Articles

Getting Bronzed From a Spray Gun

John Rodgers is willing to go just about anything for a tan without having to sit in the sun. So after a half dozen tanning creams left him streaky and orange, he went under the gun-the airbrush gun, that is, which dispensed a fine mist of bronzing lotion all over him. "People thought it looked great," the 35-year-old New Yorker says.

With bathing-suit season just weeks away, hip sun lovers who've tried creams, sprays and even those carwash-style booths have a new way of getting bronzed, by artists wielding the same equipment used to paint everything from hotrods to model trains. Indeed, salons from Los Angeles to New York say they're seeing as many as 200 palefaces a week, more than four times as many as a year ago. It's all part of a boom in sunless tanning; with doctors increasingly warning about sun damage to skin and improved self-tanners giving a more natural-looking result, sales of self-tanners jumped 11% last year to $217 million, according to Kline & Co., a market-research firm.

The process, which costs as much as $75, is simple but not particularly "luxurious and pampering," says Robin Gibson, president of St. Tropez, which makes self-tanning cream. Clad in next to nothing, clients stand still for 15 to 30 minutes while an airbrush artist blows a fine brown mist all over their bodies.

The brown-colored solution can take as long as 24 hours to set, and can rub off of clothing, bed sheets and furniture. Then there's the smell: Darci Vonfeildt's salon uses a coconut-scented lotion supposedly remiscent of the tropics. "It just gets old," says the Kansas City, MO., party promoter who gets bronzed every Friday. Of course, models on magazine covers have had make-up airbrushed on for years, but it wasn't until 1997 that anyone had the idea to use the compressed air-driven machines for tanning. That's when Starr Hamson, a Hilton Head, N.C., makeup artist, tried out her equipment on some guests who had a rainy week. Not long after that she founded Fantasy Tan Airbrush Tanning, and in the last six months business has more than doubled.

Some fashion-forward folks have already come up with variations, including "tan-toos" (spots that are covered up during spraying, leaving behind a pale emblem) and "sculpted" tans that carve out cheek-bones and erase love handles using a variety of shades. And while last summer car-wash booth were big, those run as much as $30,000; a salon can pick up an airbrush kit for less than $400.

Even folks vacationing in cool spots will soon be able to come home with a sprayed-on glow. Mark Morrison, director of operations for Steiner Transocean Ltd., which runs salon and spas on roughly 100 cruise ships, says they may add airbrush tanning on some ships this summer. The first spas to get them? They'll be on boats sailing out of Alaska.