I have really ummed and ahhed about writing this review and to be honest I've been putting it off for a few weeks. I was so unbelievably excited to try this tan out after reading so many great reviews and I had so many people telling me it was the best tan that they've ever tried, so for me this review is going to be quite hard to write.
First things first, let's start with the basics. Cocoa Brown One Hour Tan is a new tanning product on the market which claims to give you "beautifully bronzed, radiant skin in just 1 hour". It also uses vegetable derived DHA (the active ingredient in self-tanners) and no parabens so is kind to sensitive skin. There are no nasty ingredients in this tanner - which also means no nasty smells.
The day before tanning, I did all the usual preparations. Shaving, exfoliating, moisturising - I did the lot - and the next day I woke up excited and ready to be a bronze goddess. I applied a generous amount of tan to my fake tanning mitt (Primark £1) and buffed it into my skin in a circular motion until I had covered my whole body and then I waited...
The tan itself has a lovely floral scent to it. It isn't overbearing and it certainly isn't anything close to that horrendous biscuit smell that some fake tans come with. It dries very quickly - maybe too quickly - so you really have to rush getting this on your skin correctly. One plus point was that because it dried quickly, it didn't leave any sort of stickiness on my skin and was able to cover up after a few minutes of application.
Cocoa Brown boast that you don't need to leave this tan on for more than 3 hours, in fact I've been told it completely stops developing after 3 hours. This is because Cocoa Brown contains tan accelerating ingredients which is meant to give you a rich brown town in just 1 hour. After an hour I must say that I saw little to no improvement in the colour of my skin so I decided to keep it on for the whole 3 hours.
Now I am an extremely pale person naturally because of bad genes and because I have been cursed with a Vitamin D deficiency and anaemia. Both of these things effect the colour of your skin and so I am usually a ghostly, pale white. I honestly would of thought that after an hour I would of seen some sort of improvement and I thought that I would definitely, definitely have a gorgeous tan after the whole three hours...but...no. For some unknown reason this tan just did not work for me. It didn't stick at all. I had a very pale tan, maybe a shade or two darker than my natural pale skin tone, but nothing significant and nothing anything close to that gorgeous brown tan I'd been promised by the product, friends and other bloggers. I wasn't the only person that this tan didn't work on, in fact I'd convinced my friend to buy it as well and she had the same bad results.
I'm really unsure of what happened here. Everyone else has had such a good response to this product but I guess that stuff like this just doesn't work on everyone and I have the accept that. It wouldn't be the first time that a fake tan hasn't worked on me either. I didn't want to write a negative review. There are a lot of great things about this product because there's no icky ingredients and there's no icky smell, but I guess that all of that doesn't matter if it doesn't completely work on some people.
I would however, like to try the darker Cocoa Brown tan, just to see if that one would work better on my skin. Clearly I am just destined to be pale forever and ever until the end of time!
