St. Tropez Instant Tan Face & Body Lotion

Being an avid fake tan wearer, I am constantly on the look-out for the next best thing in fake tans, all be-it gradual or instant, lotion or mousse. The world of fake tanning can be complicated and vast. There is constantly a new 'revolutionary' product being released onto the market and fake tan always seems to be in demand. In today's post I want to talk about a product from a well known false tanning brand, St. Tropez. I recently picked up their Instant Tan for Face & Body in medium/dark. It is a lotion, which can be easily applied onto the skin by using a tanning mitt. Like most instant tans, the colour appears straight away after application for that beautiful bronzed glow. This instant tan by St. Tropez claims to glide on to give the skin a natural golden tan that lasts for up to 24 hours and because of the RAINMAC technology it also claims your colour will not run or streak when wet. I recently tried and tested this product on a night out and my feelings towards this instant tan are still somewhat mixed.

First of all the colour of this tan is beautiful. A really nice natural dark brown that makes you look like you've just come back from two weeks in Egypt. That being said, I did purchase the medium/dark version of this tan so I was expecting it to live up to it's name. You can also buy it in a light/medium version (which has a pink lid) but I'm not too sure about the colour of that one since I haven't tried it yet.

I did find applying this instant tan to be a little bit tricky. I usually go for a mousse formula when choosing my fake tans so maybe I just wasn't used to applying a lotion. None the less, I massaged the lotion onto my skin using a mitt (as it says to on the bottle) and waited for 2-3 minutes to let it settle. I found that it took a good 2 minutes of massaging it onto my skin for each section (arm, leg, etc) so the lotion could sink in properly and have no streaks. Once it had dried and set, the result was really even and smooth and the colour was a dark natural-looking tan.

However, one thing I really wasn't impressed with at all about this tan was it's staying power and RAINMAC technology claims. Unfortunately for me, within one hour of being out that night, some clever person accidentally spilled their drink on me. Having just about missed my lovely new dress, the drink did however run all down my legs and not only that, my instant tan had decided to run too! I now had giant streaks all down both my legs from my fake tan and a horrible sticky residue left from the spilled drink - AND it was only the start of my night. If it had rained that night too, I can only imagine what the tan would have ended up looking like. For this reason, I will now only use this tan as a last resort for being pale and certainly would not wear it on a wet and windy night-out on the town. Overall, it's not a bad instant tanning product and the colour and application are quite nice if you need a quick fix - but if you like wearing instant tan on a night out, I would steer well clear of this one from St. Tropez.

Have you tried this instant tan from St. Tropez yet?