The only face tan that has ever worked for me (and other beauty bits)

Come with me through this bathroom shelf tour-style beauty miscellany

🎵 (Darlin’ hold my hand) Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday 🎵

Okay, now that that’s out of my head and into yours, we can move on.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, which I’m certain the majority of you do because I mention it and the start and end of every conversation I have, I was a beauty editor for donkey’s years before I became what I am now (a transponster).

I spent a literal decade, more even, receiving and reviewing everything the beauty world had to offer, and with my Spidey senses, am able to cut through the marketing bullshit and the gifting and the fancy press trips (many of which I enjoyed of course) to get to the root of the issue: Is the product actually any use?

I pride myself on never having done ads, and having maintained my impartiality, across the entire time I was writing about beauty (and still now), so you can rest assured that what you’re about to read is as honest and unbiased as it comes in the world of beauty content.

I don’t wear tan to be *tanned* per se. I wear tan to take the ill Victorian child look away, to give my blotchy, red, freckled, pale and uninteresting (but healthy – grateful and blessed etc etc) skin a bit of a chance of looking halfway decent. I don’t so much want colour as I want uniformity. And thanks to circa 20 years of weekly experimentation, I’m somewhat happy with where I’ve arrived in terms of body tanning.

But then. Then, there’s the FACE. I always end up with a tan tide mark along my jawline, and while that’s fixable with the right shade of foundation, more and more as I get older I’m choosing to go without foundation, thereby leaving the tide mark to give the game away that actually, my body isn’t that colour.

So I started experimenting with face tans. UGH. What a process.

I tried the Bare by Vogue one first, which was fine but I didn’t love it. I felt it a bit sticky icky, a bit underwhelming, colour pay-off-wise, and it faded way too fast.

I tried the Vita Liberata one next, their HA one. That one, I’m sad to say, broke me out like I was a series of tiny, threatening Italian volcanoes, spreading its molten lava over Pompeii (my face). Not happy, straight into the bin.