Colour is one of the most important appearance attributes in a variety of fields including both science and industry. The focus of this work is on cosmetics field and specifically on the performance of the human visual system on the selection of foundation makeup colour that best matches
with the human skin colour. In many cases, colour evaluations tend to be subjective and vary from person to person thereby producing challenging problems to quantify colour for objective evaluations and measurements. Although many researches have been done on colour quantification in last
few decades, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate objectively a consumer's visual system in skin colour matching through a psychophysical experiment under different illuminations exploiting spectral measurements. In this paper, the experiment setup is discussed
and the results from the experiment are presented. The correlation between observers' skin colour evaluations by using PANTONE Skin Tone Guide samples and spectroradiometer is assessed. Moreover, inter and intra observer variability are considered and commented. The results reveal differences
between nine ethnic groups, between two genders, and between the measurements under two illuminants (i.e.D65 and F (fluorescent)). The results further show that skin colour assessment was done better under D65 than under F illuminant. The human visual system was three times worse than instrument
in colour matching in terms of colour difference between skin and PANTONE Skin Tone Guide samples. The observers tend to choose lighter, less reddish, and consequently paler colours as the best match to their skin colour. These results have practical applications. They can be used to design,
for example, an application for foundation colour selection based on correlation between colour measurements and human visual system based subjective evaluations.
