Where Are All the Cool-Toned Foundation Shades?
Even with how wide shade ranges have become, there are seemingly still few options for cool undertones.
With how skin-focused beauty fans have become, it’s no surprise that foundation often sits at the center of our makeup routines. In recent years, we’ve seen major advancements in the foundation category: from K-beauty formulas infused with skincare ingredients to skin-morphing pigments. No matter if you’re a drugstore BB cream loyalist or like to try out all of Sephora’s newest launches, it’s clear to see foundation has come a long way — yet, it’s more difficult than ever to find the right shade.
Thanks to innovators in the beauty space, shade ranges have become more extensive than ever. Back in 2004, Maybelline’s Dream Matte Mousse Foundation released with only 13 shades, and now in 2026, brands like Fenty Beauty and Haus Labs are consistently delivering up to 50 shades. But, even with the endless number of options, makeup fans still find that there’s a gap in the market. Specifically, finding a shade that suits both a medium to deep skin tone and a cool undertone can be an especially trying task. While most fair shades come in endless cool-toned variations, deeper shades often only bring one cool-toned shade, or in some cases, only warm and neutral ones.
View this post on Instagram
On the surface, it’s easy to imagine that the lack of cool-toned shades could be a result of varying factors — whether it’s a lower demand for them among consumers with deeper skin tones or an increased difficulty in formulating them. However, celebrity makeup artist Mally Roncal believes that neither are the case. Rather, she finds that the beauty industry once ignored the nuance of foundation shades by emphasizing warm undertones, in an attempt to associate them with a glowing complexion, “There’s a huge range of undertones, including cool, neutral, olive and combinations of those. When you’re developing a foundation, you’re not simply making something lighter or darker; you have to balance multiple pigments to make sure the undertone still looks natural at that particular depth,” she tells Hypebae.
Historically, cool-toned shades, of all shade families, have been disregarded for looking gray or muddy on the skin. “As a MUA with 20+ years of experience servicing clients of color, I rarely use a predominantly cool-toned shade, because chances are it’ll pull grey once it’s on the skin,” Tiesha Williams, makeup artist and Black Radiance brand ambassador, says. The problem isn’t that deeper skin tones simply don’t have cool undertones, it’s that they often don’t suit the cool shades that brands are formulating.
On the other hand, beauty experts also note that creating cool-toned shades isn’t merely more difficult than making warm or neutral counterparts. Rather, they require more intentional color development and testing. “Cool-toned foundation isn’t hard to create if you know color theory, so it really comes down to the expertise level of whoever’s developing the products,” Williams says. “If you understand how color theory works, you can make any foundation whatever undertone you need it to be.”
View this post on Instagram
Although the way brands approach foundation shades has become far more nuanced since the 2000s, there still seems to be underlying misconceptions about the intersection between undertone and skin tone. “Deeper skin tones don’t automatically mean warm skin tones. Someone can have a very deep complexion and still have a distinctly cool, neutral, olive, or red undertone. Historically, brands have sometimes treated depth and undertone as if they were the same thing — so as the shades got deeper, they tended to push them warmer or redder. That’s why having multiple undertone options within every depth is so important,” Roncal says.
Similarly to how the beauty landscape evolved from foundations with 13 shades to 50, makeup artists are hopeful that the clear gap in undertones is slowly improving. While Williams notices that more brands are moving towards neutral-leaning foundations for deeper skin tones, Roncal adds that consumers increased awareness of undertones should serve as a motivating factor for brands to release more varied shade ranges, “I think we’re seeing a real shift. Consumers are much more educated about undertones now, and they’re asking for something more specific than simply light, medium, or deep. A truly inclusive range should give someone with a cool undertone the same level of choice as someone with a warm undertone.”
