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How this site works.

Last updated: May 2026

What Periodic Tan is

Periodic Tan is an independent self-tan recommendation tool for the UK market. You take a photo of your skin, answer a short set of preference questions, and we match you to one of 66+ fake tan products based on ingredient profile, undertone fit, skin-type suitability, and your stated preferences.

We are not a beauty retailer, a sponsor of any brand, or a medical service. We are a small independent matching tool.

How we make money

Some of the product links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and buy the product from the retailer, we may earn a small commission from that retailer at no extra cost to you. Commissions help us cover the cost of running the site and keeping the catalogue up to date.

Commissions do not influence which products we recommend. Our matching algorithm scores every product in our catalogue against your profile using the same weights regardless of whether the product carries an affiliate commission. Many products in our catalogue are linked to direct brand pages with no affiliate relationship at all.

We participate (or intend to participate) in: Amazon Associates UK, the Awin affiliate network (covering Boots, LookFantastic, Cult Beauty and others), and Skimlinks.

Your privacy

The single most important thing to know: any photo you upload to the matcher stays on your phone or computer. The skin analysis runs entirely in your browser. We do not upload, store, transmit, or have access to any image you submit.

What we do collect:

• Nothing personal by default. The matching quiz answers stay in the browser tab and are discarded when you close the page. We do not have a user account system, and we do not link any data to an identity.
• Standard server logs from our hosting provider (Netlify) — these include things like rough geographic region and browser type, retained for ~7 days for security and abuse-prevention purposes.
• If we add Skimlinks (the affiliate-link rewriting service), it will set tracking cookies when you click an outbound product link, in order to attribute the commission. This page will be updated to disclose this when it goes live.

We do not run any analytics platform, ad network, or social tracking pixels on this site.

How the matching actually works

Skin analysis estimates your Fitzpatrick skin type and undertone using the Individual Typology Angle (ITA) method from Chardon et al. (1991) — the standard dermatological method for objectively classifying skin tone from photographs. Skin pixels are detected using a published computer-vision rule (Kovac et al., 2003) and converted to CIE L*a*b* colour space before classification.

The matching algorithm then scores each product across seven weighted dimensions: skin-type suitability, depth alignment, undertone match, development time, format preference, scent preference, and experience level.

This is a heuristic recommendation tool, not a medical or diagnostic instrument. Lighting conditions affect the analysis. Always patch-test any new product before full application.

Brand names & trademarks

All product names, brand names and trademarks referenced on this site (e.g. St. Tropez, Bondi Sands, Tan-Luxe, Isle of Paradise, and the other 60+ brands in our catalogue) are the property of their respective owners. Periodic Tan is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of these brands.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or affiliate enquiries: [email protected]