Doctor’s blast man’s ‘idiot’ tanning move

Dylan Wright, 28, has claimed the injections left him with the dry, sun-spotted skin of a 60-year-old, the New York Post reports.

The freckles, a permanent reminder of his tanning disaster, even gave him a cancer scare.

“The doctors called me an idiot and told me it’s a side effect from the drug, but now I’m stuck with [freckles],” the Essex resident told South West News Service. “I’ve got freckles like I’m in my 50s or 60s. It feels like my skin’s aged.”

The self-tanning shots use a lab-made hormone called melanotan II to increase melanin production – but at the cost of moles and freckles.

Before a 2014 trip to Sitges, Spain, he purchased the injections for $A18 to amp up a soon-to-be beach glow.

Mr Wright gave himself two injections before leaving for the airport to get a head start on his desired bronzed look. However, at the end of the six-day vacation, his complexion was darker than he expected.

Looking back, he said he was probably supposed to only use one syringe but didn’t want to take another through airport security and was nervous one wouldn’t do the trick.

“I bought them before to make the most of the sun. I went on the sunbeds a bit before the holiday but didn’t take the injections until just before I left,” he told SWNS. “I was too scared to take them away.”

In December, Mr Wright did what any other person would do with a beauty hack gone wrong: He took to TikTok.

The video shows a photo from Wright’s holiday as he pokes fun at himself for getting a bit too crisp in the sun post-injections.

The clip, which had more than 600,000 views and 23,000 likes, had a huge number of comments from people horrified at how dark Mr Wright’s skin looked.

“So good it altered your genetics,” chided one user.

Worryingly, some actually asked where he got the injections, apparently hoping to bump up their tans, too. Mr Wright, however, was quick to shut them down, warning of the after-effects – and the judgmental looks from others.

“It was so embarrassing. People staring, like I had something severely wrong with me! The bleached hair didn’t help. I looked like a pint of Guinness!” he wrote in the comments.

Halfway through his trip, he noticed how dark he was, despite thinking the injections didn’t work because he bought them online – and, by the last day, he caught people staring.

“It looked really odd … because I had this white top and white hair and I think that makes it funnier,” he told SWNS.

“After I saw the photo, I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is not cool,’” he said.

“Because the injections make tanning more efficient, being in the sun for nine hours a day is like being in the sun for a week every day and that was the problem.”

When he returned home, he refused to tell his parents what he’d done, despite their questions about the abrupt change.

Now, Mr Wright – whose excessive tan has since faded – is spreading awareness about the injections, urging people to do research into possible side effects.

“It’s really not worth it. There’s safer ways to tan, like fake tanning,” he said. “It gave me a wake-up call … It’s a classic case of being 20 and thinking you’re invincible.”

This article originally appears on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as Man’s tanning injection disaster: ‘Doctor’s called me an idiot’