We’ve all woken up to an extremely orange version of ourselves. We didn’t seem to realise that less was more when we were younger, so the brighter we were, the better.
There were so many times that we would turn up at school on a Friday after caking ourselves with fake tan the night before and we would look like a big orange highlighter walking down the corridors. Back then, everyone was doing it. So nobody really paid attention to one specific person. We all tried to be as tanned, or orange, as we could be!
When we look back at pictures of us in our teen years and when we were just starting our adult lives, the majority of photos are of all your old friends looking like oompa loompas.
Another thing we notice about these pictures is that we all look like we’re having the best time in the world. Thinking back to these times, we probably were. When we didn’t have any responsibilities and we didn’t feel as much pressure to look 10/10 all the time.
Here are 10 memories we will all have of fake tanning in the 00s…Most of these things still happen to me now ? ?
1. Having every intention of washing your ridiculously ‘fake tanned’ hands but forgetting.
How many time have you heard your mum say the words “What on earth have you done with that fake tan!?” For some reason, none of us could get the fake tan on our hands looking right and we always ended up with hands like this…
Fake tan always left us looking like we had some sort of skin disease on our hands, but we all had it. Even if you used a mitt to rub the majority of your tan over your body, you would still somehow end up with the scary fake tan hands.
2. Covering yourself in Johnson’s summer skin.
Then smelling like biscuits and beef for the rest of the week until you’d scrubbed all of it off, including the top three layers on your skin.
This was one of the first fake tans we all started to use in the early years of high school. Johnson’s holiday skin was basically for beginners and was the start of a lifetime full of fake tanning.
3. As you got older and wiser, you invested in a 99p tanning mitt to avoid any sort of fake tan on hand disaster.
It helped a bit, I mean we looked like streaky. Remember the days when you’d turn up to school after having a major fake tanning spree the night before, and the palms of your hands would literally be brighter than the rest of your body.
For some reason, the self tan mitts would not offer full protection of your hands regardless of how much you ended up paying for one. Yes, they might not have left your hands looking as bad as if you didn’t wear one at all, but we were definitely hoping for nice clean hands when we took them off. Unfortunately, that almost never happened! But when it did..
4. What happens to your hands when you have the mitt on? They don’t get tanned…
So then you try to apply a tiny bit of tan onto your hands but still manage to wake up with ridiculously orange knuckles. It’s just a lose-lose situation.
For us people that weren’t really that knowledgable about fake tan and didn’t have the right skill when it came to applying it (which was most of us) we could never get the arm to hand ratio looking any good.
5. We quickly learnt it was almost impossible to fake tan our legs without making them ridiculously streaky and gross looking.
If it’s not your knee’s, it’s your calfs. If it’s not your calfs it’s your streaky ankles. If it’s not the ankles, it’s your ridiculously streaky bikini line. Our legs were definitely one of the hardest parts to get right.
Saying that, our legs were probably one of the easiest parts of our body to apply fake tan to. But it was the weather conditions that we had to deal with that left us looking like streaky messes. In Britain we’re used to a lot of rain but we always hoped and prayed that it wouldn’t be raining on the day we needed to go out with our freshly applied fake tan. That never happened!
6. We also learnt that having white bed sheets is never a good idea if you wear fake tan regularly.
Yep, why did we ever think that was a good idea? The amount of bed sheets I’ve ruined and left looking like this…
Honestly, it happens a lot more than you would have thought. You’d think applying fake tan the night before would be the best idea until you woke up to smeared bed sheets which left your room stinking of biscuits.
7. Or white towels for that matter…
I’ve pretty much ruined most of my mums fancy white towels. It didn’t go down too well with her to be honest.
But I never seem to learn and I still ended up wiping myself down with the fancy white towels.
8. And we’ve all taken a little visit to the tanning salon to have a spray tan.
Has anyone’s ever gone green before though? Mine has! On the day of my prom too…
We will all remember our first ever trip to a tanning salon and getting our first ever spray tan. When they go through how dark you want your tan to be and you picked the darkest one. It might have looked better than when you fake tanned yourself, but it still didn’t look natural.
9. And you know when you’re cleaning your fake tan off in the shower, the bathroom tiles slowly start going a strange shade of brown.
We’ve all been there when we see our tan all over the floor of the bathroom.
This is another moment when you anger your mum. Not only did you used to ruin her towels, but you left the bathroom looking like this every Friday night before you went out.
10. Let’s face it, most of us have never mastered the art getting a perfectly bronzed body without any white lines anywhere.
It’s pretty much impossible. I’m convinced of it.
We all know what it is like when you end up looking like you belong in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What are your worst fake tan stories?
