What are your techniques and ways of colour matching foundation to the client? Do you prefer liquid foundation, cream foundation or powdered foundation?
As I'm expanding my portfolio I am wanting to diversify the skin colours that I work with and finding the perfect foundation colour matching.
So I must ask, do you have any tips on how to colour match foundation?
I look forward to the replies
It doesn't really matter what type of foundation formulation you use to colour match someone. As long you (I am speaking generically here... everyone) are comfortable with whatever formulation you are using, use it. And of course use the formulation that works for their skin's pH.
In the film / TV industry, we just colour match their skin tone with whatever foundation formulation we're using. Typically we just colour correct, reduce redness, cover blemishes, dark circles that sort-of-thing, without applying it full coverage. Sometimes we don't even cover dark circles, or we add more redness... Depending on how we create a character and how that character looks like in a particular scene.
An example, I worked on this film,
Longing (2024) and the director, Savi, much to the female actors dismay, didn't want their under eye circles covered up and didn't want the teen actors blemishes covered up. But I colour corrected everything else including tattoos. There was some initial push-back from the actors, but they eventually understood the assignment.
For street make-ups, sure, applying it more full coverage to whatever level that makes the person more comfortable wearing works.
For tips, use a shade that matches their skin tone exactly. However, on some black skin tones that have two different tones, (usually, they are lighter near the centre of their face and darker around the periphery of their face). You want to blend the lighter tone out towards the darker tone without making them look ashy.
In other words, it's a bit of a trial-and-error, and you have to mix more than one shade of foundation to match their overall skin tone. And you need to two powders to set each shade, or use a no-colour powder to set it.
As usual, everyone is different, so your approach is going to be different with every person.
