Pure Bronze Tanning vs Delux Tanners: The Comparison They Started
The comparison
they started.
We spent over a year refusing to name other brands. Then one of them put our images in their adverts, edited our product out and theirs in, and ran them as paid ads. This is the full record, dated, with the originals side by side. It does not expire. It updates.
11 July
Why we are writing this
Since day one, our policy has been simple: talk about our own formulas, publish our own images, and let other brands do whatever it is they do. We have never named a competitor on this blog and we were happy to keep it that way.
Then our advertising images started appearing in someone else's paid ads, and had been since before June. Not similar images. Our images. The same model, the same setting, the same composition, the same props, with the Delux Tanners tube digitally removed and a Pure Bronze Tanning tube pasted in its place. Two of these ads were live in the Meta Ad Library when we found them (Library IDs 995996182800694 and 2124172281772145, for anyone who enjoys receipts). We have the originals, dated, published months earlier on our own channels.
Drag the handle. Same model, same pool, same towel, same heart-shaped tan mark, same little red heart on the towel. One difference.
Left: ours, published in May. Right: their paid ad, our product edited out and theirs edited in.
And it was not a one-off. Here is our beach hammock image against their second ad, same treatment, our tube out, their tube in. The ad copy underneath it, incidentally, is selling their tanning drops while the image shows their accelerator. At this point we had stopped being surprised.
Left: ours. Right: the Meta Ad Library, running since 2 June, their tube edited in.
Our first thought was to handle it quietly, which we are. Our second thought was: if Pure Bronze Tanning believe our imagery sells tanning products better than their own, the least we can do is agree with them publicly and complete the comparison they started. So here it is. Everything below is factual, checkable, and accurate at the time of writing.
16 July
They did it again. Twice, in one day.
We published this article on 11 July. On 16 July, Pure Bronze Tanning launched two brand new ads in the Meta Ad Library. Both are ours.
The first is our night beach photograph. Same model, which makes it the third photograph of her they have taken, same night, same white shirt, same beach bar glowing behind her. Our tube has been edited out of her hand and a Coconut Crush tube edited in. Library ID 1522824199333263.
Left: our shoot. Right: launched 16 July, their tube edited into her hand.
The second is the one we have framed on the office wall, because it is not a photograph at all. It is one of our finished adverts. The layout is ours. The composition is ours. The black marble, the palm shadow, the pouring shot, all ours. The headline, "The texture says everything.", is ours, word for word, in the same position, in the same type. The only things they changed are the tube and the colour of the cream. Library ID 997804023252507, for the collectors.
Left: our advert, our headline, our cream. Right: same advert, same headline, their tube.
So let us take stock. Four paid ads. Three of our photographs and one of our finished adverts, each with their tube pasted over ours. At this point they are not borrowing our photography. They are running our advertising department. We would send an invoice, but we suspect it would come back with our logo edited off it.
When we first published this piece, we set out a simple policy: any brand that uses our images gets a public, formula for formula comparison, receipts included. Pure Bronze Tanning appear to have read that as an offer. Fine by us. Every new ad they build out of our work gets added here, dated, side by side with the original, for as long as they care to keep going.
5 September
The madness starts again
Those are not our words. They are the opening line of a video Pure Bronze Tanning posted this week, and we could not have put it better ourselves. It has been a quiet seven weeks since the last update. We had begun to wonder whether this article might be finished. It is not finished.
This time the action has moved from Meta to TikTok Shop, where the Coconut Crush listing has been given a new set of images. We have laid them out below exactly as they appear on the listing. Swipe through theirs. Then swipe through ours, which is the Island Coconut carousel we published in August. Take your time. There is no rush.
Theirs. Coconut Crush TikTok Shop listing, September 2026. Swipe
Ours. Island Coconut carousel, published August 2026. Swipe
Dark tropical backdrop. Oversized stacked headline down the left, alternating cream and colour. Tube on the right with the product splashing behind it. A row of three circled benefit icons under the headline. A banner strip of three-word claims along the bottom. Our fourth slide is headlined Tanning Meets Luxury Skincare. Their third slide is headlined Tanning Meets Tropical Care. We are not going to say anything about that. We are going to suggest you swipe to both, and then we are going to sit here quietly.
To be scrupulously fair, and we always are, none of these are our photographs. Nobody has edited a tube this time. So we are not adding them to the count. We are filing them in a new folder marked "tribute", in the sense that a tribute act is a tribute. The wigs are on. The set list is familiar. The original artist is at the back of the room with a drink, trying to keep a straight face.
The ingredients, again, now in a larger font
Slide two of their new set is the one worth lingering on. It lists, in big friendly type with icons, Coconut Oil, Cocoa Butter, Hyaluronic Acid, Niacinamide and Vitamin E, plus a badge reading "Science Backed".
Regular readers will remember the chapter further down, where we set their TikTok Shop ingredient list beside the tube in their own video and counted. The tube list ran to around eleven ingredients: glycerin, tyrosine, propylene glycol, shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil, oat kernel oil, jojoba, dimethicone, cyclopentasiloxane and a cetearyl entry where the label runs out. No niacinamide. No hyaluronic acid. No vitamin E. No water, for that matter, in a 200ml cream.
Nothing about that has changed. It is the same tube, in the same video, with the same eleven ingredients. What has changed is that three of the ingredients which do not appear on the packaging have been promoted from a line in a text panel to a headline graphic with their own icons. We had assumed, after July, that the next step would be to bring the listing into line with the tube. It turns out the next step was to make the listing bigger. Different approach. Bold, in its way.
We keep coming back to the same rule because it is the only one that matters: under the UK Cosmetics Regulation, the list that has to be accurate is the one printed on the tube. Every ingredient we put on a Delux slide is on the Delux label. That is not a boast. It is the minimum.
About that madness
Back to the video. After the opening line, it pans across their Shopify orders screen to show how busy things are. We paused it and counted, because by now counting is a habit. We make it fourteen orders across four days. Three and a half a day.
We want to be careful here, because every brand starts somewhere and we remember our own three-orders-a-day weeks with real fondness. Fourteen orders is fourteen real people, and we hope every one of them gets exactly what the listing promised. We would only observe that the word "madness" is carrying a heavy load in that opening line, and that the "10,000+ Happy Customers" banner we quoted in July and the orders screen in this video are not obviously describing the same business.
For a sense of scale, the Shop app displays a "bought in past month" badge on a listing once a product passes 25 orders in a rolling 30 days. Below that line it shows nothing at all. Above it, the number appears automatically, rounded, whether the brand wants it there or not, which makes it one of the few sales figures in this industry that nobody gets to write themselves. Here is one of ours this week.
We looked for the same badge on every Pure Bronze Tanning listing and, at the time of writing, could not find one. Not a single product over the 25 mark in the last 30 days. We will leave that there. It does not need us.
While we are here: the new Island Coconut
Since everyone else seems keen on it, here is the actual product the listing above was built around. Island Coconut relaunched in August in a new tube, reformulated with MelanoBronze alongside N-Acetyl-L-Tyrosine, copper gluconate and a peptide complex, with niacinamide, ceramide NP and ectoin doing the skincare work. Every one of those is on the label. Every one of them is on the product page with an explanation of why it is there. Swipe.
See the full Island Coconut ingredient list and why each one is there.
That is the September update. We said in July that this article does not expire, it updates. We are starting to think we should have said it charges by the hour.
8 September
New name, same photographs
Three days. We published the update above on Friday. By Monday, a Facebook page called "PB Tanning Co" was running paid adverts for Pure Bronze Coconut Crush. By our count it is the third Facebook page these products have been advertised from since July. We are not going to speculate about why a brand would change the name above its adverts three times in as many months, because we do not know, and this article only ever prints what we know. What we know is what is in the adverts.
Both images will be familiar to anyone who has read this far. Our night beach photograph, with the Coconut Crush tube still in her hand. Our texture advert, with our headline still sitting on it. They have not been re-edited. They have not been re-shot. They have been re-uploaded, under a new name, with "20% OFF Everything, Limited Time Only!" underneath.
Left: our shoot. Right: "PB Tanning Co", 8 September. Her fourth appearance in their advertising.
Left: our advert. Right: "PB Tanning Co", 8 September. Our headline. Third page name.
That takes the running total to six paid ads, built from four Delux images, under three page names. We keep a spreadsheet now. The images have a column. The page names have a column. The page names column is growing faster, which is not a sentence we ever expected to write about a tanning brand.
A small note for PB Tanning Co, in case they are new here: the originals of both of these are further up this page, dated, with the Ad Library IDs from the first time they ran. So are the originals of the two before that. Welcome aboard. The kettle is on.
Back to the Shop app, where the reviews are not the brand's to edit
Last week we mentioned the Shop app because of its sales badge. It turns out it had something else to show us. Reviews on the Shop app are tied to verified orders placed through the app, and the score is set by the buyers, not the seller. It is, as far as we can find, the only place on the internet where Pure Bronze Tanning customers are rating Pure Bronze Tanning, rather than Pure Bronze Tanning rating itself. Here is what those customers make of it.
Store rating, 3.9 stars from 21 verified reviews. The Spray Duo, listed at £44.99 against a crossed-out £49.98 for a saving of ten percent, sits on two stars from three ratings. On the same app, with the same verification, our Tanning Spray is on 4.8 stars from 438 store reviews and five stars from 159 product ratings. Same app. Same rules. Same black pouches. Different numbers.
Pure Bronze Tanning, Shop app
3.9Set by their buyers, not by them.
Delux Tanners, Shop app
4.8Same app. Same rules. Different numbers.
We also noticed the Spray Duo is sold in X2, X3 and X5 strengths, which some of our readers may find rings a bell. Our Tanning Spray has been sold as The X2, The X3 and The X5 since it launched. We are told great minds think alike. The second half of that proverb is quoted less often.
One more thing on that listing, and then we will let it go. Look at the variant selector in the screenshot. It says "Strengh". Not Strength. Strengh. The one word the entire X2, X3, X5 range hangs on, on their own listing, on the app where their own customers leave the reviews, and it is a letter short. We mention this partly because it made us laugh and partly because it answers a question we have been quietly asking since July. We had wondered whether anyone at Pure Bronze Tanning had actually read this article, given that the copying carried on regardless. We now think it is entirely possible that they have read it, all the way through, and came away with the impression that we were complimenting them.
To be clear about what we are not saying. We are not saying 21 reviews is a small number, because every one of them is a real person who paid real money and took the time. We are not saying a 3.9 is a catastrophe. We are saying that the "10,000+ Happy Customers" banner on their homepage, the fourteen orders in four days from last week's video, and the 3.9 from 21 verified buyers on the Shop app are three descriptions of the same business, and only one of the three was written by the customers.
Why the letter is still in the drawer
A fair question at this point, and one we get asked: six paid adverts built from our photographs is more than enough to start with, so why have we not taken legal action? The honest answer is that we sat down and did the maths.
This article sits at the top of Google for their brand name. Every pound Pure Bronze Tanning spends on adverts sends people off to search for Pure Bronze Tanning, and a healthy share of those people land here, read everything you have just read, scroll to the bottom, and find a route to 25% off with our name on it. We cannot lie to you. It is bringing in a lot of sales. Somewhere along the way, Pure Bronze Tanning became our best performing ad account, and we do not even have the login.
A solicitor's letter would cost us money. Their marketing budget costs us nothing and, on the evidence, converts better. So the letter stays in the drawer for now, next to the invoice we never sent. If they would like either of them, they know where we are. They have been here since July. They have our photographs.
19 September
Mango Melt, and the brief they forgot to delete
A quick word on where things stand. The images are still running. We said the letter would stay in the drawer and it has. What has changed is that, as of this week, we are running adverts of our own, side by side with theirs, so that the people who see their version also get to see the original. We gave them enough time. This article carries on regardless, and this week it carried us to a new product.
Pure Bronze Tanning have launched a tingle cream called Mango Melt, and it is on TikTok Shop, and TikTok Shop requires an ingredient list. Here is theirs, exactly as published.
An ingredient list with a request in it
An INCI list is a legal document. It is the one piece of text on a cosmetic listing that is supposed to be exact, because it is how a person with an allergy finds out whether a product will hurt them. This one opens with the words "This is my new tingle cream ingredients aswell". It closes with: "Please develop a stronger tingle version of our Mango Melt cream using both Methyl Nicotinate and Benzyl Nicotinate at safe but noticeable salon-strength levels. We want strong warming sensation with smooth moisturising texture and mango fragrance."
That is not an ingredient list. That is a message to a manufacturer, pasted whole into the ingredient field, greeting and sign-off included. Somewhere in the middle of it is an ingredient list, but it is impossible to tell whether the list is the cream you are buying or the cream they have asked for, because a brief for a stronger version and the formula of the current version are two different documents, and both have been dropped into a box where only one belongs. We can only assume they did not spot it, and to be fair, they have not spotted "Strengh" yet either, and that has been up for months. "Aswell", incidentally, is now one word.
We should add, because regular readers will already be thinking it: this is the brand whose Coconut Crush listing published nine ingredients that do not appear on the printed tube. That is the record we are working from. So the odds of a list that arrived by copy and paste, with the chat still attached, being more accurate than the last one are, well. We will let you decide.
What the tingle actually is
The two ingredients they asked for are methyl nicotinate and benzyl nicotinate. These are real and they do work, so let us be clear about what they do. They are vasodilators, from the same family as the active in muscle rubs. Applied to skin they open the small blood vessels near the surface, and within a few minutes you go red and warm. That is the tingle. It is your circulation, not your melanin. Nicotinates have no effect on pigment at all. The deeper, darker look in the first ten minutes is blood.
The same tube also contains caffeine. Caffeine, on skin, is a vasoconstrictor. It is the ingredient eye creams use to close blood vessels and reduce redness. So the formula contains one ingredient to open the blood vessels and another to close them, which is either a very sophisticated piece of chemistry or a list of things that sounded good. We know which way we would bet.
The "natural bronzers"
The listing promises natural bronzers. There is exactly one colourant in the list, and it is the last ingredient: caramel. Sugar, cooked until it is brown. It is natural, we will give them that. It is also why the "tan" appears in the same minute the cream goes on, which is also why it is not a tan. It is a tint, and it goes down the plughole with the mango scent. Delux has been bronzer-free since the first tube for exactly this reason: colour you did not earn is colour you cannot keep.
What is left when you take those out
Water, aloe juice, glycerin, propanediol, two silicones, a palmitate, jojoba oil, shea butter, mango seed butter, avocado oil, cocoa butter, two olive-derived emulsifiers, lecithin, mango fruit extract, panthenol, vitamin E, a copper peptide, three thickeners, a preservative system, fragrance. That is a body moisturiser. A perfectly nice one, if we are being generous, and we always are. Tyrosine is in there too, which is a fair thing to put in a tanning cream, we put it in ours, so we will say nothing about it. Strip out the chemistry warmer and the caramel and what you are holding is a decent after-sun in a tube with the word tanning on the front.
To be clear about what we are not saying. We are not saying the cream is unsafe. Nicotinate tingles are common in indoor tanning and most people tolerate them fine. We are not saying it will not feel like something is happening, because it will. We are saying that the thing happening is not a tan, that the listing describes it as one, and that the ingredient list meant to let you check for yourself has a manufacturer's brief stapled to it. Under the UK Cosmetics Regulation the label has to be accurate. We have not seen the label. On this brand's form to date, we would want to.
The full formula-by-formula breakdown of Mango Melt against our own tingle, and Coconut Crush against the Next-Gen creams, is in the formula comparison.
Side by side
The comparison
| Delux Tanners | Pure Bronze Tanning | |
|---|---|---|
| Ingredients published | Named on every product page, with a section explaining why each was chosen | None on their website; two contradictory lists for Coconut Crush on TikTok, and a manufacturer brief pasted into the Mango Melt list |
| Named actives | Tyrosine complex, peptide complex, barrier-support ingredients, all named on-page | "Nourishing coconut ingredients" on the website; a longer list online that does not match their own printed label |
| Reviews | Verified purchase reviews, on-site and checkable; 4.8 stars from 438 verified reviews on the Shop app | No verified review system found on their site; homepage claims "10,000+ Happy Customers"; 3.9 stars from 21 verified reviews on the Shop app |
| Photography | 100% our own, of our own products | Six paid ads across three page names found using Delux Tanners photographs or finished Delux adverts with their product edited in; TikTok Shop listing images now follow the Delux Island Coconut carousel layout |
| Trading history | Founded April 2025, 50,000+ orders shipped, verified reviews to show for it | Company incorporated 1 October 2025 (Companies House no. 16754637) |
The deep dives
The full working
For anyone who wants it. Tap a chapter to open it.
Ingredients: you cannot compare what one side will not show you
We wanted this section to be a proper formula-versus-formula breakdown. We could not write one from their website, because at the time of writing the Coconut Crush page lists no ingredients at all. The entire product description is around sixty words and the closest it comes to a formula is "infused with nourishing coconut ingredients".
We take a different view. Tanning accelerators go on your skin, repeatedly, often before UV exposure. You are entitled to know exactly what is in them before you pay. That is why every Delux product page carries a "Why We Chose These Ingredients" section naming what is in the formula and what each ingredient is doing there, from the tyrosine complex supporting the look of deeper colour development to the barrier-support and conditioning ingredients that keep skin comfortable while you build it. No bronzer. No DHA. No fake colour. Nothing we would not put on the label in full.
In most brand comparisons, that would be the end of the ingredients section. In this case we kept looking, and what we found deserved its own chapter.
The TikTok detour: two ingredient lists that cannot both be true
There is usually a reason a brand does not publish its ingredients anywhere it is not required to. So we went to the one place where a list is required: their TikTok Shop listing. And there it was, a full "Product Ingredients" panel for Coconut Crush. Water, aloe, glycerin, shea, coconut oil, squalane, and then an ambitious stack of actives: L-Tyrosine, Acetyl Tyrosine, Niacinamide, Vitamin E, Panthenol, Caffeine, Sodium Hyaluronate, Copper PCA and Riboflavin. On paper, quite the formula.
Then we watched their own TikTok video from 22 May, in which they hold up the tube and show the back label to the camera. The list printed on the actual packaging is around ten ingredients: glycerin, tyrosine, propylene glycol, shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil, oat kernel oil, jojoba, dimethicone, cyclopentasiloxane and a cetearyl entry where the label runs out of frame.
Here are both, side by side, from their own published content.
Compare the two, published by the same brand, for the same product, and the differences write themselves. Acetyl Tyrosine, the headline active in the online list, does not appear on the printed tube. Neither do Niacinamide, Caffeine, Sodium Hyaluronate, Copper PCA, Panthenol, Vitamin E, Riboflavin or aloe. For completeness, the printed list also shows no water and no preservative system, in a 200ml cream.
We are not going to tell you what is actually inside the tube, because we have no way of knowing. Apparently the challenge is not unique to us. What we can tell you is that both of these lists were published by Pure Bronze Tanning, they describe the same product, and they cannot both be accurate. Under the UK Cosmetics Regulation, the ingredient list that is required to be accurate is the one printed on the packaging, which in this case is the shorter one, without the actives. We will leave you to decide which list you are paying £25.99 for.
While we had both sources open, one more discrepancy caught our eye. The TikTok listing describes Coconut Crush as "designed for indoor and outdoor tanning routines", and repeats "suitable for indoor and outdoor tanning routines" in its bullet points. The tube in their own video reads "for outdoor sun use only". You can see both in the screenshots above. If you use sunbeds, you might reasonably want to know which of those sentences is true. We could not tell you, and on the evidence, neither can they.
Reviews: verified, or vibes
Every review on deluxtanning.com is a verified purchase tied to a real order. You can read them, sort them, and see they came from people who actually bought the product. That is the entire point of verified reviews: you do not have to take our word for anything.
On the Pure Bronze site we could not find a verified review system at all. What we found was a homepage banner claiming "10,000+ Happy Customers" from a company that was incorporated on 1 October 2025, and a section titled "Real Peoples, Real Results", which we quote exactly as written.
Then their own TikTok account did the auditing for us. A video posted on 22 June, captioned "another busy morning building a tanning brand from the ground up", proudly scrolls through their incoming Shopify order notifications. The order numbers on screen run from 1622 to 1626. Shopify order numbers start at 1001 by default. We will let you do the subtraction. We will note only that the result sits some distance short of 10,000, happy or otherwise, and that the homepage banner and the order screen cannot both be telling the same story.
Authenticity: our line in the sand
Delux Tanners has never used a false image to make a sale. Every product photo, every texture shot, every campaign image is ours, made for our products. It costs more and takes longer, and we would not do it any other way, because the image is a promise about what turns up at your door.
Which is why finding our own images in someone else's paid ads, with their tube edited over ours, was such a strange compliment. Of everything they could have used to represent Coconut Crush, they chose photographs of a Delux Tanners product. Six times now, under three different names. We are told imitation is flattery. We would have settled for a licensing enquiry.
A few smaller details we noticed while we were on their site, offered without further comment: the main Shop link in their navigation points to a collection called "test", the logo file in their own source code is named "Neutral Elegant Minimalist Jewelry Logo", and at the time of writing their Tanning Drops page showed a sale price of £21.99 against a crossed-out regular price of £19.99, which is a discount in a direction we had not previously encountered.
How to judge any tanning brand, including us
Strip the branding away and there are four questions that sort serious tanning brands from label-and-logo operations. Does the brand publish its full ingredients, so you know what you are applying? Does the list on the website match the list on the tube? Are the reviews verified purchases you can check, rather than a number on a banner? And is the photography the brand's own, showing the actual product you will receive?
Hold Delux to those standards as hard as you like. Hold everyone to them. If a brand fails all four, the price tag is not the bargain it looks like.
The tan speaks for itself
We built Delux for people who are serious about tanning: named actives, skin-first formulation, verified results from real customers, and imagery we made ourselves because we have nothing to hide behind. If you were searching for Pure Bronze Tanning and landed here instead, welcome. Read our reviews, read our ingredients, check them against our labels, and decide for yourself. That is all we have ever asked anyone to do.
Making the switch? This one is on us.
Since you likely got here from Pure Bronze, welcome. We are that confident in our products that we are giving you 25% off your order. There is one small catch: you have to earn it. Three rounds, a few minutes, and the code is waiting at the end.
Take the quiz for 25% offFind your formula first