Gold or silver: which actually suits your skin

The advice that gold suits warm skin and silver suits cool skin gets repeated everywhere without anyone explaining how to tell which you are, or admitting how small the effect actually is. Both parts are worth fixing.

Undertone is not the same as how fair you are

This is the confusion at the centre of the whole topic. Undertone is the colour beneath the surface, and it is independent of depth. Two people with identical complexions can have opposite undertones, and someone very fair and someone very deep can share one.

Across South Asian skin, warm and neutral undertones are the most common by a distance, with olive — which behaves as its own category — very well represented. Cool undertones exist here too and are simply less frequent.

Four tests, two minutes

1. 1Veins at the wrist, in daylight. Greenish suggests warm. Blue or purple suggests cool. Both or unclear suggests neutral. Daylight matters — indoor bulbs make everything look warm.
2. 2White paper against your face. If your skin looks yellow or golden beside pure white, you are warm. If it looks pink or slightly blue, you are cool.
3. 3Jewellery you already own. Hold gold to one side of your face and silver to the other. One will make your skin look even and the other will make it look slightly grey or slightly flushed. This is the most reliable test on this list.
4. 4The sun. Skin that tans readily and rarely burns tends to be warm. Skin that burns and then goes pink rather than brown tends to be cool.

What flatters what

Rose gold is the diplomat here. It sits warm enough for warm skin and pink enough for cool skin, which is a large part of why it became so widely worn — it is genuinely the most forgiving metal tone there is. Wearing more than one tone at once has its own rule.

Now the honest part

The effect is real and it is small. It is most visible in pieces that sit against your face — earrings, and a short necklace — and almost invisible in a ring or a bracelet, which is why nobody has ever looked wrong because of a ring's metal colour.

Three things matter more than undertone: whether the piece fits, whether it suits what you are wearing, and whether you like it. A woman with cool undertones who loves gold should wear gold. The rule is a starting point for people who have no preference, not a verdict for people who do.

Working around it, if you want to

• Put your best tone closest to your face. Earrings and short necklaces in the flattering metal; rings and bracelets in whatever you like.
• Use a two-tone piece as a bridge. It legitimises the less flattering metal by putting it beside the better one.
• Warm metals against jewel colours — emerald, deep red, mustard. Cool metals against navy, grey, black and white.
• PVD gold on steel is slightly cooler than real yellow gold, which occasionally makes it the better choice for someone in between.

Undertone tells you where to start. It has never once told anyone what to buy.