More beauty companies are expanding their shade ranges to reflect real life.

Meet three industry experts working to ensure there’s #foundationforall.

In 2017, Rihanna shook the beauty industry when she debuted her Fenty Beauty cosmetics line with Pro Filt’r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation in 40 shades. Her deepest hues sold out almost immediately, disproving the absurd yet common claim that darker shades of makeup don’t sell. More importantly, her extensive colours and diverse marketing campaign sparked a conversation around inclusion and the importance of giving equal consideration to everyone, especially people of colour, who have long been ignored by cosmetics companies. While RiRi wasn’t the first—giants like M.A.C and Estée Lauder already had 40+ foundation ranges—she definitely created a movement for more representation, and suddenly it appeared that other brands, from drugstore to luxury, were scrambling to follow suit with shade extensions or by launching entirely new 40+ shade collections. However, it seems like many brands, in their rush to do better, often miss the mark when trying to colour match an array of skin tones (notably the ones they didn’t pay much attention to before).

Much of the colour mismatching and confusion occurs when brands operate under the mandate of addressing undertone instead of skin tone, believes James Boehmer, global artistic director for Shiseido’s makeup division. Skin tone is our surface colour whether our complexion is fair, medium or deep. Undertone, on the other hand, refers to the oh-so-subtle hue underneath the skin’s surface and is either cool, warm or neutral.

Focusing on the undertone when creating foundation results in “correcting” skin colour, something Boehmer is very much against. “I’ve always hated the idea of changing someone’s skin colour,” he says. “Your skin should be your skin. You just want it to be more even and luminous.”

Boehmer explains that foundation shades are developed using four basic pigments from the colour wheel: black, white, yellow and red. From there, combinations of those colours make it possible to create a boundless number of foundation shades. The key to a natural-looking formula is to not be heavy-handed with one hue.

A sought-after makeup artist with over two decades of experience, Boehmer was tasked with reinventing Shiseido’s entire makeup offering. The three-year undertaking led to the launch of the Japanese brand’s Synchro Skin SelfRefreshing Foundation in 2019, a range of 30 foundations. Yes, that’s shy of the magic “Fenty 40,” but for Boehmer, it wasn’t about the number but, rather, the inclusive execution. The range appears equally distributed across fair, medium and deep skin tones. And, of course, the most realistic complexion matches were paramount. “We were really thinking about skin tone more than undertone,” he says.

Constant difficulty with finding a shade that matched her own complexion is what led longtime makeup lover Yu-Chen Shih to start her own ultra-niche foundation brand, Orcé Cosmetics. The Taiwan-born, Singapore-bred, L.A.-based founder, who had formerly worked in diversity marketing, launched a carefully selected six-shade range in 2019 specifically for Asian complexions.

“Foundation was something I wanted to love, but I just couldn’t find any options for myself,” shares Shih. “Even