Ad copy

I have a photo from Ibiza in 2019 that I will never show anyone. Not because anything bad happened. The holiday was fine. The hotel was lovely. The weather was everything a British woman spends eleven months hoping for. But in the photo I am standing at the pool in a white cover-up that I didn't take off once in seven days. My husband is in the background, in the water, waving at me to come in. I am smiling. I am also not moving. That was the summer I decided I was just someone who didn't do pools anymore. I'm 47. I've been fake tanning since I was about 24, which means I've spent the better part of two decades in a cycle I didn't really question until it stopped being worth it. In my twenties it was fine. A bit of a faff, but fine. You did it the night before. You smelled like digestive biscuits for a day. It looked good enough that nobody mentioned it. In my thirties it got more complicated. My skin got drier. The tan stopped going on evenly. I'd spend forty minutes applying mousse with a mitt and wake up with streaks across the backs of my knees that I'd have to try to blend in the shower, which never fully worked. I started buying better products. The expensive ones. The ones the beauty editors said were foolproof. They were not foolproof. I tried St. Tropez. £32. Beautiful colour for about thirty-six hours. Then it started to fade in patches — lighter at my ankles, darker around my knees, that specific orangey-brown at my elbows that fake tan does on dry skin no matter what you do beforehand. I tried Bondi Sands. £18. Smelled less. Still streaked. My husband once asked me, in complete innocence, if I'd been in an accident. He meant the marks on my legs. I did not find it funny. I tried Tan-Luxe. £36. Gradual. Buildable. Still required maintenance every two days or the fade looked worse than no tan at all. I tried Sienna X. I tried Isle of Paradise. I tried the ones with the guide colour and the ones without. I tried mousse and I tried drops and I tried a tanning water that a woman in a YouTube video described as life-changing. Every single one of them needed the same things: time, exfoliation, a mitt, at least two hours before I could put clothes on, and the specific kind of optimism that comes from believing this time will be different. And for a long time it was worth it. Because the alternative felt worse. The alternative was going on holiday with my actual legs. I have spider veins across my left thigh. I have had them since my second pregnancy. I have an uneven patch of skin below my right knee from a fall I had in 2017 that healed badly. My legs are pale in the way that only a lifetime of British winters can produce — not a fashionable pale, just a washed-out, slightly bluish pale that looks fine under trousers and wrong at a pool. And recently I noticed the first age spots. I know this is not a tragedy. I know. But there is something particular about the moment every summer when you have to decide what to do with your legs. When the holiday is booked and the swimwear is bought and you are standing in the bathroom with the mitt in your hand thinking: right then. Here we go again. By Ibiza in 2019, I had been doing this for twenty years. And for the first time, I didn't bother. I told myself I'd do it on the first night. Then I was tired. Then it was too hot in the hotel bathroom. Then two days had gone by and there didn't seem to be any point anymore. Then my husband found me at the pool bar on day three in a kaftan to my knees when it was thirty-one degrees, and he didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything, and that was worse than if he had. I watched three women by the pool in bikinis the entire week. Not self-consciously. Just comfortably. Sitting at the edge with their legs in the water, reading, talking, not arranging themselves at particular angles. I couldn't tell you what their legs looked like. I only noticed that they weren't thinking about it. I thought about it the entire flight home. Then I found this by accident, which is the only way I've ever found anything that actually changed something. I was on my friend Deborah's sofa last January. We were planning a girls' trip to Mallorca and Deborah was showing me what she'd packed for Tenerife the month before. She pulled out this small bottle from her washbag — the kind of thing you'd walk past in a shop without a second look. "What's that," I said. "It's like a makeup for your legs," she said. "But it doesn't come off in the water." I said that sounded like exactly the sort of thing that would come off in the water. She said she'd worn it in the sea in Tenerife for five days and it didn't. I picked up the bottle. Miracle de Paris Body Perfector. I'd never heard of it. "It's not a fake tan," she said. "It doesn't pretend to be a fake tan. It has all the fake tan benefits, without the fake tan downsides and It just makes your legs look like a better version of themselves." I turned it over. No DHA — the thing that makes fake tan smell. No self-tanning agent at all. Just a tinted formula that goes on, blends to your skin tone, covers the things you want covered, and doesn't transfer. "How long does it take to put on," I said. "Two minutes," she said. "Maybe three." I looked at her. "No mitt?" She laughed. "No mitt." I ordered it that night. Not with enormous conviction. I've ordered things without conviction before and been proven right to be unconvinced. When it arrived I took it into the bathroom on a Sunday afternoon and tried it on my left leg — the one with the spider veins — just to see. It went on like a lightweight cream. Easy to blend. Within about thirty seconds it had evened out the tone across my leg, the veins were covered, and I had this natural glow on my legs. Not orange. Not the colour of someone else's skin applied to my body. Just my legs, but more glowier and even. I stood there for a minute. I put it on the other leg. Checked the backs of my knees — the place where everything always goes wrong. Fine. Smooth. No streaking. I called Deborah and told her it worked. She said: "I know. I've been trying to tell people for months." We went to Mallorca in May. I put Body Perfector on every morning before we left the apartment. Took about two minutes. No mitt. No waiting. I put my dress on straight over it. I got in the sea. I got out of the sea. My legs looked the same as when I'd gotten in. I swam in the hotel pool. I sat in the sun. I wore a swimsuit without a cover-up for the first time since before Ibiza. Not because my legs looked perfect. Because they looked fine. Even. Like legs. On day three, Deborah took a photo of our group at a beach bar. I looked at it later that evening. I looked like someone who wasn't thinking about her legs. I wasn't. I've used it every holiday since. I used it for my niece's garden wedding in June, which was thirty-three degrees and I wore a midi dress with bare legs and I didn't cross my ankles under the chair once. I used it for a weekend in Edinburgh in August when I wore a skirt I'd bought three years ago and never taken the tags off. I haven't fake tanned since January last year. I don't miss the mitt. I don't miss timing it around bed sheets. I don't miss the patches. I don't miss waking up the morning after to see what the night had done to it. What I do miss, genuinely, is nothing. I can't find anything to miss. Body Perfector is £19. The bottle I've had since January is still going. It doesn't wash off in the shower and it doesn't transfer onto your clothes if you give it sixty seconds to dry, which it does easily. There's a thirty-day guarantee. If it doesn't work on your skin, they refund you. My sister wanted to order one before her holiday in July and it was briefly out of stock. She had to wait a few days. It came back. If you're reading this in spring or summer, I wouldn't leave it too long. I spent twenty-odd years planning my holidays around my legs. The cover-up that would work with the swimwear. The night before with the mitt. The careful assessment each morning of what the tan had done overnight. I was solving the wrong problem. I didn't need a better fake tan. I just needed to stop pretending my legs needed to be a different colour. They just needed covering. Quickly. Easily. In a way that held. That's it. That's the whole secret. I just didn't know it existed.