Commentary:
Forget ‘sunless sizzle,’ tanning isn’t all that

FlipSide illustration by LYDIA LOWE/Home-schooled

By Lydia Lowe
Home-schooled

I’m pale. Really pale. Like, I glow in more than the dark pale. Put me next to Dracula and he looks like a California surfer boy. OK, maybe I’m not that pale, but the word “tan” would never be used to describe me.

There was a time when I wasn’t so crazy about this whole white as the driven snow look. The fact that others were constantly sticking their bronzed forearms next to my pale, freckled ones and saying “Hey! Even I’m tan next to you!” was not a source of enjoyment for me.

I tried going without sunscreen on trips to the beach and laying out for 15-20 minute intervals on a regular basis. I always either burned to a crisp or remained unchanged (not counting the new freckles I inevitably got). After the burns I sometimes got a light tan, so then I was only seven or eight shades lighter than everybody else, as opposed to the usual 10.

No, I never truly achieved that much-coveted tan.

So I gave up. I embraced my paleness.

I now slather on the sunscreen and admire my totally tan-line free shoulders (a nice feature that comes with the proper application of SPF 50). By some freak occurrence, I got a dark-for-me tan a few summers ago, and the two times I’ve been burnt since then, I tanned afterwards. But even with the knowledge that I could tan, I don’t.

Although there’s the truth that exposing yourself to UVA and UVB rays until your skin looks like toast is bad for you and ups your cancer risk phenomenally, that’s not really the reason. I do want to take care of my skin (feeling like the interior of a luxury car when I’m 40 isn’t one of my goals in life), but mostly I just have no desire to be brown. It’s kind of my subtle version of a fashion statement.

Think about it. Fashion and all of its many gurus have maintained for the past 50 years that tan is the way to be, even though the fact that tanning is harmful came out close to two decades ago.

“We know sun exposure is unhealthy,” they say, “but the sun-kissed look is just so irresistible!”

And so forcing your skin to produce more melanin than it naturally would has become really cool. Additionally, your skin can only be bared if it’s not in its naturally low-melanin state. Why is that? Who decided that skin tone is a key factor in how fashionable you are? Does that not seem wrong to anyone else?

This commentary started a month or two ago as a simple idea. I thought that one of my many nerdy attributes — skin that’s distinctly not tan — could prove to be humorous article material. But after the piece “Sunless sizzle: Why teens use artificial tanners” in October’s FlipSide magazine, I simply couldn’t help myself.

“Being a teenage girl is hard enough without being pale.” Are you kidding me? What, exactly, is so terrible about being white if you were born white? Or, as a friend put it, why is that minorities are the only ones allowed to have racial pride?

Don’t get me wrong, I have no personal vendetta against tan people. In fact, many of my friends are actually quite a bit darker than I am. But for most of them, this is just what occurs when they step outside for a while; they don’t go out of their way to look like this.

The majority of the population is naturally going to be a little farther down the skin tone spectrum than someone of my pale-skinned descent. And, really, that’s what this is all about: nature.

People constantly talk of diversity, but it’s like half of the female population has forgotten that a diverse palette also includes white. It is so past time to wake up.

Were you born pale? Do you have to work really hard to obtain and maintain a tan? Then give it up, sister. Trust me; it makes life a lot easier.

Despite what the fashion magazines say, paleness doesn’t necessarily mean looking sickly or ghost-like. And I’m definitely not saying everyone needs to look like me. (Proponents of tanning are doing enough with the whole cookie-cutter idea.) Rather, this is a rallying cry: being a teenage girl is hard enough without feeling like you have to be tan to look good!

Please abolish this extremely old-fashioned idea. Celebrate diversity and show off your God-given skin tone.