Fancy a cuppa… for your skin? Why tea could be the best fake tan going
Most of us – at some stage or other – have delved into the just fine and dandy fake tans readily available in supermarkets and pharmacies.
You read the instructions carefully and give it your best try. Most of the time it works out great, and for those other times… well, we just won't talk about them.
So when we recently discovered that you can use an old tea bag to self-tan, we pondered over whether it would work or not.
Yes, we make face masks and hair masks from products in our kitchen cupboards but tanning is a whole different story. No one wants to end up a weird brown or orange hue when they wake up in the morning!
So, we found beauty writer, Cheryl Wischhover's account of how she used the delightful tea bag to tan herself.
The results may surprise you.
Cheryl first tells us that there is an active ingredient in tea called tannic acid that gives it its colour, so the stain is perfect for tanning.
She used Twinings English Breakfast tea for the DIY project. Recipes vary online but she used one tea bag for every one to 60mls of hot water. Cheryl split the difference and used 12 teas bags in 475ml hot water.
She left it soaking for about 20 minutes, wringing all the bags out individually to make sure she got all the concentrated liquid out.
She ended up with the most powerful looking mug of tea she has ever seen!
Cheryl then poured the liquid into a mist-spray bottle and tested it on her arm. It dried in quite quickly but she had to spray a lot of it to get a dark colour. When she woke up the next morning it was still there. Result!
She then decided to go to the gym and it all heads downhill from there. Within 20 minutes of running on a treadmill, pockets of brown liquid were falling by her side. The smell of tea filled the air and she had to rub the remainder onto her towel. Not a very good look!
It all started so well but as a durable tan, we think we'll still with our regular stuff, thanks all the same.
