Choosing a wig colour you will still like in month three

Colour is the decision people make first and should make close to last. It is also the one where the photograph is least trustworthy, for a reason that has nothing to do with anyone being dishonest.

What the photograph is doing to the colour

Product photographs are lit to make hair look expensive. That means strong directional light, often warm, usually from more than one angle, with the hair arranged to catch it.

Two things follow. Warm shades — chestnut, caramel, honey — photograph richer than they are. And any colour with variation in it photographs far better than a flat one, because the light has something to work with.

Neither is a trick. But the light in your hallway is one overhead bulb, and it will not do any of that. Assume a shade will land a step flatter and a step cooler than the picture, and choose accordingly.

Undertone, briefly

Skin undertone is the colour underneath the surface tone, and it does not track how light or dark your skin is. Two people with the same depth of complexion can have opposite undertones.

The wrist test is the quickest version. In daylight, look at the veins on the inside of your wrist.

• Green-looking veins point to warm undertones, which sit well with golden browns, caramel, honey, warm blondes and chocolate.
• Blue or purple veins point to cool, which sits well with ash browns, espresso, jet black, and blondes described as beige or platinum rather than golden.
• If it is genuinely ambiguous, you are likely neutral, and most shades will work. This is the easy outcome, not the inconclusive one.

The rule this produces is soft. A cool-toned person in a warm shade does not look wrong, they look slightly ruddier. It is worth knowing which direction you are pushing, not worth agonising over.

The five families we stock

Rather than list shade codes, here is what the catalogue actually splits into and who each one tends to suit.

Natural black. The most forgiving from a distance and the least forgiving up close, because a single flat dark colour against skin shows every edge of the lace. Works with cool undertones and with any complexion depth. If you buy this, buy it with a root shadow.

Brown. The broadest family and where most people are happiest. Warm browns for warm undertones, ash and espresso for cool. This is also the family that hides regrowth mismatch best if you have your own hair underneath at the nape.

Dimensional — highlights, balayage, ombré. Colour that changes down the length. The largest part of what we stock, and the family that most reliably reads as real hair, because grown hair is never one colour. The style page goes into how the different techniques behave.

Blonde. The hardest to get right and the one where undertone matters most. Warm undertones want honey and golden; cool undertones want beige, ash or platinum. Get this backwards and it is visible from across a room. Our range here is small, so if blonde is non-negotiable, check what is in stock before you get attached to a shade.

Bold colour. Red, burgundy, anything unnatural. Undertone rules mostly stop applying, because nobody is reading this as your own hair. Choose it because you like it.

Why flat colour is the risky choice

The most common reason a wig reads as a wig is not the hairline. It is that the colour is identical from root to tip and identical across the whole head.

Hair that grew out of a head is not like that. There is regrowth at the root, sun exposure at the ends, and variation between strands. A wig with a root shadow and some tonal movement through the length is doing an impression of that. A flat one is not, and no amount of good lace compensates.

If you are choosing between two shades and one has some depth variation in it, take that one.

The bathroom test

Before you commit, do this. Find a photograph of the shade, put it on your phone, and go and look at it next to your face in the room where you get ready in the morning — not by a window, not under the bathroom’s brightest setting.

That is the light the wig will live in. A colour that survives it is a colour you will still like in month three.

If it goes wrong anyway, darkening a wig is achievable and lightening one really is not, which is another argument for choosing slightly lighter than your target rather than slightly darker.