Thirty-eight shades, matched on one variable: depth, not undertone. Hung Vanngo’s Red Carpet Skin Luminous Foundation, which launched July 13 at $46, drops warm, neutral, and cool entirely (the taxonomy every shade-finder quiz and virtual try-on engine inherited). His bet is that the three-bucket system was always a lossy compression of skin, not a description of it.

Skin sits in a continuous color solid. In the CIELAB space, a complexion is three numbers: L* for lightness, a* for red to green, b* for yellow to blue. Warm, neutral, and cool take that chroma plane and round it into three drawers. The clearest evidence that the rounding costs you something is an adjacent metric: the Individual Typology Angle, dermatology’s “objective” skin metric, is built from L* and b* alone and drops a* entirely, so it “does not account at all for the red/green color scale.” One ITA number can stand for many different real complexions, which is the working definition of a lossy code.

The same irony sits inside an established tool. Sephora’s Color IQ, the Pantone scanner it introduced in 2012, reads skin with a spectrocolorimeter, then compresses that reading into a single Pantone SkinTone code. The measurement is high fidelity; the format it writes into is not. A face gets scanned in fine detail and then filed under one of a handful of codes, exactly the compression Vanngo is now cutting out of his own bottle.

Vanngo’s answer is to stop asking the shade to carry the undertone. He builds every face on neutral foundation, then warms or cools it with blush and bronzer on top, treating undertone as a step you tune, not a property poured into the bottle. Depth is the one axis a stranger can read off your jaw in good light; the red-green and yellow-blue drift is where matches curdle. It is how oil painters build skin: value first, temperature after.

None of this is new, which is the tell that the taxonomy was always a convenience. Color Harmony, the counter system credited, unreliably, to Max Factor in 1918, sorted faces into Blondes, Brunettes, Redheads, and a bucket he coined himself, Brownettes. It was a sorting scheme for a shop, built so a woman could be mailed the right products by return post, not a claim about what skin is. Warm, neutral, and cool read like the same instinct in modern dress: fewer buckets, faster fulfillment.

A lossy format is fine until you need what it discarded, and a foundation match is exactly where you do.

Whether the bet pays is a separate question from whether it is honest. Depth-only matching quietly hands the hardest part back to the customer, who now has to warm or cool her own face, and a 38-step ramp still rounds a continuous axis into 38 stops. What it stops doing is selling three buckets as if they were found in the skin rather than drawn onto it. The teams to watch next are the try-on engines and shade-finder quizzes that still sort by warm, neutral, and cool; olive skin, whose green cast sits off the warm-to-cool axis entirely, is the clearest sign that the sorting was never complete.