Rae Turberfield, 28
What is a contrast level? Someone’s contrast level is the contrast between their eye color, hair color, and skin color. Someone’s complexion and contrast can tell them what colors or the intensity of makeup would look best on them. There are three different contrast levels that one can be: light contrast, medium contrast, or high contrast. Here’s how to find out which one you are.
The skin color
Skin color is the base of complexion. You should identify your skin color as light, medium, or dark.
The eye color
Eye color is one of the secondary colors in the face. Eye color, unlike the skin, should only have two identifying categories: light or dark.
The hair color
Hair color is one of the biggest factors in determining your contrast level. This section can be a little complicated. Depending on your hair color, you could have two different contrast levels. Like eye color, again, you could either be lighter or darker.
Once you have determined your eye, hair, and skin shade you put them all together.
Low Contrast: If you are low contrast, that means your hair and eye color are the same shade as your skin tone. For example, someone who has light skin, light hair, and light eyes would have a low contrast. Another example would be someone who has darker skin, darker hair, and darker eyes.
Medium Contrast: If you are medium contrast, that means that you have some differences in the shade of your skin, hair, and eyes. This one can be a little difficult to understand. Basically, your skin shade is the same shade as only ONE of the features. For example- light skin, light eyes, and darker hair. Another example could be dark skin, dark hair, and light eyes.
High Contrast: If you are a high contrast, that means that both your eye and hair shade are different from your skin shade. For example, someone who has light skin, dark eyes, and dark hair or someone with dark skin, light hair, and light eyes would be high contrast.
How to do your makeup after finding your contrast level:
Low Contrast: When doing makeup for low contrast, you really want to match what the name says, meaning you don’t want too much contrast in an everyday look. Basically, this means that you want a look that almost looks natural. Things such as bold lips or smokey eyes would be too harsh on a low-contrast face. So the perfect look would consist of a lip that is almost the same color as your own, a very neutral eye as well as base products that are only a bit different from one’s natural look.
Medium Contrast: When doing makeup for medium contrast you wanna kinda combine low contrast and high contrast. What I mean by that is having one or two bold aspects in your makeup routine but keeping the rest more toned down. For example, as someone who is medium contrast what I do is I do a bolder contour as well as a darker eye but when it comes to the rest of my base and lip color I keep it a more natural color.
High contrast: When doing makeup for high contrast you really want to play into that high contrast. You really want to add more to it by making your look quite heavy. So for this look, I would do a heavier eye look as well as a heavier lip and a bit more contour or blush, whichever you prefer, but the premise of this look is to play into that high contrast.
If after all of this though, you still cannot figure out your contrast level, there is a very good filter on TikTok that will give you more of a visual guide on how to find it.