I often get asked about the tanning process that is required before a bikini competition. I thought I’d share my experience with tanning for the Midwest Championships.
How to Tan For A Bikini Competition
The tanning process is funny to me. A normal spray tan is NOT even close to how dark you need to be in order for the stage lights to not drown your color out. You need to be DARK!!
I was very unsure about how dark to go for my first show since I had no experience competing before and I didn’t go to my show with any teammates or friends who were also competing. I just researched a lot and asked my coach what she thought was the best approach.
Two Nights Before The Show
My show was on Saturday night so the tanning process started Thursday night for me. I shaved and showered Thursday night and also used a PH balancing solution to make sure my tanning reacted as good as possible with my skin.
I made sure to shave as perfect as possible on Thursday night because I knew it would be my last time shaving before I got on stage. If I shaved any other time, it would remove some of my tanner. Also…make sure to shave your ENTIRE body. Yep…EVERYTHING!!! That was a first for me! You may need someone’s help to get your back and other places where you don’t think you even have hair…shave it anyway! The tanner will look like crap if you have left over hair…don’t make that mistake. Get it all!
After showering and shaving, I got my first coat of regular spray tan as a base coat. I used Infinity Sun solution because I love the color. You can use any full body spray tan that you’d like for your base coat.
The Night Before The Show
On Friday, I rinsed my body off in the evening to remove any existing bronzer that was on my body from my Thursday night spray tan. I didn’t use any type of lotions or skin care because you never know how it will react with your tanners.
After our Friday night athlete meeting, I started the second phase of tanning my body for the stage! This time, I used JanTana Hi definition to get a much darker color than any regular spray tan will do. It comes with the PH balancing shower gel as well as a “puff” to apply the tanner with.
I put on the first coach by rubbing it in with latex gloves (not the puff). Bad idea. It worked, but the rubbing of the latex on my skin really hurt! After the first application, I waited about a half hour until I did a second coat…with the puff this time.
The puff was so much easier to use and felt a million times better on my skin. I don’t know why I listened to whoever told me not to use that puff! USE IT!
I ended up putting on two coats on Friday night. Jan Tana soaks into your body and doesn’t rub off as much as I thought, which was great! I still slept on a dark sheet though because I didn’t want to mess up the hotel sheets.
Here is a fun break down of how my skin looked after the two coats of JanTana Hi-Def.
Yep..that’s my leg! Picture “0” was with my base spray tan from Thursday night. Picture “1” is after one coat and picture “2” is after 2 coats of JanTana. It got me dark, although you can’t really tell much a difference between the first and second coat.
Show Day
Saturday morning before the show, I ended up doing one more coat but I don’t have a picture of my leg for that one..sorry! I do have pictures from me on stage and how DARK I looked off stage. It’s amazing how much the stage lighting drowns out your color.
I ended up buying some Dream Tan in case I thought I needed to be darker but I didn’t even want to mess with using it because that stuff is a complete MESS and rubs off on everything! It WILL get you much much much darker though if you need to be. It may be worth trying to see if you like it better than I did. It’s dark, dark, DARK!
I’m the second from the right and as you can see, I’m not too dark and barely look like I tanned!
But as soon as you step out of the stage lights, you look a bit ridiculous 🙂 It was pretty darn funny in my opinion!
I’d say I look a bit tanner than Ryan…what do you think?
After my show, I got the judges “notes” about how I did and one of them said I wasn’t tan enough! Maybe I should have done another coat of JanTana?! Maybe next time.
One word of advice…if you’re not sure if you’re dark enough, go darker! Even if that makes you look like you walked straight out of the Jersey Shore House when you go out for your post competition meal!!!
I hope this helped you a bit when deciding how to tan for a bikini competition! Feel free to leave any comments below!
Not tan enough?! You look great and about the same color as the other girls. How funny. I’m going to look into that tanning product just because I’m so pasty!
There’s nothing worse than when someone messes up their tan on contest day. I was at the WBFF show in Denmark and some competitors just destroyed their chnces by having bad tans. The training and the diet is the hard part, people should never mess up their tan after all that hard work.