Turn Up the Tan with Academie Bronz' Express

Despite the howling gales and lashings of freezing rain that the weather was doling out over the last few days in some kind of pathetic fallacy to our Budget woes, we're gradually starting to think again about fake tan here at Beaut.ie. Kirstie had a round-up of some new snazzy self tan offerings recently, and I've been giving some sister products to that mad-sounding tan drink from Academie Bronz' Express a whirl.

First up, the powder bronzer, €28.20. If you like your bronzer dinner plate sized, then this laddie is for you. To be brutally honest, now, initially I wasn't too mad about the colour of this. It's inclined to be quite ruddy if you're heavy-handed at all, but in fairness it does last brilliantly and there is great colour payoff, you just need to be careful in the application. I've been using it daily across the aul' decolletage for the last while in place of slapping false tan on my chest, and it does look very natural - not too shimmery, not too matte.

Fierce heavy to cart around, though!

Then for my trip to gay Pareee last weekend I decided to break out the Bronz' Express false tan fluid, €20.95, itself, which has been glaring balefully at my whiter-than-the-driven-snow hide from the corner of the bathroom for days on end. (Eventually I had to turn it around to face the wall, it was starting to freak me out.) This gets thumbs up on several fronts - it's tinted so (a) you can see exactly where it's being applied, easily spot any missed patches and blend where necessary to avoid harsh edges, and (b) you get immediate colour gratification, which deepens over about 2-3 hours. It's not stinky: according to the morketing blurb, that's because it contains ylang-ylang and citrus fruits. My smellers couldn't detect either, but equally they weren't overcome by the usual soggy biscuit fake tan smell so it was all good.

The Bronz' Express mitt, €5.50, has a spongey application side backed by plastic to protect your little lámh from inadvertent tangoing and makes putting the tan on a breeze - although the plastic backing doesn't go all the way around the innards of the mitt, as I discovered to my cost after a bit of a spill. Bah. I have a quibble with the design of the bottle too, which is what caused the accident (not my clumsiness, oh no): the neck of the bottle is totally open. It doesn't have one of the little stopper thingies with a hole in the middle that just dispense a small amount of product at a time, which is a bit of a miss because this is a seriously watery tan. Grouching aside, this did deliver a very natural looking colour which you couldn't be taxed for and wore off gradually and evenly over the course of a few days.

Salons nationwide, including branches of Unicare, stock the Academie Bronz' Express range.