The Spots On Your Legs Go Darker Every Time You Use Self-Tanner. After Nineteen Weddings In Pantyhose, I Finally Found Out Why — And It Isn't Your Skin.

If you have age spots on your legs, you already know the thing I am about to describe.

You buy the tanner. You do everything right. You scrub first. You use the mitt. You go slow.

And the next morning your legs are browner — but the spots are browner too. Darker than before. And there are more of them than you remember.

Spots you did not even know you had.

I am going to tell you exactly what causes that, right now, before anything else — because it took me far too long to find out and it is not what you think.

Here is what is actually happening

Age spots are not flat.

They sit a little raised. And the skin on them is drier and rougher than the skin around them.

Dry skin drinks up more liquid. You know this already — it is why your elbows and knees always go darkest.

So when you rub self-tanner on your leg, those patches soak up more of it than everywhere else. They end up darker than the rest of you.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

It is not your skin. It is not your age. It is not that you did it wrong.

It is the chemical.

Nineteen weddings, and I counted them

I am sixty-eight. I live and die in slacks.

You cannot wear slacks to every wedding, so what actually happens is pantyhose. Flesh coloured, in Georgia, in September, at ninety-one degrees.

Somebody always asks. Aren't you hot?

I say I feel the cold. I have said it so many times I have nearly stopped hearing myself do it.

I am not cold. I have spider veins from the backs of my knees down to my ankles and age spots on both shins, and I have not had a bare leg at a wedding since 2017.

And then when the photographs are done I go to the ladies' room and take them off.

I thought that was just me until I read a woman say this on a forum:

"When the photos are done — you could always pop into the loo and remove them. I have at numerous occasions."

At numerous occasions. She was not complaining. She was giving somebody advice.

That is the part that got me. Not that I do it. That it is ordinary enough to be advice.

My mother did it first, and I watched every bit of it

My mother was a dress person. I have photographs of her at fifty-five, at fifty-eight, bare legs, not thinking about it. She was the one at the cookout who never went inside to change.

There is not one photograph of my mother's legs after 1998.

At sixty-two the veins came behind her knees and she mentioned it once, the way you mention weather. At sixty-four the spots came up on her calves to keep them company.

There was no day she stopped. The hems got longer. Then there were sleeves. Then there were slacks in the same colour so it looked like a choice.

She died of heat at every family thing for eight years and never once said why.

At sixty-six she bought her first self-tanner, for my cousin's wedding. She rang me about it, pleased with herself, saying she was going to sort her legs out before October.

She rang me again two days later in a completely different voice.

"It's made them worse. They've gone dark. I look like I've been knocked around."

Here is what she bought, in order:

Notice something there.

The $46 bottle failed the same way the $12 bottle failed.

She wore pantyhose to the wedding. There is a picture of the six of us on the church steps and she is at the end of the row, half behind my uncle.

If the expensive one and the cheap one fail in exactly the same way, the problem isn't the price. It's the ingredient they both share.

And here is the part I am not proud of. I watched all of it and I still did not understand it. I thought her skin was getting worse.

So did she.

The part that made me cross

Nearly every self-tanner sold in America uses the same active ingredient. It is called DHA.

DHA is a sugar. It works by reacting with the top layer of your skin to make a brown colour.

Reacting is the whole point of it. That is the product.

But reacting is also exactly what makes a dry, raised, thirsty patch go darker than the leg around it.

So the thing that makes it work is the same thing that makes it fail on you.

Not on your daughter. Not on your neighbour who is forty-one. On you — because you are the one with the spots.

I found this last year, from a woman about my age, and I have not been able to forget it:

Read that last line again.

The same bottle. Her daughter loves it.

That is not a product that failed. That is a product working exactly as intended, on somebody who is not you.

And this one cost her money twice:

She paid to buy it and then she paid to undo it.

Every bottle on that shelf was built for skin that doesn't have what your skin has.

Nobody is lying to you exactly. They just never tested it on us.

So I did what they tell you to do next

Every article says the same thing. If self-tanner darkens your spots, stop using self-tanner and use leg makeup instead.

So I did.

And here is what nobody mentions until after you have paid.

You have to pick a shade. On a screen. Of your own leg.

I could not tell Medium from Medium Natural. There is nowhere to try it and nobody to ask. I picked one, got it wrong, and that was $42 I did not get back.

Then you find out you need a setting powder. That is a second product.

Then you find out it comes off anyway. On your trousers. On the car seat. On the chair at your daughter's house.

And then somebody posted the routine a beautician had given her, to stop that happening:

Four days. For one afternoon.

The woman who posted it wrote underneath: "I felt exhausted just listening about them."

So did I. I put the tube in a drawer and I stopped wearing dresses. For about four years, if I am honest about it.