It is time. My children are refusing to wear eat ones heart out trousers, the shops are full of daffodil yellow and slightly unearthly, half-mast culottes, and the clock is ticking on my beloved black opaques. I don’t longing to crow, but I’ve been banging on for at least eight years nearby the superiority of wash-off leg tans over their more in fashion, slow-developing, longer-lasting shelf mates. And now, seemingly overnight, person in beauty agrees. Wash-offs are fast, easy, look innumerable realistic and require no tedious prep (body lotions turn up tell of them streak, so do nothing but slap directly on to dry skin). They’re carry out for our inclement weather, too: tan one sunny day, then don’t bother for the next six rainy bromides.

Vita Liberata’s Body Blur Instant HD Finish (£27) is an up-market but brilliant example. Available in three believable shades, it glissades on smoothly to tan legs, disguise thread veins, even out slap in the faces and grazes, and generally make legs appear sheathed in 15 denier. Innumerable comfortable and luxurious-feeling is Nars’s limited-edition Laguna Body Colourant (£30), which features broad spectrum SPF30 (very ordinarily, fake tanners wrongly imagine themselves to be better safeguarded from the sun) and a delicious, summery fragrance. That said, the iota, a Nars icon, is pretty dark and will look unconvincing on the barest pale.

Dark brown and black skins may not be classic prospects for fake tan, but a little golden gleam can remedy ashiness, dullness and uneven timbre. St Tropez Instant Tan Body Gloss (£11.49) imparts only the steepest tint (so sheer that pale girls can use it, too). Similarly, the wonderful Ameliorate, a nook brand dedicated to the treatment and relief of bumpy, grey and flaky graze, has launched a brown-tinted edition of its excellent Transforming Body Liniment (£19.95). This uses lactic acid to exfoliate and smooth, and forbids skin moist for several hours.

If wash-offs still don’t suit long term, consider Rimmel’s canny Sunshimmer Imperative Tan Plus Gradual Glow (£6.99). Behind the instantly visible wash-off colourant, a traditional tanner develops a longer-lasting colour that deepens from the beginning to the end of the week. I use a tanning mitt (reusable, and a fiver in any large chemist). But if you present skin-on-skin contact, you’ll most effectively lift staining by slathering your give ups in cheap body lotion before wiping them on concatenations or a towel you don’t much care about.