'Cheap, effective and easy' - Why women are illegally selling tanning nasal sprays on TikTok
When 22-year-old Lily* glimpses her sun-kissed, evenly bronzed limbs in the mirror, elation washes over her. With every deepening shade of tan, her body confidence soars, and she beams with pride each time someone compliments her glowing complexion. It's a feeling many women who rely on a bottle of fake tan can wholeheartedly attest to.
Except, Lily hasn’t used of a bottle of fake in years, nor does she use sun beds or even lay out in the midday heat. Instead, she’s cast the usual tanning methods aside in favour of a new tanning obsession, one which comes in an unexpected form: Melanotan nasal sprays. And it seems that Clarke isn’t alone in her faux fixation: An increasing number of young women are turning to this method of tanning, with melanotan nasal sprays accumulating approximately 86 million views on TikTok to date.
What are melanotan sprays?
If you're not au fait with the melanotan sprays, allow here's the deal. Not be confused with melatonin (a hormone used for sleep issues), melanotan sprays are filled with synthetic hormones that enter the blood stream and make the skin all over the body appear darker. The results are temporary and fade after a few weeks if the product is not continually used.
Dr Hamdan Abdullah Hamed, a US board-certified dermatologist explains that ‘tanning nasal sprays contain melanotan II, a synthetic analog of the hormone alpha-MSH that stimulates melanin production in melanocytes. This gives an alternative way to get a tan-like skin pigmentation without the exposure to UV rays otherwise found in tanning beds as well as direct sun exposure,’ he says.
If you've not seen these tanning sprays while wondering down the aisles of Boots or Superdrug, it's because melanotan sprays are illegal to sell in the UK. Under current guidelines, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who are responsible for regulating all medicines and medical devices in the UK by ensuring they work as expected and are acceptably safe, told Women's Health;
'All our work is underpinned by robust and fact-based judgements to ensure that the benefits justify any risks. Melanotan II containing products are unlicensed medicines in the UK, and as such the safety, quality and effectiveness has not been demonstrated. These products may cause serious side effects, so our advice to those who have used nasal sprays is to stop using them immediately.'
Dr Hamed adds that while the synthetic hormones carry unknown health risks, there have been individual reports of side effects. ‘We know they can cause nausea and skin flushes.' More importantly though, he adds that ultimately 'there has been no studies on the long-term effects and the potential link to melanoma through an overstimulation of melanocytes.’
And yet presently, the rise of the tanning nasal sprays being sold online on platforms such as TikTok Shop, Instagram, and Amazon has made the crackdown of these sprays increasingly difficult.
A hot topic
So why are some women willing to put their health aside for the sake of a tan? Certainly for Lily, one selling point of these sprays is their ease of use compared to other tanning methods. They don’t require scorching your skin under the sun all day, and they don’t stain your bedsheets like some tanning lotions. Mostly though, the nasal sprays can also give the skin a natural looking glow because they're stimulating your skin's own melanocytes.
With her deeply bronzed complexion standing out against her bleached, icy blonde hair, Lily says that prior to nasal sprays, she has tried every method of tanning under the sun. She explains that she use to depend upon tanning injections and like Kim Kardashian, even owned a sunbed, but it was after being allured in by advertisements on social media, that she decided to put nasal sprays to the test.
'I’m naturally very pale and I’ve tried a few different brands of tanning nasals. One of the most popular brands, 2BTanned, was the worst I tried. It gave me bad headaches and made me feel sick right after taking them,' she says.
Unfortunately, this was not enough to stop Lily from using them regularly and perhaps more worryingly, despite knowing they're illegal, she also admits to selling nasal sprays and promoting them on social media.
She does add however, that she felt a duty of care to be honest about the potential side effects. ‘My buyers were between the ages of 21 and 40. I obviously informed them through private message of the common side effects.’
Elsewhere and 25 years old Sophie Green’s* documentation of trialling a nasal spray gained almost 19k views on TikTok within a couple of days. After searching the social media site for alternative ways to achieve a tan, Sophie came across the nasal sprays. ‘Fake tanning lotions require effort, so I ordered a tanning nasal spray from a generic brand called Fashion Base on Amazon. It cost around £10,’ she says.
Sophie first used the nasal spray for a week before going on holiday and then for two weeks while she was there. ‘I’ve never tanned easily so I just wanted to see if this would work for me, and it did. I could see a difference in my skin colour within a few days of being on holiday,’ she adds.
Like Lily, the potential health implications don’t seem to faze Sophie. ‘I did find that I developed a lot more freckles than I normally would. And if you sniff too hard it can feel like your nose is burning, which is probably not a good sign,’ she says, laughing, a cue that demonstrates she believes having a tan is worth the risk. Currently, Sophie has no plans to give up her nasal spray and continues to use the product every week.
The fact that Sophie and Lily have experienced fewer side effects compared to other women highlights how little we truly understand about the effects of these sprays. TikTok user Maddie Birch, had a far deadlier experience resulting in hospitalisation. In a video now spanning 1.1 million views, Birch shares that she has lost pigmentation under her eyes as a result of excessive melanotan snorting and is seeking medical treatment. Birch had only used the spray four times over the course of two weeks before she began to lose pigmentation.
Despite being relatively easy to get hold of, Dr Hamed, believes consumers should stay away from the viral sprays because the risk simply isn’t worth it. He’s adds that he’s seen too many patients suffering from nausea and skin rashes as a result of using melanotan while on holiday.
‘I believe that the excess surge of melanin from both melanotan and the sun would have caused this. There have been studies that link melanotan to an increase in cancer rates, however not enough research has been concluded,’ he says.
The rise of tanorexia
That these young women are obsessed with tanning isn’t surprising when you consider its cultural cache. Sunning yourself is a practice that has been thriving in the Western world for nearly a century. Darker skin was popularised by the Black singer Josephine Baker in France, while Coco Chanel, who was papped leaving Mediterranean cruise looking bronzed, set a new standard for beauty in the 1930s. While the trend dipped in post WW2 era, the accessibility of package holiday in the eighties and nineties saw the re-emergence the tan and by 2000, a survey revealed that 50 percent of Britons admitted that returning with a tan was the single most important reason for actually going on holiday.
Fast forward to today and despite the link between UV exposure and skin cancer being known to many in the UK, it has done little to challenge the idea than tanned skin (whether fake or not) is superior, signalling wealth and health. Celebrities also engage in the tanning cult — many speak of getting a spray tan before a red carpet events and Kim Kardashian posted a controversial TikTok in January that showed off her sunbed located in her office while According to research, 1 million Brits currently visit tanning salons every day, with 62,000 young people in the UK now using sunbeds.
The obsession with having a bronzed complexion has often been dubbed ‘tanorexia’. Thomas Midgley, founding director at The Body Image Treatment Clinic in Harley Street London and CBT and compassion focused psychotherapist, explains that ‘tanorexia’ follows ‘the trend of adding the latin for Hunger ‘rexia’ onto a potentially unhealthy obsession. In this case the Hunger or desire for darker or tanned skin.’ Tanned skin creates the allusion of looking more slender and toned.
Midgley continues: ‘Between ninety and 95 percent of the female identifying clients we see in our clinic their primary concern is social ranking and by that, I mean how they invariably feel about their bodies and confidence in the presence and in competition with other females.’
He adds that it is therefore unsurprising that so many young women turn to these viral sprays when there is an increased amount of pressure on them to look tanned and thin.
‘Why natural skin should be 'in'
Societal pressures aside, the government agency (MHRA) say they are doing everything in their power to crack down on illegal suppliers, and have repeatedly taken action to remove Melanotan products from the market for over 10 years.
Elsewhere and a spokesperson from TikTok told WH that they have reviewed the promotional content shared, and have removed that which violates their community guidelines. TikTok Shop guidelines also stress that prohibited products such as Melanotan and Melanotan II must not be sold on the platform. According to TikTok, the platform is taking enforcement actions against any sellers who violate the guidelines.
According to Dr Hamed (and many other doctors, who staunchly speak against too much sun exposure), the safest way to achieve a sun-kissed glow is by using fake tanning lotions and creams. It may run the risk of a streaked complexion when applied haphazardly, but this harmless side effect is far preferable to the serious dangers posed by the likes of nasal sprays and UV rays.
On the one hand, the good news is many consumers are in favours of using fake tan. According to Future Market Insights, self-tanning products for women accounted for almost 65 per cent of the market revenue in 2022. The global self-tanning products market net worth was estimated to be worth almost a billion pounds last year.
And yet our collective desire for looking toffee-skinned only serves to feed a toxic beauty standard that many women feel they must adhere to. 'Changing the beauty standard and what is aspirational is a huge and global task but it starts with everyone trying to question the beauty ideal’ says Midgley. Until then, sales of tanning products, illegal and legal, will continue to soar.
While it might sound like a cliché from a well-meaning hallmark card, true beauty comes from embracing your uniqueness. Your skin's beauty isn't defined by its colour; it's beautiful simply because it exists. The more we see social media posts celebrating this message, rather than promoting health damaging beauty products, the faster we’ll experience a collective shift in mindset—and that can only be a positive change.
* Both case study names have been changed for privacy and legal reasons.
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