Our data

6,950 shades, 321 products and 109 brands. Here's where they come from and what we did to them.

Sources

Brands' own websites (20 products). For the most-searched ranges and newer launches, we took each shade's name, code, listed undertone and colour from the brand's own website in October 2026. Where the brand publishes a colour value for its shade picker, we use it. Otherwise we measure the colour of the brand's shade-picker swatch. We never keep or show those images. We only replaced older data where the brand's colours follow the brand's own light-to-deep order at least as closely. Each product page says which source it uses.

Everything else comes from the foundation dataset published by The Pudding. They collected it from the Sephora and Ulta websites in January 2021 and released it under the MIT licence. Each colour was sampled from the retailer's swatch image.

What we changed

• Face products only. We left out body makeup, setting and finishing powders, a concealer, a mixing pigment, a sunscreen lotion and product bundles.
• Duplicates removed. Where a shade was listed twice with two different colours, we kept the first listing.
• Unusable swatches set aside. 48 swatches came out white, grey or blue in the source images. Those shades stay listed but aren't used for matching.
• Formulas kept apart. The same shade code can be a different colour in a brand's other formulas (MAC NC42 appears in five), so we never merge them.
• Undertone. Where the shade name, the shade code or the retail listing states an undertone, we record it and say which one it came from.

How current it is

20 products were checked on the brand's own website in October 2026. The rest date from January 2021, so some may have been reformulated since. Where a brand's own website no longer lists a product (3 so far), the product page says so. We don't call a product discontinued unless the brand says it is. Some brand websites block automated visits, so their products stay on the 2021 data for now.

Colours from brands' own websites are more consistent than the 2021 retailer photos. The same shade in two formulas of one brand differs by about half as much. Our closeness labels are set from the noisier 2021 data, so they stay cautious for every product.

Corrections and removals

If a shade is wrong or missing, or you represent a brand and want your product data corrected or removed, email hello@foundationshades.com. We'll reply within 30 days.

Licence

Source data: The Pudding foundation dataset, copyright (c) 2019 The Pudding, used under the MIT licence (full text). Brand and product names are the trademarks of their owners and are used only to identify their products. Foundation Shades isn't connected with or endorsed by any brand or retailer.