Clunky title, I know.

The purpose of today’s article is to explain why you don’t need to worry about your skin tone when it comes to your wardrobe choices.

That might surprise some of you, since I bet many of you have read pieces from respected sources that have told you how important skin tone is when choosing what to wear. Here are just a couple examples I found with a two second Google search…

Art Of Manliness states…

“As far as what colors work well with a man’s particular features, you’ll want to mimic your natural contrast levels. Men with light colored hair and fair skin have low contrast and should stick with pastel and monochromatic color combinations. Men with dark hair and light skin are high contrast and will look best selecting color combinations which have clearly defined lines between them. If you have dark hair and medium to dark-colored skin, you can pull off both low and high-contrast tie and shirt/suit combinations. Your difficulty in this case will be separating acceptable suit/shirt/tie combinations from great looking suit/shirt/tie combinations. It’s a small distinction, and one best made by taking the clothing in your wardrobe and experimenting with various shades.”

Style Girlfriend states…

“Cool undertones mean your skin coloring has a base of a combo of red and blue. Cool tones go with skin tones that are olive, rosy pink, dark brown, or ebony. This undertone puts you in a Summer or Winter category.

Warm undertones are a yellow and red combo with skin tones that tend to be ivory, beige, or golden brown. If you have warm undertones, you’ll be either a Spring or a Fall.”

Those are just two examples. Over the years, I have stumbled across many more.

Now, AOM and SG are two of my favorite sites and I have been an avid reader of both for many years. They were my main inspirations for starting Father Style and, on the whole, I think the advice found there is excellent.

That being said, contributing an alternate point of view to the discourse on a particular topic is healthy and useful.

Hence, today’s article.

So, if skin tone isn’t all that important, why do men’s sites keep talking about it as if it is?

In my opinion, there are two reasons.

Let’s pile into our time machine and go way back to around 2017 or so. I was working in the marketing department of a large menswear company. I was in a meeting with the rest of the marketing team discussing some talking points we’d like to include in upcoming communications. Things like new products, any promotions we were running, which items paired best, what to wear to a wedding, stuff like that.

One of the possible topics that was brought up was how to dress based on your skin tone.

Immediately, everyone in the room unanimously agreed that skin tone was a HUGE factor in deciding what to wear and it should absolutely be a major feature in an upcoming marketing communication. A no brainer, essentially!

In the group of half-a-dozen, I was the only one who pushed back. I said that, actually, it really isn’t all that important and neither I nor any man I’ve known has ever decided what to wear based on skin tone.

A chuckle rippled through the group as they dismissed my point of view entirely and moved on to another meeting topic.

The crucial detail I have intentionally left out until now is that I was the only man in the room.

Now, this is NOT an attempt to convey that women can’t give good advice on what men should wear. What I am saying is that men and women clearly have different experiences. And living those experiences color perceptions of others’ lived experiences, often unintentionally. That’s totally normal and expected.

But the most accurate perspective on a topic will always come from someone who has lived the experience in question. I would never give advice on what a woman should wear. I have absolutely no authority on that subject because I don’t live that experience every day. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of women’s clothes when it comes to color, formality, comfort, social acceptance, and all the other stuff that goes into creating an outfit. Sure, I can make an educated guess based on my knowledge of menswear, but it will always be a guess. Also, I can give my opinion on what I like to see women wearing, but that’s different and that’s coming from my own lived experience. I would never pretend to know how to competently dress a woman.

Getting back to the marketing meeting. The women who vetoed my contribution honestly believed that skin tone was important and that talking about it would be beneficial to our customers.

But why did they believe it so strongly. I think it’s because skin tone IS important… to women!

I might be wrong, because again, I don’t live that experience, but women often consider their skin tone when getting dressed, largely because of the fact that they wear makeup. They are literally putting something colorful on their face, which already has a certain color, in order to make it pretty and appealing.

Therefore, their skin tone is part and parcel of their whole “getting dressed” process. It’s inseparable from their clothes, shoes, and jewelry.

But men don’t have that aspect of getting dressed. What our skin tone looks like literally never enters our minds when we are deciding what to wear.

And that’s how it should be, because, again, it doesn’t matter.

And the reason I know it doesn’t matter is because I have never seen a man look bad because what he was wearing clashed in some way with his skin tone. And if you think about it, I bet you haven’t either.

If an article of clothing looks bad on a man because of what color the item is, it’s because the item itself is ugly, not because the man has the “wrong” skin tone.

All the common colors found in menswear, from pale yellow and pink to lavender and green, look good on EVERYONE. If it doesn’t, it’s because the garment itself is an unattractive color.

Pale yellow is a classic shade that universally looks good. Mustard yellow, on the other hand, is ugly and looks bad on everyone.

See the difference? It doesn’t matter what your skin tone is.

Now, it’s important to note that, yes, dark skin makes those ugly shades look marginally better, but that’s just because everything looks good against a dark background. The shirt is still ugly.

Dwight Schrute’s shirts look bad on him but it’s not because of his skin tone. It’s because his shirts suck. Put them on Darryl or Stanley and they would still look bad.

But doesn’t that example prove that skin tone matters?

Not exactly.

The typical advice on skin tone usually delves into some real, gritty minutiae. I mean, look at the AOM and SG examples from earlier in this article. They aren’t simply saying “Having darker skin means universally ugly colors will look slightly better on you than people with lighter skin.”

Their advice is instructing you to put yourself into a specific category, based on your skin tone, which determines what you should or should not wear.

That’s way more rigid than it needs to be. And in being so rigid, it actually creates MORE problems for guys getting dressed than it solves.

A well-meaning guy who reads those articles is going to come away with his head swimming! He might not second guess wearing a navy suit and white shirt, but he might suddenly feel unsure about his brown, tweed sport coat. Or his green sweater. Or his olive trousers. Things that look great on everyone, regardless of their skin tone.

Here at Father Style, I have always tried to “plow the road” for you guys. I have always tried to provide guidance to make getting dressed easier for you than it was for me. After all, I have done all the trial and error already. I’ve had the experiences. I can look at advice (often well-meaning, to be sure) on the internet and determine whether it holds water.

But a lot of guys aren’t at a place yet where they can separate the wheat from the chaff. Personally, I feel like most advice regarding skin tone falls squarely in the “chaff” category.