August 5, 2009

Product: Nivea Summer Touch Smooth Legs

In the summer, I like to have a bit of the season's warm glow, especially to compliment certain clothing colors. So in May it was finally time to choose a tinted moisturizer. I had no loyalty to certain brand; so far they'd all worked fine but you could really smell the tinting chemical at work on me. So I did a bit of internet searching to see what my choices were this year.

And that's how I found Nivea's Summer Touch Smooth Legs self tanning lotion. Not only is it designed to gradually build color but also to make hair look and feel finer. And I thought, "Well that could be neat." Every little bit helps, right?

Ingredients:
  • Water, glycerin, cyclomethicone, alcohol denat., cetearyl alcohol, dihydroxyacetone, tapioca starch, glyceryl stearate SE, chelidonium majus extract, butylene glycol, dimethicomol, fragrance, sodium cetearyl sulfate, xanthan gum, sodium citrate, citric acid, phenoxyethanol, methylparaben, propylparaben.
Things I liked:
  • Color developed quickly, even though I was using the kind for light to medium skin tones.
  • The initial smell of the lotion was not unpleasant.
  • It makes a nice moisturizer.
Things I didn't like:
  • It left that usual self-tanner smell as the chemicals reacted with my skin. (But everyone's different in that regard.)
  • Either I was being more careless than usual or this one is more prone to streak.
  • It seemed like I lost more color than usual when shaving or exfoliating. And if I didn't exfoliate or shave for a few days, I could actually scrape off all the color build-up with my nails in the bath. That was kind of an icky discovery. Never had that happen before.
  • I still had to shave the same amount.
Did it do what it promised?

It's got the "natural summer glow" part down, though I found it was easy to loose it, even if I let it build up before a shave or scrub. As for the hair, it looked and felt the same as always a day after a shave. I didn't find that I could skip a shave at all. I tried it on my arms to see what it would do for lighter hair that wasn't shaven, and noticed no difference there either.

While it didn't physically affect my hair itself, a tan can lessen the contrast between your skin and hair and make it a little less noticeable. I don't think you need to be buying a lotion that says it has hair control though.

But now I'm curious what the active ingredient in softening the hairs might have been. I've seen other lotions (not neccessarily tanning ones) say they can soften body hair, too. There's got to be some science behind that. Maybe we'll see more products like that in the future.

2 comments:

Sophie said...

or maybe somebody just wants more women to buy their product? forgive me cynicism but all these new products that are supposed to soften the hair have one thing in common: they don't soften anything apart from our hopes...

Allerleirah said...

I'm inclined to agree with you.

I do hope that if there are people out there developing creams that are meant to soften hair, maybe one day there'll be some good results.