The Spots On Your Legs Go Darker Every Time You Use Self-Tanner. After 34 Years As A Nurse, I Finally Found Out Why — And It Isn't Your Skin.

If you have age spots on your legs, you already know the thing I am about to describe.

You buy the tanner. You do everything right. You scrub first. You use the mitt. You go slow.

And the next morning your legs are browner — but the spots are browner too. Darker than before. And there are more of them than you remember.

Spots you did not even know you had.

I want to tell you what causes that. It took me eleven years to find out and it is not what you think. But first I need to tell you what I got wrong, because I got it wrong for a very long time.

I thought my skin was getting worse. It wasn't.

I worked as a nurse for thirty-four years. Most of it on my feet.

I tell you that not because it makes me an expert on skin — it doesn't — but because it should tell you something that I could not solve this. I am not squeamish. I am not vain. I read instructions. I follow them.

And I still could not get my own legs to look even.

Here is what I bought, in order:

Notice something there.

The $55 bottle failed the same way the $10 bottle failed.

That should have told me something. It took me years to hear it.

If the expensive one and the cheap one fail in exactly the same way, the problem isn't the price. It's the ingredient they both share.

Three things I wish somebody had told me in 2015

I am going to give you these in the order I learned them, because the order matters.

One. Your spots are not getting darker. The tanner is finding them.

This sounds like a small difference. It is not. It changes what you buy next.

Two. It happens in the same places every single time.

Go and look at your own legs after your next tan. Same spots. Same shapes. Same size. Every time.

That is not skin getting worse. Skin getting worse would be random. This is not random. It is a pattern, and a pattern has a cause.

Mine, in the kitchen, on an ordinary Tuesday. This is the bit you only see when you lift the hem.

Three. The reason is boring, and once you know it you cannot unknow it.

Here is what is actually happening

Age spots are not flat.

They sit a little raised. And the skin on them is drier and rougher than the skin around them.

Dry skin drinks up more liquid. You know this already — it is why your elbows and knees always go darkest.

So when you rub self-tanner on your leg, those patches soak up more of it than everywhere else. They end up darker than the rest of you.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

It is not your skin. It is not your age. It is not that you did it wrong.

It is the chemical.

The part that made me cross

Nearly every self-tanner sold in America uses the same active ingredient. It is called DHA.

DHA is a sugar. It works by reacting with the top layer of your skin to make a brown colour.

Reacting is the whole point of it. That is the product.

But reacting is also exactly what makes a dry, raised, thirsty patch go darker than the leg around it.

So the thing that makes it work is the same thing that makes it fail on you.

Not on your daughter. Not on your neighbour who is forty-one. On you — because you are the one with the spots.

Every bottle on that shelf was built for skin that doesn't have what your skin has.

Nobody is lying to you exactly. They just never tested it on us.

So I did what they tell you to do next

Every article says the same thing. If self-tanner darkens your spots, stop using self-tanner and use leg makeup instead.

So I did.

And here is what nobody mentions until after you have paid.

You have to pick a shade. On a screen. Of your own leg.

I could not tell Medium from Medium Natural. There is nowhere to try it and nobody to ask. I picked one, got it wrong, and that was $42 I did not get back.

Then you find out you need a setting powder. That is a second product.

Then you find out it comes off anyway. On your trousers. On the car seat. On the chair at your daughter's house.

I read a review from a woman who said she rubbed her legs with hydrogen peroxide first, to get every trace of oil off, so the makeup would stay put.

Hydrogen peroxide. On her legs. Before going out.

I put the tube in a drawer and I stopped wearing dresses. For about four years, if I am honest about it.