from
$78.00 USD
$108.00 USD
from
$68.00 USD
$80.00 USD
Aside from being an indie, woman-owned business, one of the most charming parts of the GlowPro story might be how the owner, Julie Koritko, created the company and speaks about her viral empire with a casual, unassuming air. Julie told me she was always a tanning addict, laughing at herself and cringing as she tells me about her membership to Hollywood Tans in high school and all the sun damageshe says she’ll spend the rest of her life outrunning. After high school, she “did what every vain girl must do,” and moved to LA where she worked as a makeup artist.
“It was the early 2000’s, I was cutting my teeth in the industry and airbrush foundation was huge. I decided to take a spray tanning course at a local makeup academy since I already had the equipment," she recounts.
This was how Julie was introduced to spray tan solutions and first took notice of the difference between the DHA % pro formulas were labeled with verse the light/med/darkyou see in consumer formulas. “Unsurprisingly, the novelty of it wore off and I wanted an easier method of doing my own tans but with the same pro DHA concentrations.”
After trolling the depths of the internet and reaching out to countless customer service reps for big companies like St. Tropez and Loving Tan, Julie found that not a single company would tell her the DHA concentration of their formulas. “Actually, most of the reps didn't even know what DHA was," she added.
The TL;DR of DHA is that it’s the active browning ingredient in self tanner and what controls how dark of a tan you can get. If you don’t know the DHA of a product, it’s a crapshoot.
Not one to sit around and wait, Julie jumped head first into creating the tanning product that she was looking to buy- professional strength DHA tanning mousses.
“I was lucky,” she chortles. “I had no business plan, no distribution, warehousing, marketing ideas…. Nothing. It definitely wasn’t smart, but I just knew it was better tanner and believed that other people would get it…. Thank God they did!”
Presently, you can find 50,000+ people on social media who did indeed, “get it,” just like Julie hoped for.
DHA, short for Dihydroxy acetone, is a sugar derivative and is the active ingredient in sunless tanners. DHA interacts with the amino acids on the skin’s surface to create the bronzing/darkening effect that replicates a sun tan. *think of it like how a cut apple browns when left out
The maximum amount of a DHA the skin can react with at one time is 14%. Anything above this is just going to sit on top of the skin.
DHA is the main factor in a product's color delivery, but depth and intensity of tan will also depend on the user’s skin in the areas being tanned. Thicker skin contains more amino acids for DHA to react with, which produces a darker color, while thinner areas, such as the face, generally produce a lighter tan.
GlowPro products also contain a secondary, more premium (i.e. expensive) tanning ingredient, called erythrulose that is also a sugar derivative but has more of a red-tone and develops slower than DHA.
Erythruolse combats orange-tones, streaking, and provides a smoother fade than products that only use DHA.
