The Deep-Shade Map: Foundation, Powder and Concealer by Depth and Undertone

This map holds every Opuliss Beauty complexion shade whose own product page states its depth as medium-deep, deep or tan to deep: eleven liquid shades, four pressed powders and two concealer sticks. None is named as a match for deep skin yet, because none has been photographed on deep skin under one fixed light. What follows is the map, the pigment chemistry that decides how each shade reads, and the places where the range runs thin.

What is this map, and what is it not?

This page is a chart. Every shade on it is placed by the sentence its own product page states: a depth, an undertone, and the skin it was made for. The rule for getting on the chart is that stated depth: medium-deep, deep, or tan to deep. It admits eleven liquid shades, four pressed powders and two concealer sticks. Where the shade finder on the site sorts a shade into a different band, it is working from a coarser five-band scale, and this map follows the product page. Nothing here is a camera reading, so nothing here depends on the light in your room. It is also not a recommendation. Opuliss has not yet photographed these shades on deep skin under one fixed light, and a colour judgement made without that picture would be a guess. What the chart can show is what the range holds at this end, and where it stops.

Why map by depth and undertone?

Depth is how light or deep skin reads. Undertone is the hue underneath that depth: how much yellow, how much red. The two move independently, so a useful map needs both. Colour scientists at the University of Leeds analysed an international archive of skin reflectance measurements and found that variation in lightness and colour within one population group often exceeded the difference between groups. In their data, 89.4 percent of samples had a perceptually indistinguishable counterpart in another group (Lu 2026). A group label is a poor stand-in for a shade. An imaging study of Black African women in Mauritius and Caucasian women in France found the first group measured higher in both redness and yellowness, and less even in tone across the face (Campiche 2019). A face is rarely one colour, so a shade read at the cheek can sit differently at the forehead.

What colours a foundation?

Foundation colour comes from a short list. Researchers at a cosmetics laboratory set it out plainly: the inorganic pigments in foundation are mainly red, yellow and black iron oxides with white titanium dioxide, with ultramarine blue and a chromium oxide green used occasionally (Ikkai 2023). All seventeen shades on this map list that core of four: titanium dioxide, red iron oxide, yellow iron oxide and black iron oxide. Titanium dioxide is the white that sets coverage. The three iron oxides carry the shade, and their balance decides how warm, how red and how deep it reads. Ultramarine blue appears in none of the seventeen. The five shades in the silicone-in-water Foundation line add CI 77288, a chromium oxide green, and the four pressed powders add three organic colour lakes.

Which liquid shades sit at the medium-deep line?

Nine, spread across four formulas. In the water-in-silicone full coverage line, laid down by a volatile isododecane carrier and set to a soft-focus matte, sit Praline with warm caramel undertones, Full Cover Brunette with neutral, Cafe with warm-neutral and Coco with warm cocoa. In the silicone-in-water line, which builds from a sheer veil to medium coverage in a dewy, luminous finish, sit Amber with warm golden undertones, Brunette with neutral-to-cool and Rich Caramel with warm. Terra Cotta is the medium-deep BB cream and Toasted the medium-deep tinted moisturiser, both warm. So this map holds a cool-leaning dew at this depth as well as warm and neutral ones.

Which liquid shades are labelled deep?

Two, and both sit in the dewy silicone-in-water line. Velvet Espresso is stated a deep shade with neutral undertones. Bronze Night is stated a deep shade with warm, bronzed-golden undertones. Both pages then say the same thing about who the shade was made for: medium to deep skin. That made-for clause is the one to read closely, because it is where the liquid range actually stops, and it stops one step short of where the depth word alone would suggest. One housekeeping note, because a reader may meet both surfaces. The site's shade finder sorts Bronze Night into its tan band while the product page calls it deep. The two tools run on different scales, and this map follows the page, as it does for every shade here.

Where does the liquid range stop?

Here the map has to be plain. Across every liquid formula, from full coverage to BB cream and tinted moisturiser, no shade is described as made for deep skin alone. The two stated deep are made for medium to deep skin, and Rich Caramel, stated medium-deep, is made only for medium to tanned skin. The undertones thin out at the same point. Across the eleven liquid shades here the undertones run warm, warm-neutral, neutral and one neutral-to-cool. There is no cool deep shade and no shade at any depth described with a red undertone, and olive appears only among medium shades. If your skin is deep and cool, or deep with a red cast, this range does not hold a liquid foundation labelled for you. That is a gap in the catalogue, stated as a fact. The history of why deep ranges so often end this way is told in How Many Shades Is Enough?

Does the powder foundation go deeper?

On one clause, yes. Four pressed shades are stated deep: Cinnamon and Gingerbread with warm undertones, Fig and Walnut with neutral. All four are then made for deep skin, with nothing lighter in the clause, and the powder is the only formula in the range that says that. On the depth word itself it is level with the two deep liquids rather than past them. The formula is a talc-free mineral powder, swept on dry for a natural matte or pressed on damp for fuller coverage. In a study of pressed foundations, yellow iron oxide spread its colour through a white powder base early in mixing, while red and black kept spreading later, so the shade darkened and moved toward red, and the colour of the cake could differ from the powder once applied (Tsugita 1985). The colour in the pan is a rough guide to the colour on the face.

Liquid or powder on deep, oily skin?

Oil changes how a liquid foundation reads. In a laboratory study, adding artificial sebum to a liquid foundation darkened it, and the darkening tracked a rise in how much light passed through the film. Foundations whose pigments dispersed well in sebum were less affected, and in formulas built on volatile carriers a certain range of sebum reduced the darkening (Zhang 2024). A second study measured liquid foundations over time and found that how much a shade darkened depended on how light it started, with darker shades losing less lightness than lighter ones from the same brand (Yolanda 2025). Neither study tested these formulas. They explain why a liquid can read deeper by afternoon on oily skin. The powder page makes a narrower statement: an absorbent mineral blend helps hold down surface oil, described as formula performance rather than a clinical measurement. The oil side is covered in The Greasy or Matte Default.

Which concealers reach deep skin?

Two. Choco and Oak are both stated tan to deep shades with warm undertones, made for tan to deep skin. They are creamy sticks with full, buildable coverage and a matte finish, pigmented with the same titanium dioxide and iron oxide core as the foundations. That is where the concealer range stops. The concealing cream's deepest shade is stated medium, and the two products the range calls correctors are both stated for fair and light skin, so colour correcting at depth is education on this page rather than a product. A dermatology classification, not a cosmetics study, sorted under-eye darkness into four types: a pigmented brown, a vascular blue to purple, a structural type that is shadow cast by the shape of the eye area, and a mixed type that was the commonest of the four (Huang 2014). Read against a concealer, the split matters: a shadow cast by structure is depth and light rather than colour.

How do the three products line up?

Across the map, the three products overlap rather than stack neatly. Ten of the eleven liquid shades are stated for medium to deep skin and one for medium to tanned. The two concealer sticks are stated tan to deep, a band that starts lighter and runs into the same deep end. The four deep powders are the only shades stated for deep skin with nothing lighter beside it, the one place the range reaches past its liquids, and it reaches on the made-for clause rather than the depth word. Two pressed shades stated tan, Ecru and Royal, are also made for tan to deep skin. Each label was written for its own product rather than measured against the others under one light. Two shades with similar words can still differ on the face, which is why no shade here is named as a match until it has been photographed on deep skin under one fixed light.

References

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2. Campiche R, Trevisan S, Séroul P, Rawlings AV, Adnet C, Imfeld D, Voegeli R. Appearance of aging signs in differently pigmented facial skin by a novel imaging system. J Cosmet Dermatol. 2019, 18(2):614-627. PMID 30381859. doi.org/10.1111/jocd.12806
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6. Yolanda S, Kim B, Kim M, Suk HJ. Discoloration of liquid foundation across the shade color diversity. Sci Rep. 2025, 15(1):33689. PMID 41023015. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-18770-9
7. Huang YL, Chang SL, Ma L, Lee MC, Hu S. Clinical analysis and classification of dark eye circle. Int J Dermatol. 2014, 53(2):164-170. PMID 23879616. doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-4632.2012.05701.x