Online Foundation Shade Finders | Glamour UK

We don't know about you, but we haven't been to an actual makeup counter in, well, just over a year. On the plus side, however, we've become very familiar with every makeup brand's website interface and know exactly how to navigate the various offerings virtually.

There's no denying that pandemic has totally changed the way we shop for our beauty products, including everything from makeup, to skincare to perfume. As physical stores have been shut for the majority of the past year, we've all have to figure out how to translate our IRL browsing, swatching and sniffing into their virtual counterparts - whatever that may be. One particularly hard thing to do remotely is shade-matching. With undertones, textures and finishes all to take into consideration, it's difficult to match our unique skin tones to a foundation through a screen.

Luckily, technology has come to our rescue. There's a flurry of new virtual 'try-on' tools that help to match your skin tone to foundation shades with impressive accuracy. Here's what we learned...

Don't be fooled by shade names

Firstly there seems to be a disparity between the shade we think we are and the shade we actually are. "Most of the offerings out there rely too much on the user’s knowledge of their skin tone and ability to identify detailed colour nuance, without understanding personal preferences like finish and coverage," notes Alexia Inge, co-founder of Cult Beauty.

Our advice would be to choose the shade you really are at the time of ordering your foundation, rather than the shade you could be if you spent two weeks basting on a beach in the Balearics (because, #cancelled). Get your base right and let your bronzer do the job of warming up your complexion if you need – that way, no tidelines.

Consider the texture

Sheer and lightweight textures give you a lot more wriggle room in terms of the shade than anything full coverage, which means they're much harder to screw up. Tinted moisturisers are your best bet if you really don't know where to start.

As for online tools and quizzes, we searched them all, but only four came out victorious - starting with Cult Beauty's brand new and very clever MatchMe service.

Cult Beauty MatchMe

This simple quiz guides shoppers to a list of their perfectly matched foundations across multiple makeup brands. Developed in partnership with US-based tech solution, MIME (Make It My Experience), the technology learns and improves every time someone uses it meaning the more people try it, the greater the accuracy.

All you have to do is answer five standard questions to establish your perceived skin tone and the kind of coverage you want and upload a selfie. Then, the algorithm will match you to your perfect shade from Cult Beauty's beauty brands including Huda Beauty, Too Faced, Charlotte Tilbury, NARS and so many more. The only disclaimer is that you will have to enter your name, email address and tick that you'd like to receive emails from Cult Beauty in order to get your results, which is a little annoying - but you can always unsubscribe after.

Il Makiage

Disclaimer, this quiz is a bit of a "you scratch our back, we'll scratch yours" situation. Considering the brand has only one foundation option currently (the Woke Up Like This foundation), there's a lot of superfluous questions around your skin type, favoured finish, method of application and age, plus, as with Cult Beauty's service, you have to enter your email address at the end to get your results. These brands are sure making the most of the opportunity to collect your data and do some market research - let's hope they put the findings towards some amazing new products.

As for figuring out your shade, they do ask you to identify your skin tone, but instead of "light", "medium" and "dark" there's seven pictures to choose from which makes it much easier to visually identify one that fits you. The quiz then asks you to narrow down your exact shade three more times to make it more specific. You select your undertone (there's advice to help you identify it accurately) and answer a few more questions about how regularly you use your foundation, what your main concerns are and which brand you're currently using. It takes less than five minutes. At the end, you'll be given your shade recommendation. Adele tried the quiz too and was equally impressed. "Initially, when I looked at my shade (#150) it seemed much more of a peach brown than my MAC NC45, but when applied and set, it's near identical," she said.

MAC

MAC was one of the first brands to use AR try-on tools to its advantage. Alongside being able to try on different lipstick shades, blushers and eyeshadows virtually, now, the brand has created a face scanning tool (via your phone only), which takes a picture of your skin to generates your ideal shade match. Currently only available for the brand's Studio Fix foundation, all you have to do is visit the product page and click the "Find Your Shade Match" camera icon. All you need to do is pose for a selfie (natural sunlight works best) and it'll come up with your shade match.

GLAMOUR deputy beauty editor tried it twice, once in natural daylight with no makeup on and was recommended N4.75 (a beige with neutral undertones for light skin, it looks as though it has more pink in the base than the Il Makiage foundation) which matched her skin with no tidelines whatsoever. Then, when she tried the tool in the evening with a face of makeup on, she was recommended NC41 (a medium beige with a neutral golden undertone for medium skin). Adele was recommended NC44.5 (a honey with neutral golden undertones) which is the shade lighter than her favourite NC45 and guess what... She says it's an even better match for her skin tone now that we're heading into winter.

Findation

The most universal foundation finder we found (by far), is Findation. It's an independent search engine that's not tied to any single brand. If you already have a shade and formula that you know matches you perfectly, you can plug it into the search bar and it will comb through its comprehensive database of thousands of shades and hundreds of brands to produce dozens of alternative matches for you.

Adele entered her shade of her beloved MAC Pro Longwear Foundation (NC45) and Findation recommended a number of corresponding shades from a range of other brands, including Fenty Beauty. "The results are actually better than the Fenty online quiz. The brand's own website recommended shade 350, which is too deep and too orange, and Findation recommended 370, which is great on me! I would say so far that both the finish of the formula and colour of Fenty's Pro Filt'r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation are the best I've found," she says.

The site offers results from a huge array of makeup brands, as well as other complexion products such as concealer. Some of the products that popped up in the results of our research were including Charlotte Tilbury's Magic Away Liquid Concealer, BareMinerals Complexion Rescue Hydrating Foundation Stick.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qLjApqauqp2WtKLGyKecZ5ufY8Kse8Crq6KbnJp8p7vUp5uarJmku26%2Fx5qbnmWWnrulsdE%3D