A Cheltenham Fashion Week Tan

We at Silver Ball all are excitedly preparing for the very first Cheltenham Fashion Week event this evening (11 July): a ‘Night at the Movies’ with Selina Blow. The event only has a couple of tickets remaining so we are expecting a stylish, fashion conscious crowd all wanting to look their best. With this in mind what better excuse to pamper and preen ourselves?!

With the soggy summer we’ve had so far, the deep, rich, summer glow we have yearned for since February is yet to happen. Well no longer. Gill at the Gilli Tan Club offers a spray tan that really is the most natural looking around - and with tan-a-holic Ellie’s approval, it must be something to shout about!

Gill offers a spray tan called ‘Urban Tan’ and she was thrilled to tell us the benefits of this brand over its competitors. She explained how the base of the tan originates from sugar beets, meaning that it can be safely applied to skin without the plastics and chemicals that make up some spray tans. She praised the natural ingredients that build this tan, making clear to us the obvious health benefits of not coating your body in chemicals.

With Gills qualifications and her experience in the tanning field explained it was now our time to experiment! Urban Tan, unlike many spray tans offered in salons, has scope to accommodate for our individual colouring. Rather than simply offering a light, medium and dark colour scale, there are four different tan shades; SunSpray, Celebrity, Chocolate and Sunset. These range from a ‘sun kissed glow’ to ‘a deep, dark luscious tan’ with each shade offering a different colour and depth. Crucially, these four colours can be combined. For example the ‘Celebrity’ tan shade can be blended with ‘Chocolate’ - this is the combination I chose, as I wanted to stay clear of the ‘dark tan’ label but still wanted depth to my colour. However it soon became clear that there’s an endless lists of combinations to try and tan colours to create.

Veteran tanner Ellie was now in overdrive! And Gill wasn’t finished. She finally explained how Urban Tan offers a ‘developer’ that can be added to the colour combinations we had chosen. This developer would extenuate the colour we had chosen adding depth as the tan developed over the next 6 – 8 hours. Being blonde, Alex and I most certainly did not want to finish up as a Katie Price look-a-like’s so we passed, however as a self-confessed tanning addict and with naturally much darker colouring Ellie gave it a go!

So with our paper pants and shoes in hand we each stepped into the tanning tent, reappearing looking like we stepped off a plane from the south of France. All shocked and laughing at our instant paper pant tan line, we donned our baggiest clothes (so not to rub our new colour) and let our fab new tan dry and develop. Oh, and I must add the lack of digestive biscuit smell! Normally when the developing tan reacts with the proteins in our skin it produces a smell akin to a digestive biscuit, however with a choice of fragrances to add to your tan this smell is all but gone.

Walking back into the Silver Ball office we definitely turned a few heads… yes yes, we have just popped off to the Caribbean in our lunch hour!  

To contact Gill:

07932594090

gillitanclub@gmail.com

Esther x