There’s something special about lipstick’s ability to make women feel glamorous that leaves us coming back for more. A swipe of a bold red can take any outfit from basic to classic. When it comes to selecting the right lipstick, it can be harder than most, given the sheer variety of colors and finishes that are available. To help, we put together a guide to choosing the perfect lipstick for your day or night.

1. Determine your skin tone
The first thing you need to do is to assess your skin tone. Skin tones generally fall into five types, fair, light, dark, tan or medium. You should be able to determine your skin tone with ease and then, select the lipstick that goes with the same. For example, if your skin tone happens to be fair or light, then you can opt for pink, coral, scintillating red, dusty red, etc. Your skin tone determines the sort of lipstick you would need, to complement the same.

2. Skin undertone
Apart from your skin tone, you would also need to assess your skin undertone. Skin undertone is categorized as warm, cool, and neutral. There’s a simple test you can carry out for determining your skin undertone – if the veins that are visible on your wrist happen to be green, then you have a warm skin undertone. If they happen to be blue you have a cool undertone and inability to determine one implies that you have a neutral tone. Once you have determined your skin undertone, you can then move on to select the right lipstick for your body.

3. Dual shades
If you happen to have top-heavy lips, one of the advantages is that you can use a dual-color type of lipsticks of the same shade with one darker than the other. You can paint the bottom lip with the lighter shade and the top lip with a slightly darker tone. This should help enhance your lips and accentuate the same as well.

4. What to avoid
If you have thin lips, then you may want to avoid the brightly colored type of lipstick. The reason is that brightly colored lipsticks tend to make your lips seem thinner than usual which can mar your overall look. And as for full lips, you would need to avoid lighter shades and those lipsticks that come with glittery features. Angelina Jolie would be the perfect example; she has full plump lips and always uses a dark shade to go with the same.

5. Hair color
You can also use your hair colour to determine the right types of lipstick to choose from. Just remember that while there happens to be no hard and fast rule that states that you have to use these lipstick shades with a particular shade of hair, it is advisable to follow these general tips and suggestions. You may want to check online for the type of lipstick to use with your shade of hair colour; the basic premise is that using the right shade should perfectly complement your hair as well as help you stand out for the right reason.