Saturday, February 7, 2009

Where's your tan?

"Hey Kathy, where's your tan?" was the question I was asked by my friend Harry W only one day after returning from a week on Maui. "I am tan!" was my response.

It's really difficult to get a tan when you slather yourself from head to toe in SPF 50. But it's even more difficult to get a tan if your skin starts out being the color of parchment paper. The only person I've ever seen with a complexion paler than mine was an albino girl who I met in college.

I was explaining to my friend Monica at lunch the other day (who also asked, "Where's your tan?"), that when I am at my "most" tan, I am still slightly lighter than a light-skinned Italian. The difference is that I will have freckles, but the Italian will not.

When I was in high school, my locker was next to a boy who I once held hands with in junior high - but I didn't want to "go steady" with him and he resented it. Every single school day, for four years, he greeted me with, "Hi Ghost", referring of course to my translucent skin.

When you're a teenager and you're just a little bit insecure about your looks and it's the mid-80s with the perils of skin cancer yet to be taken seriously-- you want to be tan like everyone else. You don't want to be a ghost.

Some of the things that I did to myself included turning myself a putrid shade of orange with chemicals from a bottle and baking myself to the color of a lobster in a tanning bed.

I remember arguing with Monica (who has beautiful golden-brown skin) about going to the outdoor pool in the summer. On my tan-quest, I wanted to go to the outside pool to get burned and freckled. Monica's quest was different from mine - she wanted to go to the indoor pool so that she didn't get any darker. Go figure. (Monica, if you're reading this I hope you don't mind me giving away your childhood secrets!)

I think the turning point for me and my search for a tan came when I went to Hawaii for Christmas break with my family. We were in Hawaii for two weeks, and I dedicated a part of every day to lying in the sun trying to get some color. I was so thrilled the day we left, because I was absolutely the darkest I have ever been in my life. I couldn't wait to get back to see the pasty faces of all my friends who had stayed in the frozen tundra.

While we waited for our flight to board, I went into the airport shop and bought something to eat. As I was at the register, the saleswoman reached over to me, touched my arm, looked at me quite sincerely and said, "Don't worry Honey, by the time you leave you'll have a tan."

Shock. Horror. Shame. Devastation. Self-pity. Hopelessness.

I can't remember if I burst into tears in front of her or waited until I got out of the shop. Needless to say it hurt. A lot. It was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to me at the time, but now I think it's absolutely hysterical. In the end, it made me realize that it didn't matter what I did, I was never going to have the lovely golden-brown skin that I so coveted.

So now I don't really bother, because, what's the point? I've been burned too many times to want to ever take the chance of it happening again, so I wear SPF 40, 50, 60 or whatever it takes. Unfortunately, I also make mistakes, so I do sometimes get burned and peel and feel miserable about it.

But the point is that I have fair skin, and I will always have fair skin. I can't change it. If I'm not careful I will burn and if I am careful I will have a lot of freckles. If you're far enough away or if you squint a little the freckles might blur together and give the appearance of a tan, but I know that's not what it is.

Science has come a long way since I was 15 years old, and getting a tan from a bottle is better than it used to be. They've fixed the orange problem, but they haven't done anything about the smell. I'll admit that a couple of times a year I get a little vain and resort to self-tanner products. However, I just can't keep it going because I can't take the smell. I suffer through it for about a week and then I can't stand it anymore, so it just fades away again.

I actually did this for the Maui trip a few weeks ago. I decided to get a spray-tan before we left. My reasoning for this was not entirely selfish, however. In fact it was rather altruistic. The reason that I got a spray-tan before I went to Hawaii last month was to save the eyesight of the people of Maui.

Truth.

Here's my reasoning. My skin is white. White reflects. Hawaii is VERY sunny. The Hawaiian sun hitting my skin will be reflected into people's eyeballs, and they will go blind. Ergo I must have a spray-tan. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I know, I know - brilliant logic.

Anyway, I got the spray-tan. It smelled bad, but looked pretty good... for about 3 days. Then it started to fade away... unevenly.

Yeah. It was gross. All the places that were rough (knees, ankles, elbows) were still really dark, but the rest of me was getting lighter and lighter. After a while it just got funny. I left Hawaii lighter than the day I arrived. I'm probably the only person to ever have done that.

So it just comes back to the same thing over and over: I don't tan.

Accept it and move on. What is it they say, "Love the skin you're in"?

Yep. Got it!

1 comment:

BeastGP said...

FWIW I thought this was a really well-written post. I enjoyed reading it.