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Another soft summer makeup post! Today, we’re talking about the best makeup options for foundation for soft summers. I wrote about the best eye make-up colours for soft summers in this post, if you’re looking for eyeshadow colours. And we covered the best soft summer hair colors as well! 

Soft summer’s primary colour aspect is our mutedness: any color too bright or clear doesn’t suit us. And this can be a challenge for the soft summer wardrobe, and a pain when picking eyeliner colours. We don’t suit warmer colors, and our muted appearance means that fewer shades in the cool tones are perfect either. 

But in my opinion, the toughest part of soft summer is the foundation! The same is true with soft autumn colors — they’re muted as well. Finding a muted foundation can be a nightmare.

This post has some of my personal background with the soft summer color palette foundation. Then, I link to the post that helped me understand the best option for foundation, and directions for how to adjust any foundation to suit a soft summer. 

​This post technically applies to all the summer seasons, but it’s going to hit the hardest for soft summer palette girlies and our sister seasons, the soft autumns. 

​Foundation was always too orange

I could never wear foundation when I was younger! Despite being a major acne sufferer, I still somehow looked worse with foundation on than without it. It was like something with my skin was wrong. 

(Of course, we already know now that the whole point of finding out your colour season is that nothing about your coloring is wrong! But I was years away from getting interested in color analysis.)

There was no such thing as a natural make-up look for me. Every foundation looked painted on. My teen years were the very early 2000s, so as I got a little older, all of a sudden everyone looked orange anyway. That was a short respite from worrying about this!

I was color-matched at makeup counters over and over again. Sephora, Clinique, MAC — I must have gone to MAC three or four times and explained the problem. They would patiently swatch me, sometimes repeatedly. It looked fine on the store, but once I had foundation on my entire face, no matter how well I blended, it looked heavy and fake. 

Anyway, every color analysis blog post starts with a story like this: I didn’t understand my colors and I didn’t understand why everything looked bad. The makeup artists did mostly give me cool-toned foundation. It still didn’t look right! 

A couple years later those BB Creams came into fashion. (Short explanation for the youth: these were basically skin tints or tinted moisturizer; the BB stood for beauty balm, I think?) My skin cleared up significantly in my late teens. And I kind of just gave up on wearing foundation–it didn’t feel necessary anymore. 

The tinted products didn’t look weird like the more opaque ones did. I stopped worrying about foundation.

Saturation and desaturation

I still liked makeup and was still feeling my way through what looked like me: light neutrals, fewer dark colors, no harsh lines. Definitely wasn’t carrying off the late 2016 bright colours at all. I knew by then to avoid warm tones. 

Someone in one of the color analysis subreddits linked this post from Elemental Colour about how to find your best foundation shade. If you’re interested in color analysis at all, it’s definitely worth a read — it isn’t specific to soft summers and actually isn’t really even about color analysis. But I learned a lot about how to look at and understand my natural coloring. 

The part of the post that had the most impact on me was the part about chroma (scroll down to the fourth graphic!). 
Basically, the author says, you can have two people with the same skin tone, one whose skin is more saturated and one whose skin is less saturated. 

And of course we see this in color analysis too, but we call it “clear” and “muted”. Saturated and desaturated. 

Someone who’s a bright winter can have the same skin tone as me, and she will be cool like me. But we shouldn’t be wearing the exact same foundation, because it will either be too clear and bright for me, or too muted and soft for her. We both might have medium value, but our chromas are too different. 

​Foundation adjustors 

In this same post, Sarah talks about foundation adjustors in a whole slew of colors. Again, I’ll direct you to the post to read the whole thing if you’re interested, because it is a truly comprehensive guide! But I zoomed in on the part that seemed relevant to me: that my “best choice” foundation was always too orange. 

For years, I had assumed “too orange” meant “too dark” and bought foundations that were too light, and then they ended up looking wrong in a different way. But this was an amazingly helpful concept that made me actually excited to try to match my soft summer skin. 

The idea is that this blue mixing pigment will remove that orangeness. Remember your color wheel? There’s some “canceling” that goes on here, and it results in a less saturated color that suits the mutedness of a soft summer.

So I started with the L.A. Girl Pro.Color Foundation Mixing Pigment, and I bought the foundation that goes with it. I wasn’t thrilled about the matte finish on the foundation, but for $15 for both, I was willing to give it a try. 

It took an afternoon of troubleshooting, but I finally got a natural look with foundation for the first time in my life! True summer victory!

Best foundation for soft summers

Okay, to get the muted soft summer colors in a foundation that’s too bright, here’s what you need to do. 

In this post, I’m working with the L.A. Girl blue mixer that I linked above, plus my Pro.Matte shade in Bisque. You want to start with a foundation that is the right depth for you. It shouldn’t be too dark or too light, ideally. If you’re like me, you were sold a ‘perfect color’ that wasn’t too light or too dark but still wasn’t perfect somehow?

(I almost cleaned up the bottles before taking the picture, but I think it’s good that you can see that they are well-loved.)

Here’s a side-by-side: the foundation I’m starting with by itself, and then a little image for scale of the mixture before I mix it. See how little blue I’m using? Obviously this wouldn’t be enough foundation to cover my whole face, but you can imagine scaling it up, I’m sure. 

Mix!

And here’s the initial mixture before I spread it out. You’ll notice that the mixture looks lighter, almost? But really, what it is is that the blue has cancelled out some of the orange/yellow undertones, and the color is far less saturated. For a muted seasonal colour palette, this is what we need! 

Here’s the colors blended into my hand. You can see how the mixed shade blends in much better, despite the fact that my skin tone is darker on my hands than my face. 

And here’s the two mixtures blended into my wrist, which is much paler than my hand and my face. Even though the color is too dark for this skin, one shade is distinctively closer. The color on this is awful!

And here, again, the same photo in natural light: both shades are too dark, but one looks very loud. It’s the second-lightest color in the line, but next to the desaturated mixed foundation, it looks very orange!  I deliberately left a small strip of skin between the two colors for best comparison.

Other blue mixers for soft summers

I am on my second bottle of the blue mixer and probably my fifth bottle of the Pro.Matte foundation. I’ve just always been happy enough with it to never try anything else. But if you have a foundation that you love, you can test the combination together! Many of the Amazon reviews are of people mixing the L.A. Girl mixer with other foundations. I may try that on my next purchase, because I don’t love the matte aspect of the base line. 

However, the “professional” option out there (and the one that Sarah used in the post) is from Temptu: 

To me it seems like a lot less product for more or less the same price. This could be a good strategy if you’re changing the product directly in the bottle? But most of the Temptu reviews seem to be from professional makeup artists who have the whole set of adjusters to work on different clients. 

Ratios for mixing soft summer foundation

So, up there I was only mixing a tiny bit. Typically, when I mix a full face, I’m using two pumps of foundation and a half-pump of the blue mixer. I also mix in a tiny daub of the Weleda Skin Food, my holy grail for skin dryness. 

 

I have mixed a small bottle a few times, too, when my travel schedule or gym routine required it! The best way to do this is just to go very slowly. Trying to blend a bottle, even a small bottle, is deceptive because the product that’s against the bottle doesn’t always get mixed! And you might get totally different shades than you’re going for. So it can be done, but go slow. Too much blue mixer equals blue foundation!

One helpful tip, if you want to do a large premixture, is to just make sure that you are still at home the first few times you use it, so you can correct the mixture if you need. Packing a mixture for the AM gym run without testing it will take your workday from “polished look” to “cookie monster” real quick. 

But overall, once you get the hang of it and get a sense of what your best colors look like, it’s amazing to put on a full face of makeup and see your face, not the makeup! Your natural beauty and natural features shine through. And isn’t that the point of color analysis?

Pin to come back to this post when your foundation mixer arrives for your best ever soft summer foundation!