Bridal & wedding

Your wedding spray tan, timed properly.

The most common bridal mistake is booking the tan on the wrong day. Here is the exact timing, how to keep colour off a white dress, and where the tan belongs in your appointment order.

Book two days before. Not the day before.

Anywhere from one to three days ahead works, but two days before is the best. If the wedding is Saturday, the tan goes on Thursday.

Two days gives the colour time to finish developing and gives you one to two normal showers before the dress goes on, which is what actually removes the cosmetic guide bronzer. Tan the day before and you are putting a white dress over colour that has not been fully rinsed yet.

Will it transfer onto my dress?

The bronze you can see immediately after the appointment is a cosmetic guide colour, and it rinses off in your first shower. Before that first rinse it can rub, which is exactly why the studio asks you to wear dark, loose clothing home.

Once you have had a normal shower with body wash, the remaining bronzer is gone and what is left is the developed tan in your skin. That is the state you want to be in before the dress.

A helpful hack: baby powder or translucent setting powder on the areas you are worried about, like underarms, significantly reduces any transfer risk.

This is also the argument for booking two days out rather than one. The extra shower is the safety margin.

Where the tan goes in your appointment order

The tan should be one of the last things you do, because most beauty appointments involve either water, product, or friction, and all three affect colour. Nails, lashes and waxing all have their own timing relative to the tan, and the prep and aftercare guide sets out the full sequence. Read it when you book, not the night before.

If you are unsure how your particular schedule stacks up, bring it to the consultation. Sequencing around a wedding week is a normal conversation in this studio.

Why bridal colour is mixed differently

A bridal tan has a harder job than an everyday one. It has to look natural in person, at close range, in daylight, and under a photographer’s flash, all on the same day. Too deep and it reads as obvious in photos against a white dress. Too light and it disappears under camera lighting.

That balance is why the solution is mixed per client rather than sprayed from a single formula. An automatic booth applies the same thing to everyone at the same depth, which is where the orange and blotchy bridal-tan horror stories come from. The longer version of that argument is on the hand-applied versus booth page.

Bridal parties

Appointments are private and one-on-one, and each person’s solution is mixed for her own skin, so a bridal party is a series of individual appointments rather than one group session with one formula. Message the studio with your date and how many people, and Rhema will confirm what fits.

If this is your first spray tan

A wedding is a common reason for a first tan, and being nervous about it is normal. What happens, what to wear, and the studio’s judgement-free position are all set out on your first spray tan. Worth five minutes before you book.