Neutral undertone
Neutral undertone is a balance of cool and warm tones in skin, or a lipstick hue that leans neither toward blue nor toward orange, such as a true red.
Skin with a neutral undertone shows neither a clearly pink nor a clearly golden cast. In the informal wrist test, the veins look like a mix of blue and green, and both gold and silver jewellery tend to look natural against the skin.
For lipsticks, this encyclopedia calls a shade neutral-toned when its hue angle falls in a narrow band in the middle of the red range, between the blue-leaning and the orange-leaning reds. That band holds true reds and also many corals, browns and nudes at the same hue. Shades with almost no chroma, such as blacks and greys, are also labelled neutral, because a colour that close to grey has no measurable hue.
Under the colour-theory guideline used across the site, neutral skin can wear both cool and warm shades, and neutral-toned shades, such as a true red, suit all three undertones. The neutral-undertone hub lists every shade the site classes as neutral-toned.
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