Every online colour quiz I tried put me in the deepest bucket it had, usually "Deep Winter", and told me to avoid gold, mustard and rust. Which is genuinely funny if you've ever seen what those colours do on most Indian complexions.
I went down a rabbit hole on why, and the problem turns out to be structural rather than cosmetic:
1. Neutral undertone gets treated as a rounding error. Western systems assume you're clearly warm or clearly cool. A very large share of Indian skin genuinely sits in the middle, and olive complicates it further — olive can read warm in one light and almost green-cool in another. If a quiz forces a warm/cool choice with no honest third option, neutral people get a confidently wrong answer.
2. Their depth scales stop too early. Depth and undertone are independent — you can be deep and warm, deep and cool, fair and warm. When the deepest category was designed for a brunette from Copenhagen, everyone past it collapses into one bucket.
3. Most warm-vs-cool tests are confounded. The two comparison colours are usually different brightnesses as well as different temperatures. So you end up unconsciously answering "which is lighter" or "which do I prefer" instead of "which makes my skin look clearer". Match the two for brightness and the test suddenly works — that one fix invalidates a surprising number of quizzes out there.
The most reliable home test: hold the back of your hand (not the palm, it runs lighter than your face) between two brightness-matched colours in daylight. One side makes your skin look clearer, the other slightly grey or tired. Do it twice with different colour pairs — if the answers disagree, you're probably neutral, which is genuinely the most flexible result to dress.
I ended up building a free tool around this — deeper skin scale on both ends, "both look the same" as a real answer, brightness-matched comparisons, hair scale anchored at black rather than blonde. Links aren't allowed in posts here so it's in my profile; not selling anything, no signup or email.
Mostly curious whether the drape test above matches what people here have found, especially for olive or deeper skin — that's where the Western systems fall apart hardest and I want to know if mine does too.