Claudia: I use so much fake tan that I have to scrape it off with a sponge!

WITH her thick black eyeliner, a heavy fringe and a tan that’s close to tangerine, Claudia Winkleman certainly has a look of her very own.

And it seems she has to go to great lengths to achieve her signature style – claiming that her fake tan is slapped on so thick she has to ‘scour it off’ with a kitchen sponge.

The Strictly Come Dancing presenter, pictured, says she uses a yellow cleaning sponge to scrub off the layer of orange tan.

‘If you use the amount of spray tan I do, you need to scour it off with a kitchen utensil,’ the mother of two said.

She was speaking in a YouTube interview hosted by beauty blogger Sali Hughes. When asked if the fake tan leaves ‘an attractive brown scum’ around her bath, she replied, ‘It’s so disgusting.’

While most fake tan enthusiastic try to achieve a natural-looking ‘glow’, the TV star insisted that she prefers an ‘orange’ look.

Claudia said she uses a spray tan brand called LA Tanning, adding: ‘It’s fabulous...Of course it’s orange. I want orange, I request orange. If you were using a Dulux colour chart, if there was one on there that said tangerine, right at the bottom, the one where you say, “That’s going to be too much for our walls”, it’s not too much for me. Put it on.’

The TV presenter said her addiction to tanning started while she studied history of art at Cambridge.

She said: ‘I’d rented a sunbed for a whole term in tiny halls of residence .... it was so unhealthy when I think back now.’ But the Strictly Come Dancing presenter revealed that she now enlists someone to come to her home to apply her spray tan in a pop-up tent in which she strips off before the procedure.

Acknowledging that she is ‘not very physically inhibited’, Claudia explained, ‘I’m married to a Danish man – he’s never got his clothes on.’

And she went on, ‘I never get on the sunbed now. My body no longer recognises the actual sun.’

Meanwhile, although it is seen as a cardinal sin by skin specialists, Claudia, 46, said she always sleeps with her make-up on.

She added: ‘I’ve never once taken my make-up off before I go to bed.’

Famous for her hairstyle, Claudia also spoke about the benefits of having a ’do that obscures her forehead, and her belief that it will help her avoid anti-ageing cosmetic treatments such as anti-wrinkle injectables. ‘I’ve got a fringe,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t have a fringe I’d have everything done...You hide. You feel sexy with a fringe, you feel naughty with a fringe and also, this is bizarre, you feel, and I know I don’t look it, but you feel quite cool with a fringe’.