Skin Tone Chart: 8 Tones, With Hex Codes
Eight skin tones, with the hex value for each. Find yours in the chart, then read across to what actually suits it.
Depth and undertone are physical properties, not ethnic ones. This chart works the same wherever you live — the range covers most South Asian skin, and a great deal of Middle Eastern, North African, Latin American, Southeast Asian and Black skin with it.
This chart works the same for men and women. Skin depth and undertone are physical properties. They do not have a gender, and neither does the colour that suits them.
The chart
Screenshot this. It is built to be readable on a phone in a shop.
| Tone | Hex | Depth | Usually |
|---|---|---|---|
Ivory#F7EAD0 |
Monk 3 · light | Cool undertone → Cool Summer | |
Honey#EADABA |
Monk 4 · light-medium | Warm undertone → Warm Spring | |
Golden#D7BD96 |
Monk 5 · medium | Warm undertone → Warm Autumn | |
Amber#BB9D75 |
Monk 5–6 · medium | Warm undertone → Warm Autumn | |
Caramel#A07E56 |
Monk 6 · medium-deep | Warm undertone → Deep Autumn | |
Mocha#825C43 |
Monk 7 · deep | Warm undertone → Deep Autumn | |
Espresso#604134 |
Monk 8 · deep | Neutral undertone → Deep Winter | |
Cacao#3A312A |
Monk 9 · deepest | Neutral undertone → Deep Winter |
The “usually” column is the most common undertone at each depth, not the only one. Every tone here exists in warm, neutral and cool versions — twenty-four palettes in total. Depth tells you which row you are on. Undertone decides which colours you get.
How to find your row
Two questions, and the first is easier than people expect.
1 · Depth — how light or deep
Hold your inner forearm next to the chips above, in daylight, not under a bulb. Bulbs are warm and they will push you a row lighter than you are.
⚠️ Use skin that does not see the sun — inner forearm or upper chest. Your face is usually a shade or two deeper than your true depth in summer, and that is a tan, not your tone.
2 · Undertone — warm, cool or neutral
| Warm | Skin looks golden or peachy. Gold jewellery sits better than silver. Veins read green |
| Cool | Skin looks pink or slightly blue beneath. Silver sits better than gold. Veins read blue or purple |
| Neutral | Both metals work and neither is obviously better. Often reads faintly olive |
If the gold-versus-silver test gives you a clear answer, trust it over the vein test. Metal sits against your face, which is where colour is actually decided. Veins are on your arm.
Two things most charts get wrong
Depth and undertone are separate
Two people on the same row can need completely different colours. That is not a flaw in the chart — it is the reason a chart alone cannot finish the job. Caramel with a warm undertone is a Deep Autumn; Caramel with a cool undertone is a Deep Winter. Those two seasons share no neutrals at all.
Fitzpatrick is not a colour scale
You will see charts that map skin tones onto Fitzpatrick types I–VI. Be careful with that.
Fitzpatrick was built in 1975 to predict how skin burns, not what it looks like. It gives four categories to light skin and two to every shade of brown and black. And the correspondence is not statistically supported: in one study of 440 people, colorimetric measurement failed to predict Fitzpatrick type at all (p=0.3528).
This chart uses the Monk Skin Tone Scale instead, which was built to describe appearance across the full range rather than UV response.
Where these values come from
Every hex on this page is published under CC BY 4.0, with the method and the known weaknesses written down: github.com/thevarnacode/skin-tone-colour-palettes
⚠️ Honest limitation: these are specified values, not spectrophotometer readings. And depth measurement is least precise at the deepest end — that is documented in the methodology rather than left for someone else to find. Verified against the dataset on 20 August 2026.
Found your row? Now get the colours
The free analysis takes your tone and undertone and gives you eight colours with hex codes, plus which neutrals work near your face and which belong below the waist — with the actual numbers.
Take the free colour analysis → · Ethnic wear by skin tone · A worked example
Launch price — first twenty
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The quiz tells you your colours. This tells you what to do about them. You send photos of the clothes you actually wear — laid flat, in daylight, no people in the frame. I go through them against your palette and send back a written plan: what already works, what is quietly fighting your skin tone, what is missing, and a buy list ordered so the first thing you buy unlocks the most outfits.
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