Color Theory

Ever wonder why your friend's lipstick looks great on them but terrible on you? The answer lies in Color Theory, which is at the heart of everything we do at Teak, from formulating new lip shades to modeling our lipsticks. Below, we break it down. But first, please take a look at our viral tiktoks on color theory :)

Both skin tone and lip tone influence how a lipstick looks

Color Theory is a set of principles that tells us that the way we perceive a color depends on its surrounding colors. A red lipstick will look very different on a white skin than it will on brown skin. Furthermore, a red lipstick layered on top of pink lips will look very different on purple-brown lips. This is why the same lipstick can look so different on two different people.

South Asian complexions are very multi-tonal, making lipstick shopping tricky

South Asian complexions have many skintones and undertones in different parts of the face. When you put all of them together, especially those around the mouth and jaw, you get a large and varied palette of colors. This complexity can make it particularly hard to find flattering lip shades.

Teak develops lipsticks that work with South Asian complexions

We recognize that South Asians come in an infinite number of skin and lip tone combinations. We do extensive user testing to make sure we understand how our lipstick look on as many of them as possible, since we know how much of a difference color theory can make.

See how our lipsticks look on models of different complexions:

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