The general rule of thumb with fake tan is that it’s brilliant if you can’t detect its presence, that a good one will do the job without betraying a whisper of its existence via scent or telltale lines or a tangerine hue.
Despite all the many products on the market and the lofty promises on the packaging, I haven’t come across many such lotions/mists/creams/gels in my life, all of them either immediately or over time making themselves known one way or another.
I relayed this to the masterful tan artist James Harknett earlier in the year while he was spraying my skin in deep honey bronze for a weekend away in the sun (I generally have no issue with releasing my lily white body on the beach but had decided on a tan for novelty), and he asked why I had given up on fake tanning at home. “Oh, it’s just annoying isn’t it? I’ll never use a mitt because it’s more life admin and another thing to wash, I hate anything that stains my tiles or walls, and, besides, I’ve yet to find one that’s worth the palaver of applying it,” I told him.
When I left, he thrust a bottle of Three Warriors Face Tan Water, £32, threewarriors.co.uk, in my hands, and told me to spritz it on my face after doing my evening skincare routine and to then go about my life as normal. Cheered by how easy that sounded and spurred on by his assurance that the only thing it would do is turn my skin the colour of those instagram people’s who live on yachts, I tried it one night, waking to what unquestionably looked like sun-kissed skin.
I then applied it the next night, and the one after that. By a week in I was convinced that my lucky streak was at an end, but it continued to look natural without any areas where it accumulated or turned the colour of Donald Trump’s burnt orange skin.
Around that point, I saw my sister. She is a woman very well acquainted with my appearance, who can spot any tweaks to my routine immediately. “Um, you look like you’ve been in the Caribbean for two weeks,” she said when I met her for lunch, before asking what I’d used because she, like all my friends, knows I wear SPF daily even in the depths of winter because a real tan is moronic in the extreme for a vast many reasons from premature ageing to courting cancer. I of course didn’t tell her what it was straight away but instead proceeded to torture her by withholding the name of said product until she was puce with rage and insisted I reveal all. She then made the purchase immediately and phoned me the day after first trying it to tell me she too was a convert.
I don’t intend on remaining perma-tanned forever, and must emphatically add that I think pale skin is beautiful and can be luminous – but anyone who’s lived through a British winter knows that there are times when you look in the mirror at 7:30 in the morning and find the pallid creature looking back at you a little confronting. A tan makes all the difference, psychologically reminding us of sunnier times while taking the edge off the expanse of pale face. Stock up; forecasters say we’re apparently in for a bloody cold few months ahead.
