Light, medium, deep: choosing your first Bronze Era shade.

Choosing your first self tan shade is less about your current skin tone and more about your undertones — and the glow you actually want, not the one you think you should have.

Step one — find your undertone

Skin tone is depth. Undertone is the warmth or coolness underneath that depth. Two people can be the same brightness on a page and read completely differently because one is cool-toned and the other is warm.

The quickest test: look at the inside of your wrist in natural daylight.

• Veins look blue or purple → cool undertone
• Veins look green or olive → warm undertone
• You honestly cannot tell → neutral undertone (the lucky middle)

Cool undertones tend to fight orange-leaning self tans. Warm undertones can absorb a deeper formula without tipping into orange. Neutral can wear most things — though "most" is not "all."

Step two — find your base depth

Now look at your skin's natural depth in winter, or wherever your skin sits when you have not been in the sun for several weeks.

1. Fair — Burns easily, rarely tans. Often pink or porcelain undertone.
2. Light — Sometimes burns, slowly tans. May freckle.
3. Medium — Tans easily, rarely burns. Often a peach or beige base.
4. Olive — Tans easily, golden undertones. Skin reads slightly green-yellow under cool light.
5. Deep — Naturally rich, never burns. May have warm or cool undertones underneath the depth.

Now match yourself to a shade

The Bronze Era shade range is built around three depths. Here is how we'd advise pairing.

Light

Best for fair-to-light skin who want a barely-there, weekend-walk glow. Two shades darker than your bare skin, no more. If you are very fair and have ever had a self tan tip orange on you, this is where to start — our cool-toned violet base is specifically designed to keep this shade from over-warming.

Medium

The most-loved shade, and the safest first choice for light, medium, and olive skin. A real weekend tan. Photogenic. Develops over six hours into something that reads "just spent the long weekend outdoors" rather than "just self-tanned."

Deep

For medium-to-deep skin chasing an editorial holiday bronze, or for olive and deep skin who want a true color boost without going artificial. Develops faster and richer. We do not recommend this shade for very fair skin — even with our color-correcting base, the depth difference is enough to read costume on a fair complexion.

What about "deep" skin and self tan?

Self tan absolutely works on deep skin tones — it just works differently. The visible color change is more subtle (because the base depth is already rich), but the result is a more even, more luminous skin tone with a slight warm cast. Many of our deep-skin customers use The Tan in Medium or Deep specifically for the evenness and the glow, not the depth shift.

If you have deep skin, ignore "looks dark on the bottle" and choose by undertone. A cool-toned violet-base self tan (like ours) will read warm-bronze on you. A traditional yellow-toned self tan can read muddy or gray on deep skin and is best avoided.

Still unsure? Start with Medium.

Medium is the safest first purchase for the vast majority of skin tones — fair to deep. The color builds over a single overnight develop, so if you decide you want more after the first try, you can layer it. Going lighter is easy. Going darker, harder.

Or — take our 60-second quiz, which weighs your tone, undertone, lifestyle, and goal into a personalised shade pick.