Gold or silver

How to run it properly

Bare skin, no makeup, daylight or a window rather than a bulb. Hold a plain gold piece and a plain silver piece flat against the skin at the jaw, one at a time, and look at the skin rather than at the metal. The right one makes the skin look even and the wrong one leaves it looking sallow, grey or blotchy.

Two things ruin this test more often than anything else. A warm bulb makes everything read gold, and a piece you have owned for years is a piece you are used to seeing on yourself, which is not the same as it suiting you. If both look fine, that is a result: it points at the palettes that sit between the two halves.

What each answer rules out

The metal is not a season, but it removes half of them. 6 of the twelve palettes call for gold and 6 for silver, and none of them take either. That is a cleaner split than the undertone question itself gives, which is the surprise here and worth stating plainly.

The reason it is cleaner: metal tracks the season family rather than the undertone label. Soft Summer reads neutral-toned and still wears silver, Soft Autumn reads neutral-toned and still wears gold and Bright Winter reads neutral-toned and still wears silver. So a reader who is genuinely between warm and cool still gets a usable answer from this test, where the vein test would only tell them they were between.

• Gold: Light Spring, True Spring, Bright Spring, Soft Autumn, True Autumn and Deep Autumn.
• Silver: Light Summer, True Summer, Soft Summer, Deep Winter, True Winter and Bright Winter.

The neutrals that come with the answer

Metal is the visible end of a whole palette, and the part of that palette you will actually spend money on is the neutrals. Each palette below is listed with the neutral it builds on, named rather than left as a hex, because nobody can take a hex into a shop.

If your metal answer and your instinct about neutrals disagree, the neutrals are the better evidence. A wardrobe is mostly neutrals and only occasionally a colour, so the base you build on decides far more outfits than any single accent does.

• Light Spring: gold. Base neutral #EDE3D2: very light, a cream (ΔE 1.3).
• True Spring: gold. Base neutral #C89F6B: light, a camel (ΔE 2.0).
• Bright Spring: gold. Base neutral #2B2B2B: very deep, a charcoal (ΔE 5.2).
• Light Summer: silver. Base neutral #E8E6E1: very light, a white (ΔE 4.9).
• True Summer: silver. Base neutral #6E7B8B: mid-tone, nearest common name grey (ΔE 14.2).
• Soft Summer: silver. Base neutral #7D7B76: mid-tone, a grey (ΔE 11.2).
• Soft Autumn: gold. Base neutral #8A7B68: mid-tone, nearest common name grey (ΔE 14.3).
• True Autumn: gold. Base neutral #6B5842: deep, nearest common name olive green (ΔE 14.1).
• Deep Autumn: gold. Base neutral #3B2F24: very deep, a chocolate brown (ΔE 8.5).
• Deep Winter: silver. Base neutral #000000: very deep, a black (ΔE 3.0).
• True Winter: silver. Base neutral #000000: very deep, a black (ΔE 3.0).
• Bright Winter: silver. Base neutral #000000: very deep, a black (ΔE 3.0).