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By Kailah, Founder of MG Naturals · Cosmetic formulator since 2014 · Last updated:
May 2026
Buying foundation online used to feel like a gamble. You'd order a shade that
looked right on your screen, wait two weeks, open the box... and discover it was
three shades too pink. Or grey.
It doesn't have to be that way anymore. The science of online shade matching has
come a long way, and most of the friction has been engineered out — if you know
what to look for.
Here's a formulator's guide to finding your perfect foundation shade from your
phone, without leaving your house, and without making expensive mistakes.
• Screens lie.Every phone screen displays colour slightly differently. The shade you see in product photos isn't the shade you'll see in the bottle.
• Lighting changes everything.Foundation shade looks different under bathroom lighting vs natural daylight vs the office. A perfect shade in one environment can look terrible in another.
• Undertone matters more than depth.Most people can identify whether they need a light, medium, or dark foundation. Almost nobody knows their undertone. And undertone is the difference between makeup that disappears and makeup that looks like a mask.
Solve those three problems and online shade matching becomes simpler than walking
into Sephora.
The two things you need to identify:
1. Your depth (how light or deep your skin is). This is the easier one. Look at your bare face in natural daylight and rate yourself: very fair, fair, light, light-medium, medium, medium-deep, deep, very deep.
2. Your undertone (the hue beneath your skin). This is where the magic happens. There are three main undertones:
• Cool — pink, red, or bluish hues. Veins look blue. Silver jewellery looks better than gold.
• Warm — yellow, peachy, or golden hues. Veins look green. Gold jewellery looks better than silver.
• Neutral — a balance of both. Veins look blue-green. Both metals look fine.
There's also a fourth category, olive, which has subtle green undertones and is often misidentified. People with olive undertones usually find that warm shades look orange and cool shades look grey on them. Olive needs a slightly green-balanced shade — which we make in our "Olive Fair" series specifically because so many of our customers needed it.
This is the method most of our customers use Our Shade Finder Quiz takes you through a few simple steps.
From those answers, our scientific colour analysis matches you to one of our 11 shades. The whole quiz takes 90 seconds. And here's the part that makes it actually work: every order comes with a Perfect Match Guarantee. If the shade isn't right, we swap it for free. No risk. No second guessing.
When you do order, select a sample of the shade *next* to the one you've matched (we
recommend going up a shade). Why? Because skin tone shifts seasonally — you might be yourmatched shade in winter and the deeper shade in summer.
Having both lets you customise. You can mix them for in-between days. You can use one for the body and one for the face. You can keep using both for years instead of buying new foundations every season.
Three things give you a complete safety net when ordering with us:
• Every order comes with a complimentary sample of a second shade — so you can compare side by side.
• Our Perfect Match Guarantee swaps your bottle for free if the shade isn't right.
• $2 sample sizes are available if you'd rather test before committing.
There's no version of this where you end up with the wrong shade and lose money. That's the entire point of how we built it.
Stop guessing. Take the 90-second quiz, get your match, and have it on your doorstep within days.
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