A Review of the Best Sunless Tanners

Sporting a great tan makes you feel more attractive. Your legs and arms will look great, as well as all of your favorite outfits. However, getting that marvelous tan isn’t always the healthiest option. It’s a well-documented fact that damage from the sun will cause your skin to age prematurely and can also cause cancer. Luckily there are sunless tanners that will give you that awesome tan look, without any of the risks involved with soaking up too much sun.

Nordstrom offers an amazing selection of sunless tanners, including many that are rated with 5 stars by consumers.

Clarins Self Tanner

Clarins ‘Radiance-Plus’ Golden Glow Body Lotion provides rich hydration with a bit of color, giving the skin a natural, healthy glow. The lotion contains microscopic mother-of-pearl particles that give the skin a light, golden shade. Fresh botanicals will leave the skin as smooth as silk and feeling healthy and smooth. Great for year-round use, it can be used for all skin tones. The lotion smells good and the subtle color in this self tanning lotion will not create streaks or darker patches.

Estee Lauder Sunless Tanning

One of the best sunless tanners is offered by Estee Lauder. The ‘Bronze Goddess Golden Perfection’ self tanning lotion for the face will extend that natural tan to the sensitive skin on your face. You can protect yourself from the damage of the sun while enjoying a tan that extends from your body to your face. The special formula is designed for the sensitive skin on the face and won’t cause acne. Fast acting, the color will begin to show in as little as one hour. The color deepens as it’s used, so you are sure to get the perfect shade. Use it in the evening after your face is washed for a sun-kissed look in the morning.

Top rated sunless tanners are also available from Estee Lauder for the body. The ‘Bronze Goddess Golden Perfection’ Tinted Self-Tanning Gelee for the Body allows you to get the perfect shade on the rest of your body. The application is smooth and the bronze shimmer will deepen each time you use this gel. The scent is reminiscent of the beach and perfect for warm weather. The color is natural so your friends will never suspect you are using fake tanning cream. Because it gradually darkens with use, you are also sure to get the exact shade you are looking for.

Lancome Sunless Tanner

Lancôme Flash Bronzer uses natural caramel extract along with light-reflecting micro pearls for a natural look that is beautiful and healthy. The color starts developing within an hour and will last for up to five days. The results are never orange or yellow, but look completely natural. Add additional coats as needed until you have the dark color you love. Easy to use and completely fool-proof, this lotion will give you the tan you love any time of the year. With this lotion, pantyhose will be a thing of the past for you.

St Tropez Self Tanning Mousse

St. Tropez Self Tan Bronzing Mousse is one of the best self-tanning lotions available. The mousse is light-weight, soft as velvet and incredibly easy to apply. Aloe vera conditions the skin while the color infusion leaves you with a tan that feels as great as it looks. A subtle fragrance is refreshing. This self-tanning lotion is gentle enough to use on the face, neck and chest. It dries quickly, so you don’t have to wait long before putting on your clothes or shoes. You can also see where it is going on as you apply it, so there are never any darker spots or lines. The tan is natural and true, and can be deepened by using the product over a few days. It can even be applied before going to bed at night for a fresh, tanned look in the morning.

Self-tanning lotions allow you to enjoy a sun-kissed look without risking sunburn or having to spend time at the tanning salon. You can wear your favorite summer outfits knowing that you look great with natural, tanned skin. Be sure to wash hands after applying any self-tanner, and allow the tanning lotion time to dry before putting on clothes, shoes or makeup.

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Fake Bake is a line of sunless tanning products that is a favorite of various celebrities such as Kelly Ripa and Britney Spears.  I gave three products a try with generally good results. These are overall quite good self tanners, but they do require using them at night and allowing for full drying before bed because of the color indicator in the product. Also, as with use of any self tanner, be sure to exfoliate well before applying in order to avoid streaks!

Fake Bake Self Tanner lotion gave the deepest tan. It also is the darkest in terms of the color indicator (which is organic BTW). At first, the dark brown color of the product surprised me, but the use of a color indicator adds a lot in terms of avoiding streaking because you can actually see where the product is going for more even application. Do wear gloves with this one! Just doing a test swatch without gloves left my hands pretty brown!

Fake Bake’s lotion dries quickly (less than 10 minutes when I used it) and does not rub off on sheets. The color indicator generally washes off in the shower the next day after the product has allowed the skin color to develop.  I ended up with a good look from the lotion, although it was darker than I normally go with self tanners (I’m naturally pretty darn pale).

Similar to the standard lotion is Fake Bake Sunless And Skinny.  This interesting tanner contains firming ingredients to help your skin look more tone and help hide cellulite. I got a similar looking tan from this one as I did from the lotion.

My favorite was the Fake Bake Self Tanning Mousse.  This product had the lightest color indicator. In fact, it can be a bit hard to see as you rub it in, but it doesn’t go entirely invisible like many other tanning mousses, which is why I liked it so much. I find that mousse spreads more evenly than lotions, giving the best odds for a streak free tan. The addition of a bit of color indicator in Fake’ Bake’s version was even more helpful. I also got a bit lighter tan from the mousse, which is my preference. I like to start light and build up. Overall, I ended up with a nice streak free light tan from the mousse.

In the end, as long as you don’t mind the color indicator, this is a nice line of products. I like having the indicator, because I think it helps prevent streaks, but some folks prefer invisible lotions so that they can apply and go out the door.

Looking for a kit with several products? Check out the Fake Bake Tanning Kit.

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Benefit Cosmetics is running a couple of Black Friday and Black Monday specials. Here they are:

For Black Friday:  November 28th only get Free US Standard Shipping with $25 purchase at Benefit Cosmetics. Enter promo code BLAKSHIP

For Black Monday: December 1st only get Free US Standard Shipping with $25 purchase at Benefit Cosmetics. Enter promo code: CYBESHIP

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Last year, I wrote about how impressed I was with L’Oreal Sublime Bronze Self Tanning Spray (Read Review). Now L’Oreal has updated the product with ProPerfect Sublime Bronze.

I gave it a try and interestingly, I liked the old version better. This one came out more orange on me than the one I tried last year. With that said, I got perfectly acceptable results and I will happily use up the can. Streaking was minimal, and I like the spray at any angle feature.

Shop for L’Oreal Skin Care Products

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This week is sunscreen week at Beauty and Fashion Tech!

I have posted in the past about The importance of safe sun. Sunscreen was also my number one product in the list of top five kinds of skin care products for every skin type.

Not too long ago, I also took a look at the New Sunscreen Database from the Environmental Working Group. There, I questioned whether the top sunscreens on the list would also be pleasing to women cosmetically. Certainly the more comfortable and attractive a sunscreen is to wear, the more likely it is that women will do so. With that in mind, I wrote to a number of the companies that had products in the database, and some who did not. Several comapnies were gracious enough to send items for me to samples and I am happy to say that they all were good products to wear, with some better for some skin types than others. So I think I found something for everyone. I will be posting about those sunscreens this week.

Also note that I have previously reviewed the following sunscreens:

• Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry Touch SPF 45 and Aveeno Sunblock SPF 30 and MenScience Ti02 SPF30. For a look at some fake bake items, visit the Self Tanners Page.

Do you have a favorite sunblock or self tanner? Leave a comment and tell us about it!

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If you read my L’Oreal self tanner review yesterday, please take note of the update a the bottom, which I will also include here.

I had used both the L’Oreal self tanning gelee and lotion, and finding them quite similar in use and effectiveness, meant to review just the shimmery one in order to conserve space. But I realized last night that I had accidentally attributed the shimmer to the gelee, when it is the lotion that has the really noticeable shimmer. I have updated the review now to include both the gelee and the lotion.

I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience. They both are very similar and great products, but the tinted lotion is the one with the really noticable shimmer.

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L'Oreal Sublime Bronze Self Tanning Gelee

Awhile back I posted about my displeasure with Aveeno Continuous Radience Self Tanner and my preference for Neutrogena Build a Tan. I mentioned there that I was going to try a L’Oreal self tanner and I have since tried both a spray and gel from L’Oreal and I really liked both of them. I also tried their corrector for mistakes, which I thought was OK.

L’Oreal Sublime Bronze Self-Tanning Gelee is a gel based self tanning lotion. L’Oreal Sublime Bronze Self-Tanning Lotion is a very similar product, which although labled as a lotion, I found to be more gel like in consistency. Both products come in tinted and untinted varieties, and I tried the tinted versions in medium. The tint was light and had a very natural tone to it. To my surprise, the lotion also had a sparkly shimmer in it, which of course was not so natural looking, but was quite subtle, and I happened to like it quite a bit. I also liked using a tinted product because it allowed me to see where I might be missing a spot and helped assure that I rubbed things in evenly. In addition, I thought the gelee in particular spread more evenly than a lotion normally does. The tints and shimmers washed off with my shower the next morning after use and I was left with a very nice light-medium fake tan. There were no problems with streaking and the overall color continued to look good for several days. I was very happy with these products and highly recommend either of them.

I was also quite pleased with L’Oreal Sublime Bronze Self-Tanning Mist. The mist, which works from any angle, goes on easily and is the best streak free self tan I have ever had. The first time I used it, I did mess up and put too much on my feet. I then compounded the problem by failing to wipe off the excess. That created a few minor streaks which were entirely my fault. The important part of that story though is that I am shocked that for how much I messed things up there, the streaks were extremely mild. With just about any other product they would have been horrid. So that itself says something for this product. On the rest of me, the tone was beautiful, even, and natural looking, with fairly long lasting results. When I used the product a second time, properly protecting my feet and only lightly applying there, everything was perfect.

I think that a spray really is the way to go for the most even fake tan and I really love the L’Oreal one. My one complaint about the L’Oreal spray though is that it is rather oily. Be careful about spraying it so that it hits vinyl or tile flooring. It makes the floor really, really slick! It also claims to dry in five minutes, but it is easy to spray a bit too thick, and even with a thin mist, it leaves behind a baby oil feeling on the skin for hours after. It wasn’t bad enough to make me worried about putting on clothes and such, nor did it or will it deter me from using the product repeatedly. But to the extent the label leads people to believe there will be absolutely no residue after five minutes, it is misleading.

After messing things up with my feet, I was glad that I also bought the L’Oreal Sublime Bronze Self Tanning Perfector and Corrector. The corrector comes packaged in individual use packets and is a scrub like lotion. I used it on the streaks I created on my feet with pretty good success. I got to those early though and they were pretty mild. As soon as I saw that things were getting dark there, I scrubbed and it generally worked. But when I tried this product on another occasion on a spot that had been allowed to develop for a day, it really didn’t do a whole lot. So I think this product is useful if you can get to the problem early. But if you wait, then I’m not sure that it is any better than using an everyday scrub on the area to help it wear off quicker.

Update: I used both the gelee and lotion, and finding them quite similar in use and effectiveness, meant to review just the shimmery one in order to conserve space. But I realized last night that I had accidentally attributed the shimmer to the Gelee, when it is the lotion that has the really noticeable shimmer. I have updated the review now to include both the Gelee and the Lotion. The corrector appears to have been discontinued.

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2011 Update: It appears that the Aveeno product reviewed here is no longer in production, which is fine by me. The neutrogena product, which I like quite a bit is still available.

With summer fast approaching, I started looking for the best self tanner about two weeks ago. Since I am quite pale, I like the gradual self tanning products. So, although I have always been happy with Neutrogena Build-a-Tan, I was excited to try Aveeno’s new adjustable tanning product, Aveeno Active Naturals Continuous Radiance Moisturizing Lotion for all skin tones. Fortunately I tried the Aveeno early so that I could work at exfoliating away the unfortunate results of using it before I had to travel for a wedding!

Yes, I had a pretty bad experience with the Aveeno product. The product itself comes in a container with a dial to set to the darkness of your desired fake tan. I started out by exfoliating well and setting the dial at the lightest setting. I saw absolutely no results, so I tried again with it dialed up one spot. Again, I saw no results. I then turned it up to setting number three. At that point, I got a fake tan of about the right shade on my arms, but a blotchy, discolored tan with some horrible dark orange tinged streaks on my legs. I haven’t had streaks like that from a fake and bake product in several years. Just in case I hadn’t exfoliated well enough, or rubbed in the product enough, or used too much etc., I let the dark streaks fade and carefully tried again with the same poor results. And then just to be sure, I gave it a third shot where I barely put any on. I still ended up with streaks, albeit a little better than the first two times. So, as much as I usually love Aveeno products, I won’t be using this one again, and do not recommend it.

Neutrogena Build a Tan

Neutrogena Build a Tan

The whole experience drove me back to my old favorite, Neutrogena Build a Tan. Build a Tan works very gradually. In fact, if I had to find a complaint about it, the very slow, albeit also very safe results, would be it. It takes me about four applications to get to my desired shade. But once there, If I reapply every couple of days, I can keep a nice light to medium fake tan going for some time. I also have very rarely run into problems with streaking, and when I did, it was generally clearly my fault (tip, don’t put handfuls of the stuff on your ankles)! The lotion goes on easily and dries quickly. I find it to be a summer staple and one of the best self tanners that you can find at the drugstore.

I figure Neutrogena will be my regular self tanner again this year. I did buy a L’Oreal spray on self tanner out of curiosity though and will review that the near future.

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