Are you faking it?

Streak-marked racegoers banned from Ascot. Teenagers in Lancashire warned not to turn up to school 'in various shades of orange'. And now the Man Tan. In Britain we spend more than £40m a year on self-tanning products. Elizabeth Day reports on the new bronze age
Self Tan Fan
A 21st century-style tan ... at least we've moved off the sunbed. Photograph: Adrianna Williams/Corbis

It is approximately 10 minutes after first meeting Larissa that she asks me to bend over so she can 'reach my bottom crease'. I am standing in a small cubicle, naked save for a flimsy paper G-string, and Larissa looks at me intently, with a vaguely critical crinkle between her eyes. Dressed entirely in black, she holds what looks like an aerosol can, menacingly connected to a vast metallic cylinder with various gauges and dials on the side.

There are some people, no doubt, who would pay a premium for this sort of thing if it were taking place in an insalubrious Soho basement. I, however, am in a very posh salon in central London, the air thick with the scent of potted orchids and nail varnish remover. My encounter with the hand-held crop fertiliser is a completely normal part of a modern beauty regime and costs a mere £30 a pop. This is how to get a tan, 21st-century style.

Within eight hours, Larissa tells me, the sticky, sweaty sensation will have evaporated and I will emerge with the sort of olive-skinned glow that bespeaks lengthy summer holidays in Barbados, being served oysters by liveried deckhands on board Jodie Kidd's yacht. I will be gloriously honey-hued. I will have achieved the quintessential complexion du jour of brown face, eerily white teeth and strange tea-stained patches around my knees. I, too, will have a fake tan.

Britons now spend around £41m a year on self-tanning products, a figure that has grown fivefold since the late Nineties.

Globally, self-tan sales are worth around $675m (£340m) and sun care is the fastest growing sector of the international cosmetics market, routinely outperforming other emerging areas such as male grooming and baby toiletries. Sales of self-tanning products are up 51 per cent at John Lewis this year, and over four weeks last August Superdrug sold 1.4m bottles of fake tan, an increase of 50 per cent that was attributed to unseasonably bad weather. This summer, the International Therapy Education Council has even launched an official diploma in tanning treatments.

'Tanning has been elevated to a national pastime in the UK, especially in the north of England and Scotland,' says Wendy Lewis, a beauty consultant and the author of Plastic Makes Perfect. 'Once you get used to looking tanned or dark and bronzed, you are afraid to go back to looking pasty and white. The trend used to be restricted to holiday season during the summer, but now it is year round.' A tan, she says, is seen as an accessory: 'Users feel younger, it covers flaws and imperfections like thread veins, spots, scars and blotches, and younger women say it makes them look skinnier.'

Faking it also carries more serious health benefits: more than 2,300 people die from skin cancer each year in the UK - a 20-fold increase over the past decade and a death rate higher than Australia's, where the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays are far stronger. As the incidence of skin cancer rocketed through the Eighties and Nineties, there was a heightened awareness of the dangers of sun exposure, and fake tan, applied out of a bottle, was endorsed by the British Skin Foundation as a healthy alternative.

While this might explain why consumers started to use self-tanning products, the increase in sales has been so huge that there are other factors at work, too. A lot of it comes down to an aspirational desire to emulate celebrities: having a tan is seen as the ultimate signifier of luxury, wealth, style and a bank balance big enough to fund perpetual holidays.

'If they look like they just stepped off a plane from Martinique, everyone is envious,' says Geordie Grieg, editor of society magazine Tatler. 'It's not what you do but the way you do it. It is a question of getting good products, good advice and not overdoing it. Anything can be sophisticated, any cosmetic addition, if it's not obvious. Subtlety is the watchword.'

Fake tan has spread itself so insidiously across the nation's epidermis that this year's organisers of Royal Ascot found it necessary to ban racegoers who displayed streaky orange marks. Last month, fake-tanning reached such epidemic levels at Baines High School in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, that the headmistress wrote to parents asking them to ensure that pupils 'do not come to school looking varying shades of orange'. In Scotland, where spotting a ray of tan-worthy sunshine is almost as rare as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, schoolchildren in East Dunbartonshire have been offered lessons in how to apply fake tan after teachers noticed pupils popping out for sunbed sessions in their lunch hour.

'We always recommend that it's best to look as natural as possible and not to wear too much fake tan,' says Jo Bryant, an etiquette adviser for Debrett's. 'It isn't the best look to be overly permatanned but it would equally be incredibly rude for anyone to comment on it. It should be worn like make-up: sparingly, in order to enhance the features that are already there.'

There is a staggering array of lotions on offer: anti-ageing tans, moisturising tans or tans that promise almost everything apart from getting up in the morning and buttering your toast. The technological advances are such that getting brown the ordinary way has become an ancient anthropological curiosity, to be filed alongside dodo feathers in some dusty recess of the British Museum. My own spray-tan, the 'BeautyLab peptide', promised to firm
my skin with sea algae and leave me softly fragranced with 'a hint of guava and melon'.

The next day, I wake up the colour of an Ikea beech dining table. It is, I have to say, not unattractive. The tan is subtle, natural-looking and when I go to a friend's wedding with bare legs, no one points at me and laughs. I feel rather glamorous and jet-set, an impression only slightly undermined by the fact that I smell like a cross between a crispy duck pancake and a chemically enhanced digestive biscuit. When I get home, I see that my sheets are besmirched by unspeakable brown streaks and the neckline of my dress looks like it has been worn by hordes of unwashed schoolboys. After three days, I'm back to my normal British pastiness. Why, I wonder, does anyone bother?

'It just gives me a good feeling,' says Leanne, 23, a part-time hairdresser with peroxide-blonde hair and a freshly minted all-over tan. 'I used to go on sunbeds all the time but I stopped because I kept seeing those makeover shows on TV where they said it was really bad for your skin. So now I come in every week to get a spray tan, just to keep it topped up.'

Leanne is at The Tanning Shop, a small, glass-fronted building sandwiched between video shops and fried chicken takeaways in a smoggy corner of south west London. It is emblazoned with bright blue signs offering UV tanning from 69p a minute, alongside professional teeth-whitening services and something called 'hot stone' treatment.

Leanne has been fake tanning for at least two years. Can she remember her natural colour? 'Yeah, I was very fair skinned and it just looked really unhealthy. A tan makes you look better and slimmer. It means you can wear short skirts and not worry that your legs look white. I'd say I was addicted to tanning.' She laughs. 'My friends call me the original tanorexic.'

Leanne is one of a growing number of young women who, spurred on by the year-round tan of their favourite stars, spend much of their time and their money attempting to create a similar effect. Today's celebrities are required to sport deep brown tans in much the same way as they are obliged to buy very small yappy dogs and carry them round in their handbags. Victoria Beckham had a St Tropez airbrush tanning booth installed at Beckingham Palace, and the only famous people who get away with looking pale tend to be flame-haired supermodels or politicians forced to holiday in the UK because of the credit crunch.

Chantelle Houghton, the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant, garnered some column inches earlier this year when she admitted she was addicted to spray tans. 'It keeps going deeper and deeper,' she said, apparently surprised by this turn of events. In 2005, a group of dermatologists published a study that showed frequent tanners who experience a loss of control over their tanning schedule display a similar pattern of addiction to smokers and alcoholics denied their daily fix.

In spray-tan devotees like Leanne or Chantelle, this carries few undesirable side-effects, other than looking like a glamour model dipped in Ronseal. Much better than that old tan alternative, the sunbed, the results of which can be fatal. Last July, Zita Farrelly, a 29-year-old mother of two from Salford, who had been using tanning beds since she was 14, died of skin cancer. According to the World Health Organisation, regular use can result in acute and chronic health effects on the skin and eye, including premature ageing, malignant melanoma and cataracts.

'Fake tan is entirely safe,' says Julie McManus, a senior scientific adviser for L'Oréal. 'The active ingredient, Dihydroxyacetone [DHA], is an amino acid that reacts with the upper surface of your skin - the dead skin cells - to get a change in colour. It is a three-carbon sugar originally used to treat diabetes. The molecule is too big to penetrate any deeper into the skin.'

The chemical reaction produces a brown pigment called melanoidin and, as the skin renews itself, the tan fades as skin cells are shed (one of the prime reasons people end up with unsightly orange streaks is because they forget to exfoliate beforehand).

Fake-tan lotion was discovered by accident in the Twenties when a nurse treating a male diabetic patient with DHA accidentally spilled it on his chest while connecting his drip. The next day, she noticed it had stained his skin. Derived from plant sources such as sugar cane, DHA is now the main active ingredient in all sunless tanning skincare products. 'It's by far the most effective,' explains McManus. 'That's quite unusual because we are all relying on the same prime ingredient. The main way of differentiating your product is the percentage of DHA used in the formula - you use a higher percentage if you want a darker skin tone. Then you need to concentrate on making it easier to use and getting a more even result.'

The reliance on a single ingredient has led to feverish competition among cosmetics companies. The precise quantities used in any given product remain a closely guarded secret, much like the fabled Coca-Cola recipe. The most successful brands thus encourage consumer loyalty by marketing specific shades of tan for different skins. Fake Bake is one of a number of companies that has developed a range of tanners for fairer complexions.

It now has a turnover of £4.5m. Johnson's Holiday Skin, which combines self-tanning with a daily moisturiser to build up a gradual tan, accounts for more than 11 per cent of sales in the self-tan sector, worth £30m. While there are now fake tans which include 'anti-ageing' ingredients, methods which use different shades of colour to make you look thinner or more toned, and products which claim to last longer, the future for self-tanning lies in discovering a naturally derived organic ingredient with a sun protection factor that can rival Dihydroxyacetone. L'Oréal scientists have already found one. 'It's all very new,' says McManus, nervously. 'I don't even know the name of it, but it is plant-derived.'

The pursuit of beauty has long involved such obscure and inventive alchemy, but it used to be for precisely the opposite reasons. In the 4th century BC, Grecian women painted their faces with white lead. The Romans applied pastes of narcissus, lentils, honey, wheat and eggs to achieve pale complexions, and Homer described the perfect female face as 'whiter than ivory'. Even in the 19th century, upper-class women were being encouraged to stay out of the sun as much as possible. Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, was not considered wholly beautiful because of her tanned face - the product of too much walking in the countryside. In the Victorian era, tanned skin denoted the manual, outdoor labour of the lower classes, rather than the unpolluted translucence of the idle aristocracy.

For western caucasian women, the notion of fragile femininity changed after the First World War, when a new generation abandoned their corsets and started to enjoy sports, travel and adventure with gusto. If you were rich enough, you holidayed on the Riviera or the Amalfi Coast and a suntan became the status symbol of success, sophistication and wealth. The shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis once opined that in order to be successful, one must 'keep looking tanned, live in an elegant building (even if you're in the cellar), be seen in smart restaurants (even if you only nurse one drink) and if you borrow, borrow big.'

'I think a tan can still give you that self-esteem boost,' says Michelle Feeney, the chief executive of St Tropez, one of the UK's leading self-tanning brands. 'Like many people, I tend to have a spray tan if I have an important event coming up or a work function to go to. It's about how to make the tan look natural that's crucial, and that's what we're known for, because there's nothing worse than that really heavy, dark, weird colour.'

But it is precisely this heavy, dark weirdness that runs the risk of pricking the fake tan bubble. With the advent of cheap flights and package holidays, a beach trip abroad is no longer a rarefied luxury and the tan has been simultaneously democratised. Now fake tan has become ubiquitous. While the credit crunch threatens holidays abroad, it also means women are opting for cheaper luxuries. Traditionally, recession sparks an increase in lipstick sales, as women buy make-up to cheer themselves up because they can't afford a new dress. This year, self-tan has become the pick-me-up of choice.

'There's nothing original any more about fake tan and it's possible that more and more people have realised it carries a social stigma,' says manners coach and broadcaster William Hanson. 'I think it will come full circle and be fashionable once again to be pale, because people don't want to appear ostentatious.'

And, as beauty consultant Wendy Lewis points out, 'We have seen this trend come and go. Right now it's in high gear. Next year, an obvious orangey hue may become déclassé. It is something that goes with trout pouts and hair extensions, and overblown breast implants.'

Back at The Tanning Shop, I put this to Leanne. Is her sunless tan a sign of ostentatious vulgarity rather than discreet affluence? Is she wilfully ignoring the ubiquity of fake tanning during a period of economic downturn? She glances at me pityingly.

'I like looking tanned,' she says, her suntan radiating from her like sonar. 'It makes me feel good and that's all that matters.'

She walks off down the street, receding into a sea of grey and white, until all that's left is a vague smell of digestive biscuits.

· The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday August 17 2008. Above we inadvertently described DHA (Dihydroxyacetone) as an 'amino acid' but it is a three-carbon molecule related to sugars. It reacts with amino acids in the skin to produce the effect of a tan.

Today's best video

  • The NSA files trailblock image


Today in pictures