5 Ways to Tan This Summer Without the Lines

You already know four of them. The fifth is why some women stopped fighting tan lines altogether.

Picture it. The trip is over. You were in the sun every single day. That night you take off your bikini and stand in front of the mirror.

Your body is tan. Everywhere except where the bikini sat, where the skin stayed pale. Two stripes run across your shoulders from the straps, and there are pale patches on your chest, your hips, and your backside. It looks like someone stamped the bikini into your skin.

None of us want that. And yet every summer thousands of women fight exactly this. Here are five ways that are supposed to get rid of them (only one of them actually works).

You slide the straps left, then right. You flip onto your stomach, then onto your back. The idea is that every spot gets its turn in the sun.

Sounds reasonable. In reality you spend the whole day thinking about repositioning and still forget half the time. And even when you remember, every new strap position just leaves a different patch untanned. By the end the pale area has not gone anywhere. It has only gotten wider and blurrier.

A bandeau has no straps. So no stripes across your shoulders. Sounds like the fix.

It isn't. The top still sits across your chest and your back. That skin stays pale. And you still have the pale spots around your hips and your backside anyway. You lose a couple of lines. Most of them stay right where they were.

The lines are already there, so now self-tanner is supposed to cover them up. You rub it onto the pale patches and hope the edges disappear.

Except self-tanner almost never matches the tone of a real tan. Sometimes it turns too orange, sometimes too dark. Around the edges it soaks in unevenly and goes blotchy. Then there is the smell. And in the water or once you start sweating it doesn't hold up anyway. After one day at the beach most of it is gone and you are starting over.

No bikini, no lines. Logical enough. For most women it still isn't a real option.

At most public beaches and pools in the US it simply isn't allowed, and the rules change from state to state and even town to town. And in the places where it technically is allowed, the second you take your top off it can feel like every guy on the beach is looking. That is not relaxing. You don't actually get to lie there and enjoy the sun.

There is something else that matters more. The skin that is normally always covered is the most sensitive skin you have. Put it straight into full midday sun and it burns fast. Those are exactly the spots you want to keep covered, not the ones you want to expose.

That is exactly what a tan-through bikini from SAVA does. The fabric has thousands of tiny holes, so small you can barely see them. They let up to 80 percent of the sun's rays through, so the sun reaches the skin underneath the bikini too.

Which means you tan under the fabric, not just around it. Instead of hard white stripes at the end of the day, you are left with a much softer, far more even line.

From the outside the bikini looks completely normal. Worn, it stays opaque. Nobody at the pool sees anything. Only the sun gets through. And it dries up to five times faster than a regular bikini, so you are not sitting around wet for an hour after your swim.