I am guilty of going and getting a spray tan. I can’t help it; I personally think I look better when I am tan. Once the winter months come into full effect and you know you won’t see the sun for months, your skin will become a pasty white. Granted during the winter months you are bundled up, but on a night you’re going out and you want to wear a skirt or dress, you come to realize that your legs match your socks, which isn’t cute. Luckily there is a solution and it’s called a spray tan. If you frequent the spray tanning salon you’ll be able to relate to these 10 stages you experience throughout the experience:
1. You must get used to the fact that a stranger will see you naked: Unless you’re a regular, the part of stripping down to your underwear or completely naked could be a bit uncomfortable for you. No worries though they see naked people all day!
2. Praying on the inside that it turns out well: Once your spray tan is done, you look at yourself in the mirror and hope that it comes out like you wanted, and that you didn’t go too dark or too light. The color is just starting to show up so at the time you aren’t entirely sure how it’s going to look.
3. Leaving the salon and looking like life hit you hard: Typically when getting a spray tan, you don’t want to wear tight clothing. When I go, the baggier the clothes the better, so walking out of the salon with baggy clothes, no makeup, and hair in a messy bun… you aren’t looking so hot.
4. Quick panic when the color starts setting in: Once the real color starts coming out, you realize how dark you are becoming and the panic starts to set in that maybe you went too dark this time.
5. Hopelessly waiting for the color to take full effect: Give it at most 24 hours for the color to finally set in. The relief hits you when you realize that yes, you are tan and not orange.
6. Encountering the people that ask if you went on vacation: It still baffles me when people ask me if I went on vacation somewhere. Carol, I saw you two days ago; when would I have had time to go on vacation?
7. Encountering the people making fun of you for your spray tan: Then you have the other group of people that know your tan is fake and like to give you a hard time for it. I’m not sure what the big deal is, but that’s their issue.
8. Encountering the people giving you compliments: Finally, we have my favorite group of people that can probably tell that your tan is fake, but don’t care and compliment you on how well you look with it.
9. Regardless of who you encounter you know you look good: Regardless of which type of person you encounter, if you do this long enough, you won’t even care what others think because at the end of the day, you like how it ended up looking.
10. Finally when color starts fading and you realize the bliss is coming to an end: That day… you know what day I’m talking about, when you wake up and take a shower and the minute you step out and look at yourself you see the color fading. This is a sad day and you must mourn the time you had with your spray tan.
Whether you’re getting a fake tan for a special event or just because you want tan skin, you should have no shame in it. The way I see it is if you’re going to pay the money for it, you might as well enjoy it… while it lasts.
Featured image via Roman Odintsov on Pexels
