Ask - Body

one big mistake

March 17, 2010

Help me beauty goss, I’ve totally stuffed up an application of fake tan and I look ridiculous - what’s a quick way to eliminate the brown smear?

Kylie, via email

Kylie your timing is impeccable - now that summer is slowly slinking out the weather door and heading for the Northern Hemisphere the usage of fake tan will increase ten fold. Women across the country are shaking and smearing their limbs with the faux-glow goo. And not all of us do it correctly. Even us experts.

That’s my foot in the photo above and that’s a pretty good example of how NOT to apply fake tan. I was rushing, trying to do far too many things at once and got very slap happy with the cream. I forgot where I applied and I just got lazy with my feet. Hence the tell-tale tide mark. So Kylie m’dear - you’re not the only one!

There are a few tricks to get rid of wrongly applied fake tan, of course it all depends where on the body the offending marks are but they usually occur on knees, elbows, wrists, armpits and feet.

First, exfoliate the hell out of it. Scrub and scrub with big beads, little beads and everything in-between beads. Then, if you need to, blend with a gradual moisturiser - not a full strength fake tan, but a gentler version. This should, hopefully, help smooth it out appearance-wise.

In the case of my foot, well feet if truth be known, there were a couple of other sneaky tricks I adopted to bleach the colour out. One was to hang them in a pool so the chlorine could bleach them a bit (which was no problem at all given it was the height of summer that I did that) and I also used a teeny amount of nail polish remover on a cotton bud. Not too much though, I didn’t want to dry my feet out completely. I was desperate for a change because it was way too hot to wear sneakers and I couldn’t stomach the option of showing such a disaster on jandal’d feet.

Have you ever had a fake-tan disaster? How did you fix it?

Tamsin xo