EZ Beauty: Find Your Foundation Match with Sephora + Pantone Color IQ

Forget about finding the colour of your parachute. How can we find our perfect foundation match? No face posses a uniform skin tone and to add further confusion to the case, the skin’s undertones (warm, cool, neutral or a combination of all) can further complicate the hunt.

The Sephora + Pantone Color IQ service takes a scientific approach to finding your perfect base. The two have teamed up before for makeup collaborations, but now Sephora is extending the colour authority’s expertise to foundation (if Pantone can find the perfect shade of griege for your living room walls, surely they can source your face makeup, yes?).

Here’s how it works
One of the store’s beauty experts will take a reading of your undertones at three points—forehead, neck and cheek—using what is called a spectro-colorimeter. The device records 27 images in 1.8 seconds using eight different illuminations and one ultraviolet illumination. Based on this data, it will assign you a skin tone number from a library of 110 shades. This number is entered into an iPad and produces a list of recommended foundation shades from the 1,000-plus sold at Sephora. These suggestions can also be emailed to you for future reference.

They advise against having chemical peels, consuming lots of coffee or working out before the consultation. The service is available exclusively at Sephora stores across Canada and is free of charge. After trying it out in person, it did indeed provide a number of matching foundations, although we at EZ Beauty then had another not-so-terrible quandary: deciding on which one to choose from the many selections.