Since Fenty Beauty walked into Sephora with a 40-shade foundation range in 2017, “more shades” has been the industry’s default answer to accusations of exclusion. The brand’s launch changed the beauty game by embracing diversity at a scale competitors hadn’t attempted, and the ripple effect pushed legacy and indie brands alike into a numbers arms race that continues today, with 40-, 50-, and even 60-shade ranges now marketed as proof of inclusivity.
But, the data suggests that the arms race hasn’t fixed the underlying problem it was intended to solve. A study conducted by the NPD Group for Make Up For Ever found 73% of women say it’s challenging to find the right foundation, with the number-one challenge being finding the right shade according to 54% of women polled. Notably, 72% of women don’t change their foundation shade seasonally even though skin coloring can shift by up to four shades across the year. Shiseido cited an even starker figure in an internal study, putting the share of women wearing the wrong shade of foundation at 94%.
That gap between shade proliferation and match satisfaction points to a cost problem as much as a representation one. Every additional shade represents R&D spend, packaging SKUs, inventory, and markdown risk. These are the factors brands have focused on most since Fenty launched, even as complaints about undertone mismatch persist.
Every expert interviewed said that consumers and even brands conflate depth (how light or dark a shade is) with undertone (its underlying color cast). But, in fact, these are two entirely separate variables. “From my experience, a lot of the time the issue is actually undertone, not necessarily the depth of the shade,” Shanzey Al-Amin, a makeup artist and education leader with 10+ years across artistry, education, and brand training, said to BeautyMatter. “Someone can technically be wearing the right depth, but if the undertone is too yellow, too pink, too peach, or too olive for them, it can still look completely off.” She flagged a widespread misconception that surface redness automatically signals a cool undertone. “You can have surface redness but still have a warm, neutral, or olive undertone underneath. That is where people often end up buying something that looks too pink or too orange once they apply it all over the face.”
Dianna Ruth, Chief Innovation Officer at contract manufacturer DMI Solutions, framed the same gap from the product-development side. “Undertones and shade selection is very challenging for most people. A trained makeup artist would be best at helping a person select the right shade and undertone for them,” she said, adding that undertone’s effect on a shade is formula-dependent, not fixed; meaning the same shade can read differently depending on how a brand builds it.
Valerie Lawson, a makeup artist, beauty educator, and founder of CVL Beauty, a makeup and tools brand, drew the sharpest distinction between the two concepts. “Complexion is basically ‘We’re all brown.’ So we can say you're brown skin, that’s your complexion. But what makes you unique is there’s a color, either a deeper yellow, a flush yellow, purple, blue. There’s something else that's giving you depth in your unique brown, that’s undertones,” she said.
Al-Amin made a related point based on her retail experience. “There is no universal shade numbering system between brands, so a shade 5 in one brand could be completely different from a shade 5 in another,” claiming that consumer loyalty to a single shade number only holds within one brand’s specific formula.
Range expansion alone doesn’t fix mismatch, because depth, undertone, formula, and finish are four separate variables; brands frequently solve for only one. “Deeper complexions have just as much undertone variation as lighter complexions, so it cannot just be about making shades darker,” Al-Amin said. “A brand could have 50 or 60 shades, but if the foundation oxidizes heavily, turns gray or ashy, looks flat on the skin, or does not keep its true pigment once it is blended, then people can still struggle to find something that works,” she continued.
Ruth agreed depth is no longer the primary bottleneck, adding a manufacturing-side caveat with direct cost implications, as creating shades and testing for everyone takes time and requires a large community, which can take time to build. Lawson’s sharpest critique targeted brands that pad range counts without adding undertone diversity. “There are some brands that sound inclusive, but they are only representing two undertones—yellow and orange; but they’ve expanded into 40 yellows and 40 oranges. They’re really not inclusive.” Her prescription is practitioner-led development. “If you take a brand like Pat McGrath or a brand like Made by Mitchell, you can tell that these are practitioners who have skin in the game.”
The shade-range race also carries environmental, MOQ, and retail costs, among many others. These factors rarely enter the inclusivity conversation. The global cosmetics industry produces billions of units of packaging every year, the overwhelming majority of which isn’t recyclable, and every additional shade added to a range means more pigment batches, more testers, and more packaging. Color cosmetics compound that problem in a specific way, as shades within a range rarely sell at the same rate. A range expanded without fixing undertone accuracy adds SKUs that are more likely to end up as slow-moving stock, markdowns, or discontinued lines—waste that a narrower, better-calibrated range wouldn’t generate in the first place. Retailers also carry minimum stocks in these slow-moving shades. The issue, however, ultimately stems from manufacturing, where high MOQs are required per shade. This makes managing a larger number of shades a challenge from both an inventory and cash-flow perspective.
All three experts agreed on the same fix, and it’s cheaper than continuous range expansion: Educate the people who influence purchase decisions before adding more products. Al-Amin wants brands to adopt more specific language. “Instead of just saying ‘medium warm,’ I think something like ‘medium with golden-olive undertones’ is much more helpful.” She also wants formula transparency, with answers to questions like “Does it oxidize, deepen, run sheer, [provide] full coverage?” built into product descriptions. Her closing point doubles as an industry thesis. “I would love to see the industry move away from treating inclusivity as a numbers game.” Ruth’s view was more direct. “I think more education about undertones would be a benefit to the complexion category in general.”
Lawson is putting that thesis into a formal research program: a multicountry undertone-mapping study launching in six African markets in early 2027, designed to hand structured data back to the educators, the schools, the product developers, and the brands. Through her work with the Mastercard Foundation, she has already trained roughly 100 aspiring makeup artists on the continent, a model she argued is more scalable than SKU proliferation because knowledge, unlike inventory, transfers across brands, formats, and borders. “I want knowledge to be the first,” she said. “If we are able to get that understanding, half of our problem is solved.”
None of this diminishes the importance of expanding shade ranges; rather, it challenges the notion that a broader range is the ultimate measure of inclusivity.
A 60-shade range still generates returns, markdowns, and frustrated customers if the sales floor, the marketing copy, and the consumer herself can’t tell a golden undertone from an olive one. What Al-Amin, Ruth, and Lawson are each describing, from three different corners of the industry, is a rebalancing of investment toward training that travels with the customer from one brand to the next, rather than SKUs that don’t. If Lawson is correct, the brands that have the most success will focus more on education than on winning the numbers race when it comes to shades of foundation.
