I'm not an expert, but I've just learned all this from experience.
If you want to make your face seem less pale or fair, I'd try some gold toned eyeshadows, or maybe some purples with a pink undertone. Turquoise, green, coral, etc. Anything that seems to warm up your face.
If you want to accentuate your paleness, go with blue toned shadows, that seem to contrast to your skin tone.
If you really want to find out what will look best on you, you need to figure out what undertone your skin has. You can either have pink (cool), or yellow (warm). People with pink toned skin, look best in shades that have a blue undertone or base. People with yellow toned skin, tend to look better with a warmer base, like gold. To figure out whether you have a pink or yellow undertone (or neutral, which means that you could go either way), there are several methods you can use. Usually its fairly easy - you can try holding a white piece of paper up to your face and looking in the mirror to see whether in contrast to the white, your face seems yellow or pink. You can look at your wrists, and see whether you have more green veins (yellow toned) or blue veins (pink toned). If you look better in silver, you probably have pink toned skin, and if you look better in gold, you're probably yellow toned. If you tan easily, you're probably yellow toned, but if you get sunburn, you're probably pink toned.
Here's an example of the difference between blue and gold tones:
Blue toned red lipstick:
http://x30.xanga.com/5e5f825034034266171796/z212259599.jpg
Gold/orange toned red lipstick:
http://romansalonla.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/angelina-jolie-red-lipstick-in-moscow-july-2010.jpg
Again, the blue tone would look better on pink-toned skin, and the gold tone would look better on yellow-toned skin.
And the difference between cool and warm tones:
Cool:
http://www.nndb.com/people/389/000022323/courtney_love.jpg
Warm:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AbzQd0Vi8u8/Tf1JmDdYQ1I/AAAAAAAAE1M/vT3FZuzvwLo/s1600/IMG_1443.JPG
Hope this helps!