Love it loathe it, fake tan has been a cultural totem of beauty since the early 70s, and it shows no signs of abating. And really, why should it? BeautyMart co-founder Anna-Marie Solowij recalls a life spent in pursuit of a golden Biarritz glow...

It’s 1976, the beginning of the school holidays during the hottest summer on record. We’re at the park every day, playing tennis, obsessively reliving the Borg Nastase Wimbledon final. My other fascination this summer, is two older girls who look like Farrah Fawcett with Sun-In hair and browny/orange skin, shown off by their tennis whites and terry wristbands. I’m fascinated by their skin colour – it makes them look as if they live a different life, in a different place, even though I know they live around the corner from us. They flick their hair around a lot and never play tennis, although they always carry racquets. They walk past our house in the evening, on their way out ‘to meet boys, no doubt’ (says my mother) so I casually hang around the front garden, hoping for another glimpse of what appears to me, age 14, growing up in a Midlands town, the height of sophistication. 

I discover from another girl that they use QT, a magic cream that makes your skin go brown. My life in self-tan began then. That first bottle of Quick Tan by Coppertone cost a month’s pocket money, stank like the monkey cage at the zoo, left my skin streaked orange and ruined bed linen and my favourite high waist white flares. But it was worth it because it made me feel grown-up, beautiful, mysterious and exotic, just like Marie Helvin, on the cover of Vogue.  

My relationship with self-tan became more involved as I grew up. A bit like boyfriends, where the first are fun and easy while with age, complicated, troublesome types demand more effort (and more reward), my self-tan habits segued from casual to intricate. 

QT remained my favourite for years; we were going steady, but that’s because there was no competition. Then, at 16, I spent the summer in the South of France and discovered Lancome’s Bienfait du Matin, a tinted moisturiser, which made me realise that there were alternatives to self-tan that still gave skin that honeyed glow but were less orange, less prone to going wrong and didn’t have a giveaway odour. Ironically, that summer I had my first real tan and, as it turned out, I didn’t bother with tinted moisturiser for another decade. 

"I learned subterfuge, blurring the lines between real and fake to the degree that I couldn’t remember where one started and the other finished"

During the 80s, I learned subterfuge, blurring the lines between real and fake to the degree that I couldn’t remember where one started and the other finished. On holiday, I’d sleep in self-tan at night (Hawaiian Tropic, because I loved the smell) then lie on the beach during the day, covered in sun tan lotion which, in those prelapsarian times, was marketed not as protection, but to help achieve a deeper, darker tan. Back home, as other people’s holiday tans faded, mine never did. I kept it up with Hawaiian Tropic and a large tub of Ultra Glow, a loose bronzing powder applied with a giant brush. Imagine cocoa powder mixed with M.A.C. Strobe Cream and you’ll have an idea of the irradiated, moonlit effect this had on the skin; subtle it wasn’t but this was the 80s after all. 

By the end of the decade, I was working at Marie Claire magazine, frequently travelling to hot climates in the middle of winter to shoot summer beauty stories for the coming months. Because I was learning about the dangers of sun exposure yet still craved a tan, for how it made me look and feel, my self-tan habit seemed not only justified but downright prescient: I could carry on as before, go in the sun, protected (the sunscreen marketing message had changed by now) and use self-tan to make believe. Clarins and Clinique were my ranges of choice, for protection and deception.

The 90s was a turning point in my relationship with self-tan. I was deeply influenced by the make-up artist Linda Cantello who trailblazed the no make-up mandate that made grunge’s bare-faced reality beautiful and desirable. I became obsessed with Cantello’s ‘real skin’ look, pale and ethereal, yet my self-tan habit was too deeply ingrained to give up entirely. So I started customising my self-tan products, blending and mixing lotions with face cream to create hybrid formulae that gave my bare skin an underlying golden tone; I never thought about it at the time but I was creating my own gradual tan. 

The smell was still a giveaway though, so I went undercover, only applying products at night, to my face and neck, with the attendant risk of waking up to something unexpected and irreversible the following morning. I wonder now if I looked odd, as I only ever used self-tan on my face and legs, although I was probably tan most of the year as I was travelling a lot with work. Certainly, a friend I first met back in the early 90s had thought that I was Mexican: so much for my pale and grungy look. 

"over use and abuse meant that self-tan inevitably became déclassé"

This was the start of the explosion of tanning brands and the range of specialized products that dominate the market today and also the beginning of self-tan as status symbol. Where once it had been the real thing that proved you could afford a foreign holiday, now you could get the look without leaving the house. As a symbol of disposable income and free time, the spray tan (remember Jean-Paul Mist-On Tanning and St Tropez’s first spray booths?) was taken up wholeheartedly by a new generation obsessed with the fashion and celebrity ‘get the looks’ they found in magazines. 

As is the way with these things, resulting in the coinage tanorexic, over use and abuse meant that self-tan inevitably became déclassé helped along by an annual parade of Grand National race-goers with rain-streaked legs and a never-ending supply of wannabees whose philosophy of fake is better extended from eyelashes and nails to skin colour. These were the self-tan wilderness years. 

Then came the gradual tan revolution and everything looked sunny again. I was in my element, along with the rest of the nation, embraced by Johnson’s Holiday Skin. Life was simple with one product but it didn’t stay that way for long. 

Now, products are increasingly sophisticated, part self-tan, part skincare, part make-up, so my regime is more complicated than ever, which is an irony because I’ve never been paler. To achieve an undetectable light golden colour I use James Read’s game-changing BB Gradual Tan pen and Sleep Mask Tan, He-Shi’s Liquid Tan, L'Oreal Sublime Bronze and St Tropez’s easy and non-committal Wash-Off Tan. I never thought I’d agree with Victoria Beckham on anything but self-tan is our common ground: it seems we’ve both lightened up.