from
$63.20 USD
$81.00 USD
from
$55.00 USD
$70.00 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 and airbrush makeup was huge. I bought an airbrush machine for spraying foundation and when I realized I could run spray tan solution through it too— it was all over,” 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 cleaning and maintaining a bulky piece of equipment wore off and I wanted an easier method of self tanning.”
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 absorb at one time is 14-15%. 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 natural melanin content and skin thickness. Where the skin is thick ( elbows, knees) the tan will be more intense, verse where the skin is thinner (face) the tan will be lighter.
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 longer development period than DHA (48-72 hours).
Erythruolse combats orange-tones, streaking, and provides a smoother fade than products that only use DHA. It also helps the tan last longer because it starts working as the DHA starts fading.
