A spray-on tan? Indiana-made tanning booths are hot items. Takes just a minute.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Opener

You can get your teeth whitened in a hour these days, and now, with the help of an Indianapolis manufacturer, you can have a healthy-looking tan in about a minute.

ETS Inc., which bills itself as the world's leading supplier of tanning products, hopes its Sunless Express Spray Spa will yield a significant boost in business. That seems likely, as the $30,000 spray-on-tan units are shipping about as fast as ETS can make them, and the company is only now getting ready to tackle the tan-crazy European market.

Amy Doyle, who leads the Sunless Express project team, explains how the automated process works. "Before you go into the booth, you put on a shower cap and put neutralizing lotion on your hands and toes" to prevent them from absorbing too much of the special tanning solution. "The booth has automated instructions. You stand in a specific position and push a button.

The booth's 10 nozzles spray the front of your body with the tanning liquid, which takes about 15 seconds. The automated voice then instructs you to turn around and press the button again to have the solution sprayed onto the back of your body.

The liquid contains bronzers and dihydroxy-acetone, or DHA, which is the leading sunless-tanning ingredient. A sugar, DHA reacts with amino acids in the surface skin cells to darken them. The process is not instantaneous, but it's quick. "It usually takes about three hours to develop a tan, and it'll continue to get darker for up to 24 hours," Doyle says.

The tan lasts five days to a week, and tanning-salon customers typically pay $20 to $30 for a session. Apparently there are plenty of people willing to pay the price for a nearly instant tan. "There's a great demand for them," Doyle says. "We're getting ready for mass production."

ETS, with more than 500 employees, also markets traditional tanning beds as well as tanning lotions under such brand names as Australian Gold and Swedish Beauty. But sunless tanning is on the rise, and ETS is one of at least three manufacturers pushing spray booths, which apply the...