Wow Brown Ready to Glo Dark Tanning Liquid - review

Ready to Glo Liquid - DARK

Inspired by their famous professional salon formula, Ready to Glo (DARK) spritz-it-on-at-home self-tan from Wow Brown is a liquid-based product, condensed down to give the highest DHA concentration (ie the ingredient in self-tan products that turns you brown).  So in theory, it should give me a salon-strength spray tan at home...

Ready to Glo is sprayed directly onto a mitt and applied all over your body in circular movements.  It's quite watery, so follow the instructions for application;  I found applying it directly to my skin wasn't the best way of doing the trick (as it dries so quickly), but spritzing it onto the mitt and working it in from there worked a charm.  As with all self-tans, you need to work quickly enough with it, but it didn't streak and rubbed-in perfectly evenly.  It's so dark that it's pretty scary looking on the mitt, but bear with it :-)

scary scary dark on the mitt - this is two spritzes

Pros?  It goes on easily and is tinted so you can see it as you apply it.  It smells quite nice on application.  That scent does fade and it does take on a slight aroma-de-fake-tan-doing-its-thing, but it starts out slight enough and is mostly tolerable.  As with all fake tans, this smell does get stronger with every passing hour of development time, but it's not front and centre with this product, which is good.

It rubbed-off slightly while it was developing... find me a fake tan that doesn't.  So I put this on at home and had all of the chairs covered in tissues to mitigate against disaster - the place looked like a tissue version of Dexter!  I would advise that this is used at home when you have plenty of time to wander around in the never-never for at least a couple of hours and some loose dark clothes that don't matter too much to you (again, like all fake tans).

It remained quite sticky for some time... find me a fake tan that doesn't (time to non-stickiness was approximately three hours).  And I found that it made me feel rather hot and bothered about thirty minutes after application -  but this effect also faded away after a bit (about an hour).

prep and prime...

I did my usual pre-tanning routine; some exfoliating and some moisturising.  Then I used it on my face, arms, legs, chest, neck, shoulders, back.  The instructions indicate a five-hour development time, however after only four hours I was starting to freak out at how orange I looked, so I wussed-out and showered it all off at that point.  I was happy to discover however that I had a lovely natural looking subtle glow - the scary orange colour didn't translate to the final shade :-)  I am looking forward to trying it out again and, this time, leaving it for the full five hours to see how it goes.

This retails at €22 for 100ml and you should get between seven and ten applications of this, so it works out reasonably well in terms of cost per application (considering that a decent spray tan will set you back at least €40).  Each application lasts between three and ten days (I guess it depends on whether you shower ten times a day or if you moisturise each day or not... that kinda thing).  Look here for more information or to buy it directly from their webstore.  Incidentally, Wow Brown also has its two DIY self-tan lotion products; DIY Lotion Light/Medium & DIY Lotion Medium/Dark, if you find lotion-based self-tanners less scary than fluid-based products.

Some before-and-after pics:

As you can see, the final result (after 4 hours) was a lovely natural colour

Disclaimer: I was sent this out for my consideration.