You Beauty!

We all know that tans fade on the flight home. This is how it goes: you wear super-high factor for the first five days of a week-long trip. You drop down a bit on the second-to-last day as you’re not as brown as you feel you should be. After lunch on that penultimate day you might ‘forget’ to reapply cream at all. As the final day dawns, you hit the sunlounger and slightly cane it (your skin, not the sunbed) in the hope that you can play tan catch-up and your skin won’t notice what you’re doing to it. Last day doesn’t count — like calories if you eat chocolate standing up.

You moisturise on the flight home, hoping to reinvigorate the melanin and… then what? The gradual fade? Or L’Oréal Sublime Bronze? The tube is large and the price is low and you need to use very little of it. It doesn’t smell like cheap cookies or curry. The colour, particularly when used over even the slightest base tan (I have a theory that self-applied fake tan doesn’t really take to properly pale skin), is crazily natural.

Mix it with moisturiser, use it every other day and you’ll be brown until Christmas, when you can replace the tan with glitter and sparkle, which I love as much as any creepy toddler beauty pageant queen. But that’s another story for another column.

L’Oréal Sublime Bronze Self-tanning Fresh Feel Gel, £9.65 (down from £12.49), at boots.com