Free tool
What’s your undertone?
Six questions, one answer: warm, cool or neutral — and the six seasons it leaves you.
The Palettewell undertone quiz asks six questions — wrist veins, sun reaction, gold versus silver, white versus cream, natural hair and eye color — and scores them into one answer: warm, cool or neutral. Warm skin runs golden, cool runs pink, neutral sits between. Your undertone rules out six of the twelve seasons.
Take the undertone quiz
Question 1 of 6
What is a skin undertone?
Undertone is the color underneath your skin — the one that stays put. Surface tone is what changes: a summer tan, a winter pallor, a flush after a run, a bad night’s sleep. Undertone sits below all of that and doesn’t move, which is exactly why the whole seasonal system is built on it.
There are three answers. Warm undertones have gold, peach or yellow running under them. Cool undertones have pink, red or blue. Neutral has both in roughly equal measure, which is more common than the internet suggests. None of the three is better or rarer than the others — they just want different colors near the face.
For the long version — the science, the mistakes and how undertone differs from skin tone — read the full undertone guide.
Which tests does this quiz use, and how good is each one?
Six, and they are not equal. The quiz weights each answer by how much it is actually worth — natural red hair and green wrist veins move the score hard, eye color barely nudges it — and takes the weighted average. That is the same weighting the paid Palettewell classifier uses on its undertone axis, so the free tool and the paid one can’t quietly disagree.
| Wrist veins | Green veins read warm, blue or purple read cool — you are seeing your skin filter the blood underneath it.Limit: The weakest of the six on deeper skin tones, where melanin makes vein color hard to read at all. Indoor bulbs skew it further. Answer “can’t tell” rather than forcing it. |
|---|---|
| Sun reaction | Skin that tans easily leans warm; skin that always burns leans cool. It is a proxy for melanin behaviour, not undertone itself.Limit: A weak signal on its own, so it carries less weight. Sun damage, medication and sunscreen habits all muddy it. |
| Gold vs silver | Whichever metal makes your skin look brighter, rather than the metal you like, points at your undertone.Limit: Only works in daylight, with no makeup, against a neutral background. Most people answer with their taste instead of their reflection. |
| White vs cream | Optic white flatters cool skin; cream and ivory flatter warm skin. It is the same test as the metals, run on fabric.Limit: Fabric texture and how recently you slept both change the answer. Reliable in the mirror, not from memory. |
| Natural hair color | Red and copper are the strongest warm signal there is. Ash tones point cool. Weighted heavily for that reason.Limit: Only your natural or childhood color counts. Years of dye make this the question people get wrong most often. |
| Eye color | Hazel and amber usually carry warmth; blue and grey usually pair with cool coloring.Limit: The gentlest signal of the six, and deep brown eyes turn up across warm and cool coloring alike, so they barely move the score. |
The wrist-vein test deserves its own warning, because every quiz in this category leads with it. It works by looking through skin, so it gets steadily less readable as skin gets deeper, and on deep skin tones it often reads as nothing at all. It is also badly affected by indoor lighting. If it doesn’t give you a clear answer, say so — the quiz weights an honest “can’t tell” far more sensibly than a forced guess.
What does your undertone rule out?
Half the board. The twelve seasons split six warm and six cool: the three Springs and three Autumns are warm, the three Summers and three Winters are cool. Knowing your undertone is therefore the single most efficient question in seasonal analysis — one answer, six seasons gone.
What it can’t do is pick between the six that remain, because that comes down to two axes a quiz can’t see: value (how light or deep your overall coloring is) and chroma (how bright or muted it is). Those are judgements made by looking at contrast between skin, hair and eyes, which is precisely what the full analysis measures from your photo.
So: use this to get to six. Use the twelve-season guide to understand what separates them, and the palette viewer to see what each one actually contains.
Undertone questions, answered
What is a skin undertone?
Your undertone is the constant color underneath your skin, as opposed to surface tone, which changes with sun, sleep and season. Warm undertones run golden, peachy or yellow. Cool undertones run pink, red or blue. Neutral sits between the two without a strong pull either way.
How accurate is the wrist vein test?
Less accurate than its popularity suggests. It relies on seeing color through skin, which gets harder as skin gets deeper, and indoor lighting shifts it. This quiz still asks, because it is a real signal on lighter skin, but it is one of six inputs rather than the answer.
Can I be a neutral undertone?
Yes, and plenty of people are. It means no test pulled hard in either direction. None of the twelve seasons is labelled neutral, though, so a neutral result means undertone is not what places you — depth and clarity are, and both are judged by looking rather than answering.
Does knowing my undertone tell me my season?
It halves the field. Warm undertones belong to the six Spring and Autumn seasons, cool undertones to the six Summer and Winter seasons. Choosing between the six needs two more axes: how light or deep your coloring is, and how bright or muted.
Is this quiz the same as the paid Palettewell analysis?
No. This quiz scores what you tell it about yourself. The paid analysis reads your actual coloring from a selfie — undertone, depth and contrast measured from the photo — then names one of the twelve seasons and builds the report around it.