Prep is most of it
Exfoliate the day before, not the same day. Same-day scrubbing leaves skin slightly raw and the tan grabs unevenly, which is the single most common cause of a patchy result.
Moisturise the dry spots only — knees, ankles, elbows, knuckles — about twenty minutes before you apply. Those areas absorb more and go darker, and a barrier layer evens it out.
Shave the day before as well. Freshly shaved skin has open follicles and that is where the little dark dots come from.
Mousse, drops, or gradual
Mousse is the fastest and the most forgiving because the guide colour shows you what you have done. It is also the one most likely to transfer onto sheets, so give it the full development time before bed.
Drops mixed into your own moisturiser are the most controllable and the hardest to get badly wrong. Slowest to build, best for the face.
Gradual lotions are the ones I recommend to anyone nervous. You cannot really ruin anything and you can stop when it is dark enough.
The white-sheet test
This is the test that eliminated most of what I tried. A tanner that looks perfect and then leaves a shadow on a white hotel duvet is a tanner I cannot travel with.
The fix that works regardless of product: apply in the morning, rinse the guide colour off before bed, and sleep in something old anyway.
The smell
Every self tan smells eventually — that is the DHA reacting, not the fragrance. Products differ in how well they mask it for the first few hours and not at all in what happens overnight.
A shower the next morning removes most of it. Anything claiming to have solved it entirely has not.
