Excuse the rather stiff pose here; it’s difficult trying to breathe in as well as hold every muscle in your body as tautly as possible. This is the kind of position I have to adopt every time I go into the agency for lingerie polaroids and, if I’m actually doing a lingerie job, I have to spend the entire eight or nine hours holding everything in! Quite a workout in itself!

Anyway, the point of this post is twofold: one, this is my body three days (ish) after I began my Emergency Body Overhaul (see HERE). I went to the gym, I tried to stop eating bad food (failed on two counts, 1) homemade burger Saturday eve, 2) Sunday Roast on..er…Sunday) I applied Sisley’s anti-cellulite cream from bust to knees twice daily, I body brushed, I fretted, I prayed. I drank (and this is no joke) fifteen cups of Dr Stuart’s Slim Plus tea. But do you know what I think made the most difference? Probably the thing that made any difference, in reality? A spray tan!

I went for a Sienna X spray tan in Harrods’ Urban Retreat and it was the quickest, easiest and most convenient ‘body altering’ treatment I have ever had! I haven’t had a spray tan since 2003 so I was quite interested to see whether or not techniques had improved – they seem to have, vastly. I stood in a little white room and took off my clothes, stood in a tent and got sprayed with a spray gun for a few minutes, and that was it! No effort required. My tan developed overnight and in the morning I instantly looked leaner and more toned. The tan was even and streak-free and I am more than impressed!

A few weird things – or maybe they’re not weird, I have no idea being a non-fake-tanner! 1) Why do I need barrier cream on my feet? I want tanned feet! They tan just the same as the rest of me! It looks very slightly odd that they are much paler than the rest of me. 2) Is it normal to wear paper pants? Because for me, it kind of defies the point of having a fake tan – I want to be tanned all over, not have a white triangle on my arse! 3) How do you know how far to pull the shower cap down? I wanted to cover my hairline, but now I have a bloody tan line next to my hairline! Ha!

But weird things aside, my tan looks very natural don’t you think? I felt a lot more confident doing my polaroids than I would have been had I not have had a bit of a sexy colour going on. It’s almost identical to the colour that I actually tan in reality except I’ve achieved it in three minutes without having to apply SPF and get sand stuck all over my body! Result.

The Sienna X tan costs £50 from Urban Retreat – they also do home tanning products and I’m going to be trying out my new gradual tanner to see how that looks. I’m going to be a tan-oholic at this rate! What an easy (and painless) way to look that bit more svelte!