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Our name

Named after a skin tone. Made for all of them.

OLIVESKIN borrows its name from a phrase people use about skin. Not a fruit, not an oil, not a goal. Here it is, in plain words.

One day in good light

One house by the sea, one day, one camera. The light changes with the hour; the skin is never edited lighter or darker. Each picture is captioned with what the person uses, never with a name.

People in these pictures are generated placeholders.

The name, in three lines

  1. Olive

    A word people use for skin with a soft green or golden warmth. Everyday language, not a medical term, and nothing to do with the fruit.

  2. Skin

    All of it: light, medium and deep, face and body, at any age. The warmth people call olive shows up in white, brown and black skin alike.

  3. OLIVESKIN

    A tone, not a target. We chose the name because people use the phrase, not because anyone should aim for it.

Skin, under a lens

Closer up, every skin is built the same way.

At four hundred times, the surface of skin is a pavement of flat, overlapping cells, about nine layers deep on the face. They are much the same on every one of us.

So is the number of pigment cells beneath them. People of every skin colour have about the same number; what differs is how much pigment those cells make, and how it is packed and spread.

  1. 1One cell30 to 50 µm across
  2. 2No nucleusFlat, filled with keratin
  3. 3LayersAbout nine deep on the face
The outermost layer of skin at about 400×: flat cells in overlapping layers. A drawing, from micrographs.

Depth and undertone

A tone, not a target.

Skin colour has a depth, from lighter to deeper, and an undertone: the hue beneath the depth. The two vary on their own.

An olive undertone is not one of the ten circles below. It can sit under many of them, which is why one name can belong to so many people, and why no one needs to become it.

An olive undertone can sit under many of these

Melanin
Adds brown
Blood
Adds red
Carotenoids
From food, add yellow
With time
Skin shifts with age, season and sun. That is normal.

Skin tone swatches: Monk Skin Tone Scale by Dr Ellis Monk (2019), skintone.google, CC BY 4.0. Drawn here in dots; the colours are unchanged. The licence.

What we never promise

Six things you won’t read on our labels.

  1. No. 01

    A new colour

    Nothing we make is meant to change the colour of your skin, in either direction. The tinted sticks blur; they come off at night.

  2. No. 02

    A tone to aim for

    No skin tone is better than another. Ours is a name, not an instruction.

  3. No. 03

    Olive in the bottle

    The name is a skin tone, not an ingredient. The sprig on the label is our mark. Olive: not an ingredient

  4. No. 04

    Sun as a treatment

    The sticks are there to protect. We never call time in the sun healthy.

  5. No. 05

    Perfect skin

    Skin changes with age, season and sun. That’s normal, and not a problem to fix.

  6. No. 06

    Miracles

    If we can’t say it plainly, we don’t make it. Every claim comes from what the formula can do.

Read on

Our name · OLIVESKIN