How do I get a tan quickly without sun?
Many people ask themselves, how do I get a tan quickly without going into the sun? In supermarkets and drugstores you will find a myriad of cloths, gels, sprays, creams and pills that promise to make you tan quickly after taking or applying them, and without the sun. Most products take between one and eight hours before you see the effect, which usually consists of lightly tanned skin, but the artificial tan doesn’t last much longer than a week before you need to freshen it up again.
For most products, one can distinguish between those for the face and those for the rest of the body. In all self-tanning products that do not need the sun, there is dihydroxyacetone. Dihydroxyacetone is a sugar that reacts with the amino acids and proteins of the horny layer, which is the uppermost layer of the skin consisting of dead cells.
The dihydroxyacetone therefore colors the uppermost layer of the skin. However, the horny layer of the skin dies off regularly before a new horny layer is formed. This is why this tan only lasts for a few days.
There are numerous pills on the market that are supposed to cause a faster tan. Many of them stimulate the production of melanin and the skin gets a brownish shimmer. But here is the catch.
If the melanin production is already so high and you then go out into the sun, the skin cannot cope anymore because the melanin production is so high that it not only tans but burns in the end. With self-tanners it behaves somewhat differently as mentioned above. Unlike the pills, they do not change anything in the melanin production.
With these, however, there are also other problems. It is very difficult to apply tanning creams so that they cover the skin evenly. Usually there are spots left somewhere where too little or no tanning cream was applied or at the same time spots that become particularly dark because too much cream was applied there.
There are also cloths and sprays, but they are similarly difficult to apply. In addition, many creams stink after some time, which can be very unpleasant. In London, a kind of shower is currently booming, where dihydroxyacetone is used to create a kind of mist that also makes the skin look taner afterwards. Besides the creams, there are also gels and cloths as well as sprays, as mentioned above. Everyone has to find out individually for himself with which type of self-tanner he can best cope.