This is the question people ask quietly, after they have already booked, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.
What DHA is
Every spray tan is built on the same ingredient: DHA, dihydroxyacetone. It is a simple sugar. When it meets the amino acids in the outermost layer of your skin, it reacts and produces a brown color, the same kind of reaction that browns a cut apple.
Three things follow from that, and they explain almost everything about how a spray tan behaves:
- It only works on the top layer. DHA does not go deeper than the skin your body is already shedding. That is why a tan lasts seven to ten days and leaves along with that layer, and why exfoliating removes it.
- It is color, not melanin. Your skin has not produced anything. It has been tinted.
- It offers no sun protection. More on that below, because it is the one people get wrong.
What the FDA says
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists DHA in its regulations as a color additive for imparting color to the human body, and restricts that use to external application. In the FDA’s own definition, that means applied “only to external parts of the body and not to the lips or any body surface covered by mucous membrane.”
The FDA also says something people rarely hear from a tanning business: its approval does not cover being sprayed all over in an automated booth, because the safety data for that use was never submitted. Its guidance for anyone getting sprayed is to ask three questions:
- Are your eyes protected from exposure?
- Are your lips and mucous membranes protected?
- Are you protected from inhaling or ingesting it?
If the answer to any of those is no, the FDA’s position is that you are not protected. That is the whole safety conversation, and it is a conversation about how the product is applied, not whether it exists.
How a careful appointment handles that
This is where an airbrush artist and a booth genuinely differ. A booth sprays a fixed pattern at whoever is standing in it. An artist sprays a person.
With an airbrush in a person’s hand, the mist goes where it is pointed, in short controlled passes, and the face is done last and lightest with your eyes and mouth closed. That is the difference between a product applied to skin and a product filling a room. If you would rather skip the face entirely, say so: the Bare Leg Glow and the upper-body option exist for exactly that, and it is a normal request.
The solutions themselves
The formulas Seana uses are clean, vegan, and free from parabens, sulfates and harsh chemicals. She works from several professional lines rather than one house bottle and chooses between them for the person in front of her.
If you have sensitive skin, allergies or a skin condition, tell her before the appointment rather than at it. She can walk you through what is in the solution she would choose for you, and it is a fair question to ask anywhere you book. A blanket “it’s fine for everyone” is not an answer any product can honestly give.
What a spray tan is not
It is not sunscreen. The FDA is explicit: a sunless tanner only provides sun protection if it contains sunscreen ingredients and carries an SPF number. A spray tan is neither. You will look tanned and burn exactly as easily as you did before, which is worth knowing before a beach day. Keep using sunscreen as if the tan were not there.
It is not a tanning bed. That comparison gets its own page, because it is the reason a lot of people are here.
Pregnancy and children
Neither is a question for a website. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, ask your doctor before booking; many are comfortable with a spray tan given that DHA is external and the exposure is brief, but that is their call and not ours. Appointments for clients under eighteen are arranged with a parent or guardian.
Questions before you book? Text 615-428-0746. Ask anything, including about ingredients. You will get a real answer.