← Back to JournalYou Are Not “Medium.”
You Are One of Eight.
Dear Brown Girl,
Somewhere between the store counter and the checkout, someone decided you were medium. Maybe they said it confidently, like they knew. Maybe they handed you a shade and moved on to the next customer.
You trusted them. You went home. It wasn’t quite right. You assumed you must have been wrong about something.
A confident hand, a wrong shade, a customer already moved on. You weren’t wrong. The system was.
You weren’t wrong. The system was.
Indian skin tone depth spans eight distinct levels —and most of the beauty industry has been pretending three boxes can hold all of them.
Here is the scale that was always missing from your shade conversations.
The HerShade depth scale —all 8 levels
Very Light
Pale, porcelain. Not wheatish. Not medium. Its own thing.
Often mislabelled fairLight
Fair with warmth or subtle coolness. Shifts slightly with seasons. Often incorrectly matched to very light products.
Frequently mismatchedLight Medium
Fairer in winter, visibly deeper by summer’s end. A huge number of Indian women live here and are told they’re medium. They are not.
Told they're medium. Not true.Medium
The famous wheatish. Warm-neutral surface. More Indian women live at this depth than any single word can hold.
The infamous "wheatish"Medium Tan
Deeper, richer, still often dismissed with a lazy "dusky." Complex undertones live here. Deserves more than one or two shade options at any counter.
Dismissed as "dusky"Tan
Visibly, beautifully brown. Where the majority of India sits. Where shade innovation is most absent.
Shade innovation most absentDeep
Rich, warm brown. Requires specific formulations to avoid ashiness. Rarely given more than a shelf corner at most stores.
A shelf corner. That's it.Very Deep
The deepest range of Indian skin. Almost entirely ignored by Indian brands. HerShade flags this gap specifically — because you deserve to know when a brand has simply decided not to serve you.
Most underserved depthMost brand shade ranges end around depth 5. Depths 6, 7, and 8 —where most of India actually lives —are the gap nobody is filling.
Dear Brown Girl, you were never medium. You were always one of eight.
You were never medium. You were always one of eight.
hershade.com © HerShade · India-first AI makeup recommendations · Episode 01 of 20