Woman reveals she was spray-tanned on her front six times like Ross in Friends: ‘That episode was a warning’

A woman has amused her followers after revealing that the infamous episode from Friends where Ross is spray-tanned multiple times on his front “can happen in real life”.

In the iconic episode, David Schwimmer’s character attempts to get a spray tan, but accidentally sprays his front twice after counting to five in Mississippi. After realising his mistake, he attempts the spray tan booth again, at which point he again ends up spraying his front twice.

In a recent TikTok, a woman named Eleanor, who goes by the username @eleanorkishere, revealed that the unfortunate mishap isn’t just a sitcom plot, as it actually happened to her.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there is no way that, in that episode of Friends, when Ross goes and gets a spray tan and he accidentally gets triple-sprayed, can that happen in real life,” Eleanor began the video. “I’m here to tell you that it can. And it did.”

According to Eleanor, the mistake occurred after she’d decided to get her first spray tan in 2018, with the TikToker explaining how she’d been instructed by the tanning salon employee how to navigate the tanning booth.

“The lady on the desk said: ‘No problem, that’s absolutely fine. Basically, what you need to do is you go into the booth, you wait for the voice to tell you to turn around. You wait for the voice. Not until you hear the voice do you turn around,’” Eleanor recalled, adding that the woman had made the message “very clear” and that Eleanor herself was “very serious about taking this information on my journey to embark into the land of the tan”.

However, according to Eleanor, after the machine sprayed her front, she waited “patiently” for it to tell her to turn around, but it did not and eventually began spraying her front with tanning solution again.

“There is a part of me that knows this is going devastatingly wrong, but there is still also a hopeful child within me thinking that maybe this is normal,” Eleanor continued, before recalling how the machine started spraying the front of her body again, for the third time.

After spraying her front three times, Eleanor said that the machine finally spoke, at which point it informed her: “Spray tan finished.”

In the video, Eleanor noted that she’d initially thought the spray tan could possibly spread to the back of her body as well, but that she’d notified the tanning salon employee at the front desk to be sure.

However, upon informing the employee that she’d been sprayed up and down three times by the booth, Eleanor said she was told that it was her fault, as she must not have heard the booth telling her to turn around.

“She proceeds to tell me that it is my fault, that the voice definitely came in and I just didn’t hear it, and it was my own choice that I got sprayed six times, and that the worst thing I could do right now would be to wash it off,” Eleanor recalled, while she was informed that the “best thing to do” would be to get sprayed six times on her back.

She continued: “So in I went to get sprayed a further six times, 12 in total. Like a lamb to the slaughter,” before sharing a video taken  of her resulting extremely dark tan. “This was five days later.”

The video has since been viewed more than 592,000 times, with viewers sharing their amusement over the story.

“That episode was a warning,” one person joked, while another said: “This is the best!! I guess this was the one where you needed to count Mississippi-lessly.”

Someone else added: “​​You’re not even going to be laughing next time you see the episode. Only crying.”

Others were more upset with the receptionist’s response to the situation, with another viewer writing: “I’m so mad at the receptionist for you. I hope they at least comped round two,” to which Eleanor responded: “They did not. I had to pay full price.”

In a follow-up video about the mishap, Eleanor, who is a singer, recalled how it had happened the day before she was meant to perform a show, and that she had asked the receptionist for reassurance only to realise she was “already awfully orange” by the time she reached her car.

“I sit in my car. I glance into the mirror. I see my reflection looking back at me. And I am already awfully orange,” she recalled laughing.

In the clip, Eleanor then explained how rage had started to “bubble inside [her]” and that she had decided “this is finally the moment I stand up for myself”.

According to the TikToker, this meant that she asked to speak to the manager about getting a refund. However, she explained that this didn’t go the way she wanted it to, as the manager claimed that she had turned the machine off manually to get “free spray tans”.

“The manager is refusing a refund. He is blaming me. He is angry at me. And this is the moment. This is the moment that I decide that no one is going to f**k with me,” Eleanor recalled.

Rather than continue arguing with the manager, Eleanor said that she instead walked up to the drink refrigerator in the tanning salon, took three vitamin waters and walked out.

“Not only am I orange but I’m also a thief now at this point,” she said. She concluded the clip revealing that, after some time, her anger subsided and “guilt” set in, at which point she called the tanning salon and gave them her bank details to pay for the drinks. However, she did note that she wrote a Yelp review for the salon.

In the comments, viewers expressed their gratitude to Eleanor for sharing the further amusing details about the incident, with one person writing: “This keeps getting better.”

“Should have taken six drinks, one for each spray,” someone else joked.

Overall, Eleanor told Newsweek that the spray tan “stayed with me for a powerful three weeks” and that she’d “exfoliated off an entire layer of my skin” in an effort to remove it.

The Independent has contacted Eleanor for comment.