It takes about eight hours to develop, so you do still have to plan ahead if you want to be tan for a certain event. There are other products that bronze instantly, like the Jergens No Wait Tropical Tan mousse, which I use occasionally when I’m short on time. Self-tan from the bottom up. Pump the gel into your hands and rub it into your legs. I start on my calf or thigh and, when I have a little less product on my hands, blend it over areas like my knees and ankles. You could use a tanning mitt, but I find the Glow Your Own Way gel streaks less when I use my hands. Rub it in until it’s fully absorbed, then move on to the next area of your body until you’re done.

While spending hours on my personal care sounds divine, it’s not realistic for my life right now — but I still want to feel confident in shorts, dresses, and bathing suits this summer. I can slap this tan on in a few minutes, get dressed, and go about my day, or hop straight into bed without worrying about tan transferring onto my clothes or sheets. The color never pulls orange on me, lasts about seven days, and fades beautifully. The TL;DR I love that this gel comes in a bottle with a pump versus a squeeze tube; I just prefer using a pump to wrangling the last bits of lotion out of a tube when it’s running low. I like that the bottle is clear so I can see how much product I have left, and 16 ounces is a lot of product for the price. I’ve had my bottle for two summers now. Outside of music, he's also enjoying the opportunities being presented to him from other creative fields that are expanding his horizons. Having studied acting when he was younger, he's keen to find an appropriate and believable film role to accept, but has some nerves to overcome first. “Acting is like 10 times as terrifying as singing for some reason,” he says, despite gladly standing on stage every other night in front of 20,000 people. “Yeah, but 20,000 people are watching me being me, not me being someone else, which is hard,” he laughs. Apply lotion all over. Most self-tan how-tos will tell you to apply lotion to dry areas on your body, like ankles, knees, and elbows, but I go for a thin layer of moisturizer all over. If you try to layer the product up for a darker color, it doesn’t really do much. I’m guessing this is by design, so that if you overlap here and there while applying it (since it’s clear), you won’t have obvious patches.

Wash your hands thoroughly. If you’re going to go mitt-less, you’ll want to suds up your hands right after you finish tanning, since your palms don’t naturally tan and having them match the rest of your skin just doesn’t look quite right. I keep a cheap toothbrush around to scrub around my nails and cuticles so that the product doesn’t cling to those areas either. Shower, exfoliate, and shave. I like to dry brush before I hop in the shower and use a sugar scrub in the shower because I’m a more-is-more type of gal, but I’m sure one method is plenty. Then shave where you like. So when I first started using this I did notice it not going well around my feet/ankles and hands, but that's because of poor application. My advice for those areas is to really really blend it around with a small makeup brush, and smooth it over with a mitt. For my hands, I try very hard to put it on carefully with a makeup brush, and then I use wet wipes on my palm to make sure it doesn't get there. Once I shower if I see some blotches on my hand, I use an exfoliating mitt to take it right off. One other good thing about this product is that it is easy to remove with an exfoliator. In defiance of the strike against the sanctuary of music, which Shawn admits did feel compromised in the aftermath, he proceeded to play Paris the following night, where he spoke from the stage about the bombing – an act he felt compelled to do. “People who have a voice and who a lot of people listen to need to show strength and power and the fact that we are not scared, so you shouldn't be… There was a part of me that wanted to cancel the whole tour and fly home. I was on the phone to my Mom and she was all ready to get me a flight home right now, and then there's a part of you that's like, 'Listen, that means they win,' so you gotta just stand up and be that role model.”

When you grow up in Florida surrounded by surfer girls and skater boys with sun-bleached streaks in their hair and gorgeous tans, it can give you a real complex. As a dark-haired kid with fair skin (as in, you can see my veins with the naked eye), I gave myself plenty of sunburns trying to look more like the bronze girlies all around me. This went on until I was much older, when my mom was diagnosed with skin cancer and had to have a lesion removed from her hairline. That’s when I swore off the sun for good and dove headlong into self-tanning. The ingredient list on the Glow Your Own Way self-tanner is, as you’d expect, a bunch of chemical names that don’t mean much to anyone who’s not a chemist. But you’ll recognize the ones at the top, meaning they make up the bulk of the formula: water, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, and coconut and sugar cane extracts. The Glow Your Own Way gel gets bonus points for being vegan and formulated without parabens, and b.tan doesn’t test on animals.

The TL;DR

He's unquestionably excited and unfazed by what consequences may come with change – getting older, he suggests, can only inspire new subject matter: “The day I can actually write a song about my girlfriend who I am truly in love with – because I've never actually truly been in love, I don't know what type of music's going to come out of me when I am. That might be a whole new wave of music that I never thought I could write,” he beams. “And the day that my heart gets broken for the first time, which hasn't happened, will be another wave of music, and the day I have a kid… It's just going to be forever growing, and that's why I think as a songwriter you do it until the day you die.” In June, it was announced that Shawn had collaborated with Emporio Armani for their first touchscreen smartwatch collection, signaling an intrepid step into the high fashion realm. Announcing their partnership on the dynamic new line, Giorgio Armani said: “The human component has always been fundamental for me in everything I have done. Shawn embodies and conveys the values in which I believe: professionalism, commitment, innovation and style.”