warm orange shadow starts reading as a color rather than as a flush, and the peacock line under it is what keeps the whole eye from going one temperature.
Deepest at the outer corner
Center of the lid stays lightest
Lower lashes: outer half only
Wheat on the lid, copper peach carried through the crease and out past the corner, olive along the lashes. Copper is the first shade on this list with enough pigment to still be visible on a mid complexion under restaurant light.
Deepest at the outer corner
Center of the lid stays lightest
Lower lashes: outer half only
Peach wash on the lid, golden olive the whole way through the crease and the outer corner. The shades one row up stop registering on this skin altogether - the olive here is doing exactly what the aquamarine does on the fair row.
Deepest at the outer corner
Center of the lid stays lightest
Lower lashes: outer half only
Lips
One family at two strengths. The nude and the color on this palette are the same warm shade turned up or down, so the evening lip is not a separate decision - it is the same decision, further along. What has to survive the change is the edge.
- Press the first layer on with a fingertip.
- Blot it once.
- A second layer only through the middle of the lip.
- The outer edge stays soft. No drawn line, at any hour.
The rule Your depth picks the shade and the clock only picks the strength. Evening is not a different lipstick - it is the same one, built up further.
Cream pink nude by day, salmon after dark. Past salmon, on skin this pale, the mouth stops being part of the face and starts being the subject of it.
Leave the corner soft
Build through the middle
Peach nude by day, coral after dark. Coral is the one shade on this palette that reads as deliberate from across a room without putting any weight on the face.
Leave the corner soft
Build through the middle
Apricot nude by day, geranium after dark. The pink running through geranium is what stops a warm mid complexion from going entirely one note.
Leave the corner soft
Build through the middle
Salmon nude by day, geranium after dark - the same evening shade as the row above, and it lands differently. On this skin it reads as a clear pink rather than as a bright one, which is why poppy is the better choice when you want to be seen.
Leave the corner soft
Build through the middle
What must not change
It is the lightest point on your face at eight in the morning and it is still the lightest point at eight at night. Everything the evening adds goes around it. Lose that and the eye closes up, which on low-contrast coloring reads as tiredness rather than as drama.
Same shade, same place, same amount. The instinct after dark is to push the cheek deeper to match the lip, and it is the fastest way to end up with three competing warm areas on a face that only has room for one.
They stay at your hair level. A brow pencil is the most common thing to get reached for at seven in the evening and the one that does the most damage - it puts the darkest thing on your face above everything you just spent twenty minutes keeping light.
The worst possible moment to add a layer. Indoor light is harder on a base than daylight is and a phone flash is harder still, so the coverage added for the camera is exactly what the camera finds.
One line to keep from this section: more color, never more weight. Whether it arrives that way depends on something no shade name will tell you.
Why the right shade can still look wrong
That something is the finish. A shade is half a product; the other half is how much light the surface throws back at whoever is looking at you, and it is the half nobody reads on the box. One lipstick, one mouth, four photographs - the color underneath is identical in all four.
One shade, four finishes
Two things are happening across those four surfaces. The first is the specular highlight - the tight bright reflection a smooth surface bounces straight back, which is why the third mouth looks wet and the first looks flat. Matte throws nothing back, satin spreads it wide and low, shine collects it into a point, frost turns it into a surface of its own.
The second is the part that catches people out, and on this coloring it is a different trap than the one most of the internet warns about. Elsewhere the warning is temperature: the pearl suspended in a finish is usually coated to flash gold or bronze, which undoes a blue-based face. Gold light is your own register, so that danger does not apply to you at all - worth knowing, because nearly all finish advice is written for the other case. What does apply is opacity. Frost and dense pearl are white pigment as much as they are shine, and white laid over a clear shade is the thing that dulls it. Clarity is what defines your season before anything else, so the question to ask a tester is not what temperature the shine is. It is how much of the color you can still see through it.
The same question, on skin
Finish behaves differently on skin than on a lip, because skin has texture of its own to either keep or bury. In every pair above the left-hand version is the one that lets the skin go on reading as skin.
What that means, product by product
- Base
- Satin. Full matte removes the light your bone structure is drawn by, and there is no step in color here to draw it instead.
- Blush
- Cream, with powder over it only when the day is long. The job is imitating a flush, and cream imitates better.
- Eyeshadow
- Satin in daylight, a warm shimmer after dark. This is the one product where the season takes real shine happily - a lit warm lid is most of the evening look. Frost still dulls it.
- Brows
- Powder or a soft gel, somewhere between wheat and honey. Wax draws a line and then lights it.
- Lips
- Satin first, shine second, matte third. A clear balm over a satin shade gets you the light without the flatness.
- Highlighter
- Warm - peach, champagne, soft gold - on a small area with no edge. Silver goes gray on golden skin, and a hard metallic strip is a stripe.
This is a finish question more than a skin-type question. Full matte across the whole face is the intuitive answer and the wrong one here: it strips out the returned light this coloring is built on, and it breaks in patches by the afternoon anyway. Powder the T-zone, leave the cheekbones alone, and carry blotting paper rather than a second compact. Before a photograph, take the shine off the nose and forehead only - the shine on top of the cheekbone is the part working for you.
How to get the right one home
All of that assumes the shade makes it home with you, which is the part every shade list leaves out: what the words on a box are worth, how to test one properly, and why the test most people run cannot answer the question.
The jaw test
- Three candidates side by side along the jaw, each one carried over the join and down onto the neck. Your arm is already the wrong color for this and your hand is worse still.
- Blend all three out.
- Find a window. Shop lighting leans warm, and warm light is the one condition in which almost any golden base looks like it belongs to you.
- Buy whichever one you have lost. Not the stripe that looks best against your skin - the stripe that is no longer there.
The whole shade grid, and the square that is yours
Every foundation range is laid out on the same two questions: how deep, down the side, and which way it leans, across the top. Here is that grid with only Light Spring marked on it.
The whole outlined column is the answer: one letter, whatever depth you happen to be. A Light Spring in peach ivory and a Light Spring in golden mocha want the same undertone and a different number, so what you ask for is your depth and warm - never a shade name copied off a poster.
Three honest notes. The warm column is our values, not a brand’s - the same letter is a slightly different color in every range, and the depth number never transfers between brands at all, so no chart can print a shade you can order by name. The cool, neutral and olive squares are illustrations: each is the warm shade at that depth pushed toward that undertone, named the way a brand would name it, so you can recognize the wrong prefix on a shelf before you see what it does at the jaw. And neutral is a maybe rather than a no - a neutral that reads golden on you belongs in the warm column, and the jaw test decides.
Reading a shade name
Two different mistakes are hiding in that second list, which is why it is longer than you might expect. Ash, cool, mauve and plum are the wrong temperature. Dusty, muted, smoke and deep are the right temperature and the wrong strength - and those are the ones that get bought, because a muted peach still reads as a peach on the label. Words on a box are a shortlist rather than a verdict; the jaw and the window decide the rest.
What the finish words on a label actually mean
- Satin, natural, second-skin
- What you came for.
- Radiant, luminous, glow
- Also yours, and this is the season that can carry it. Powder the center of the face if the day is long.
- Demi-matte, soft matte, blurring
- Workable, and further from you than it sounds. Matte takes out the light your face is modeled by.
- Metallic, foil, chrome
- A hard edge in a pan. Warm metal can work on a lid; high on the cheek it arrives before you do.
- Frost, pearl-finish, iridescent
- The one to put back. Pearl packed that densely is white pigment, and white over a clear shade is what dulls it.
Judging a swatch photo online
Swatch photography is lit to sell, and selling light is bright, flat and slightly warm. For most seasons that warmth is the problem. For you it is the flatness, and it fails in the flattering direction: bright flat light lifts a shade and cleans it up, so a dusty peach photographs as a clear one and a muted coral photographs as a bright one. You are the season that cannot tell those apart on a screen, because clarity is the exact axis the lighting is adding for free. Two habits recover most of it. Prefer swatches on skin over swatches in the pan, and prefer a frame with a shadow somewhere in it - the color where the light drops off is the color that arrives in the post.
Ranges are reformulated, renamed and pulled every year, so any list of products rots faster than the reasoning behind it - and an unchecked recommendation still costs somebody money. A hex, a few label words and the jaw test outlast all of it, and they work on a shelf this page has never seen.
When it does not work
Shades, order, finish, and a way to buy the right one - that is the page so far. What follows is for later: the evening the mirror looks wrong and you cannot name the reason.
Two ways it goes wrong
The makeup got there before you did
- What it looks like
- The compliments are about the lipstick. In a photograph one feature has taken charge and the rest of the face is arranged behind it, and you read as someone wearing makeup rather than as someone who slept well.
- Why
- Quantity, almost always, and not shade. Your hair, skin and eyes sit within a step or two of each other, so there is nothing already on your face loud enough to absorb a full-strength product. An amount that looks moderate on somebody with dark hair and pale skin is a great deal here, because it is competing with nothing.
- Fix
- Take out weight and keep the color. Half the blush, one coat instead of two, the liner inside the lashes rather than on top of them, the same coral pressed in with a finger instead of drawn on. Nothing on the list changes - the amount of each thing does.
You look washed out, and slightly tired
- What it looks like
- The opposite complaint, and the more common one. Nothing stands out and nothing looks wrong; the face just reads flat and a little grubby, worse in photographs, worse again under office light. Often it follows a deliberate decision to go more natural.
- Why
- Something gray has got in - a taupe shadow, a dusty blush, a beige nude, a base half a step too pink. Gray is the one thing this coloring does not contain anywhere, so it has nothing to blend into and sits on top of the face as sediment. The trap is that each of those products looks sensible on its own.
- Fix
- Go clearer and warmer, not softer. This is the fix that runs against the instinct, because the face looks overdone when it is actually underfed. A clean peach beats a complicated one, and the shade that looks almost too simple in the pan is the one that reads as your own skin.
And the shades that never work
Three reasons cover every shade below, and each swatch is tagged with its own. The list matters much less than the three do: once you have them you can pick up anything in a shop and name what it is doing wrong.
Base and glow
- Pink porcelain base cool
- Taupe contour dull
- Silver highlighter cool
- Cocoa bronzer heavy
Cheeks
- Cool mauve blush cool
- Dusty brick blush dull
- Plum blush heavy
- Beige no-blush nude dull
Eyes
- Cool taupe shadow dull
- Icy silver shimmer cool
- Charcoal smoke heavy
- Black liner heavy
Lips
- Blue-based red cool
- Deep wine heavy
- Brown-beige nude dull
- Cool fuchsia cool
Why each one fails
- coolToo cool
- Ash, mauve, silver, blue-red, anything described as icy. Your undertone is golden at every depth, and laying blue over gold does not cool the face down in any flattering sense - it grays the skin, and it does it at the jaw first, which is the one place you are unlikely to be looking.
- dullToo dull
- The over-correction, and the one that arrives through good intentions. Dusty, muted, smoky, grayed-down: the register that belongs to Soft Autumn and Soft Summer. It is the right temperature at the wrong strength, which is why it gets bought - a muted peach is still a peach on the label. On you it sits under your own coloring and takes out the clarity, and clarity is most of what this season is.
- heavyToo heavy
- Jet, wine, charcoal, chocolate, blackened anything. Warm gets mistaken for rich, and rich belongs to the autumns. There is nothing dark on your face for a genuinely deep product to answer, so it does not read as depth - it reads as the only thing in the photograph.
The tags carry this section and the swatches only illustrate them. Each hex stands for the mistake rather than for a product anybody sells, so match what you own against the reason and never against the square. And if you read the dull column and recognize most of what you own, the question may not be makeup at all - it is whether you are a Light Spring or a Soft Autumn, and the palette pages settle that faster than a shopping trip will.
Your shades, in one block
This is the whole page compressed into something you can hold up in a shop. Screenshot it. Foundation, bronzer and glow are matched to your own depth, so find your row and stop. Everything else runs light to deep instead: the first shade is the fair end of the family, the last is the deep end, and you are somewhere along it.
Base: foundation, bronzer, glow and blush
- Base - peach ivory Fair #F3E2CE
- Base - golden olive Light #D8BC96
- Base - honey beige Medium #C99A6E
- Base - golden mocha Deep #8A5A3A
- Bronze - light golden peach Fair #D8A87C
- Bronze - golden tan Light #C49468
- Bronze - warm honey Medium #A87448
- Bronze - golden umber Deep #6F4527
- Glow - peach pearl Fair #F7D5BC
- Glow - champagne Light #F2E2C6
- Glow - light gold Medium #EFD59B
- Glow - golden bronze Deep #D9A864
- Peach blush #F6BFA0
- Blossom pink blush #F2B7AE
- Apricot blush #F3B282
- Coral blush #F5A98F
Eyes: shadow, liner, mascara, brows
- Champagne #EFE0C6
- Buttercream #F2DFA8
- Wheat #E4CFAE
- Peach wash #F5C9A8
- Aquamarine #86CFC2
- Papaya #F0A070
- Copper peach #D79A72
- Golden olive #B6A55E
- Peacock liner #3E9E92
- Bronze liner #9C7340
- Olive liner #6E7043
- Warm brown liner #8B6244
- Golden brown mascara #7A5730
- Bronze brown mascara #6E4E33
- Soft brown mascara #6B4A34
- Deep brown mascara #4A3424
- Wheat brow #C7A97A
- Golden blonde brow #B99664
- Light caramel brow #B08A5F
- Honey brown brow #98704A
Lips: nudes and color
- Cream pink nude #E7AFA0
- Peach nude #E9A98C
- Apricot nude #EDA97E
- Salmon nude #EC9E8A
- Salmon #F88874
- Coral #FF7F50
- Geranium #F76C7B
- Poppy #E8674C
Two families here are not a ladder. Eyeliner is four colors rather than four depths - peacock, bronze, olive and warm brown all work at any complexion, and warm brown is the everyday one whoever you are. Brows follow your hair rather than your skin: take the one sitting at your own level or a step under it, and never above. Mascara is a ladder, but the rung is your own lash root rather than your face. Photographs of each base shade on four complexions, and the clothing palette all of these come out of, are on the palette page. The full Light Spring palette →
Questions people ask
What makeup colors look best on a Light Spring?
What undertone is a Light Spring?
What is the best lipstick for a Light Spring?
How do you tell if you are a Light Spring?
Light Spring or Light Summer - how do I tell which one I am?
What if I am between two of the four depths?
Which brands make Light Spring makeup?
Where this came from
Six sources, and what each one is holding up: that makeup works by changing the contrast of a face and that a face with little of it to begin with has less room than most; what a flush actually is, and why it comes up peach on this skin; why depth and undertone are two separate things a base has to match; why a shine reads as a bright point rather than as a color; and why the shop lamp and the window disagree about a golden base.
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Aspects of facial contrast decrease with age and are cues for age perception (opens in a new tab)
Porcheron, Mauger & Russell, PLoS ONE, 2013
Behind the premise the whole page runs on. Facial contrast - how far the eyes, brows and mouth stand out from the surrounding skin - is measurable, it is what cosmetics increase, and it is read as a cue for age. Light Spring starts with less of it than almost any coloring: brows and lashes sit near the hair, the hair sits near the skin. That is why the question here is rarely which color and almost always how much, and why blush goes on before the eyes - it is supplying structure the face does not have on its own.
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Differential effects of makeup on perceived age (opens in a new tab)
Russell, Batres, Courrèges et al., British Journal of Psychology, 2019
Behind the makeup got there before you did. In controlled photographs makeup made 40- and 50-year-old women look younger, and made 20-year-old women look older. Contrast added to a face that already sits where it should pushes it past its own level - which is the mechanism this page keeps describing as a product becoming the anchor, and the reason the fix there is quantity rather than shade.
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Skin blood perfusion and oxygenation colour affect perceived human health (opens in a new tab)
Stephen, Coetzee, Law Smith & Perrett, PLoS ONE, 2009
Behind the cheeks step and the cream-over-powder call. Asked to adjust a face to look healthiest, people add the color of oxygenated blood under the skin. A blush is imitating that, which is why a cream that sinks in reads as a flush and a powder sitting on top reads as a product - and why the flush this skin makes is peach going toward coral, so a mauve is a color the cheek has no way of producing.
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Non-invasive measurements of skin pigmentation in situ (opens in a new tab)
Stamatas, Zmudzka, Kollias & Beer, Pigment Cell Research, 2004
Behind the two axes of the shade grid. Skin color is two signals rather than one: melanin sets how much light is absorbed - the depth, the row you are in - and hemoglobin in the dermal capillaries adds its own, and the two have to be separated to measure either. A base has to match both at once, which is exactly why every brand’s shade finder is a grid and not a line.
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The dark side of gloss (opens in a new tab)
Kim, Marlow & Anderson, Nature Neuroscience, 2012
Behind the whole of finishes. The visual system reads gloss from specular highlights - and from their dark counterparts - and the percept collapses when those are blurred or misplaced. A shine lip is a hard highlight, a satin lip is that highlight spread into a band, a matte lip has none. It is also why shine is a yes on this season rather than a compromise: a bright point adds light without adding pigment, and pigment is the thing a clear shade cannot spare.
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CIE 13.3-1995: Method of measuring and specifying colour rendering properties of light sources (opens in a new tab)
International Commission on Illumination (CIE), 1995
Behind the jaw test in how to shop. A light source is rated on how faithfully it renders the colors of what sits under it, and shop lighting is warm and rates low. For a warm season that cuts the wrong way: under a counter lamp almost any golden base looks like it belongs to you, and several of them stop looking that way at the window. The test has to happen at the window for the same reason the lamp exists.
One honest distinction. The contrast research, the skin biology, the gloss perception and the lighting standard above are sourced; which blush, shadow and lipstick shades belong to a Light Spring, which of them plays which part at each depth, and where the evening ceiling sits are our own analysis, built from the palette on the parent page. No study has been published on any of that, and we would rather say so than dress it up with a citation that does not cover it.