Fake Tanning Gone Wrong!

British newspaper, the Mirror, covered the story of a tanning experience gone wrong. Josh Reade, a make-up artist, decided to apply a fake tan, St Moriz Instant Self-Tanning Mist, just before watching the movie, My Sister’s Keeper. Sounds harmless enough but the movie and the tan combined to give him a horrific, or hilarious -depending on how you see it- experience. 

My Sister’s Keeper is a movie directed by Nick Casavettes, and tells the story of Kate Fitzgerald (played by Cameron Diaz), who suffers from acute promyelocytic leukemia. Kate has a sister, Anna, who was born by way of in vitro fertilization, as a savior sister. From birth, when her umbilical cord is harvested, Anna is made to donate compatible organs, blood, stem cells and tissue to her sister Kate. Anna’s life revolves around bleeding, infections, growth hormone injections, hospitalizations, opioid painkillers, and sleeping pills. Anna’s mother has no problem with constantly harvesting her daughter’s body to save her other daughter, Kate, but their father is less convinced about the merits of all this. The final straw comes when Anna has to donate her kidney to Kate. At this point she realizes that she will never be able to live a normal life if she goes ahead with this, and so she sues her parents for medical emancipation. It turns out that Kate had persuaded her sister to refuse to donate the kidney, because after all those operations, she is ready to die. It is obvious how emotional this movie must be. 

Well, the 29-year old Reade applied the fake tan, in medium brown, shortly before watching the movie and found himself crying during the movie and having to dab away the tears as they flowed down his cheeks. After the movie, he went to bed. When he woke up the next morning, he was horrified to see streak marks all across his face! He took a video of what he looked like to show his friends and it is quite a sight! After laughing at him his friends persuaded him to upload the video to TikTok, which he did. The video racked up over 3.3 million views on TikTok. 

What makes this whole experience even funnier is that Reade thought that by dabbing his face, he would avoid disturbing his tan. You wonder just how bad he would have looked had he wiped the tears away instead of dabbing on his face! The streaking tan left white marks all over his face that make him look like something out of a horror movie. 

The instructions for use say that you should not disturb the tan for at least six hours and normally, people just get to bed and wake up with their tan ready. When he showed his friends, one friend found it so funny that she laughed till she too found herself crying, this time from sheer laughter. It was just too much to not share it with the rest of the world. Within 15 minutes of posting, the video had already earned 250,000 views! If there is a lesson in all this, it is that Reade would have saved himself a lot of trouble had he just gotten Solarium spray tanning at a professional tanner’s!