I don’t tan. This is not from a healthy-I’m-avoiding-too-much-sun-exposure- approach. This is due to a tragic lack of ability. If I were able to tan I would head out, slather up and turn my hide a nice toasty brown.
My skin tone is more marshmallow than toasty. It isn’t from a lack of trying. In high school I wanted to have a tan for prom so I went every day for two weeks to a tanning salon. They gave me my money back. There was a sense the owner thought I was some kind of albino circus freak. Curse this Irish freckled skin!
Every year, without fail, I am fooled by self tanners. I want to believe that this is the year that with expensive product X I will fool the world into thinking I have a great tan. I have tried them all. I want to look like the models in the ads with the smooth evenly tanned skin. HA! I always end up looking like a marshmallow that wallowed in some orange tinted dye. No one is fooled. It makes me look, if possible, even more pathetic.
I even tried the spray on tan where you enter a booth and suddenly it is if you are in a car wash with dye shooting at you from all angles. What they neglect to mention is that you still have to rub it in and that is where the problem starts. Turns out I have a very uneven rub.
I have a friend from Jamaica who commented “I never get white people, you spend centuries keeping people with brown skin down and then spend all summer trying to be brown.” Easy for her to say what with that perfect year round tan colored skin.
Do you tan?
No, I have the same condition which I inherited from my daughter. I have stopped worrying about it.
Never. I despise skin cancer.
My technique is to stay in the sun until the freckles multiply, completely covering my skin, enabling me to seem tan.
After living in Colorado for the better part of 18 years I don’t stay as perpetually luminscent — the sun is especially strong here. Because of my aversion to melanoma, I use sun screen if I know I’ll be outside. I was once air brushed with a tan at a spa and I turned out somewhat orange and my feet were all wrong. The self tanners are supposed to be pretty good now but the couple of times I tried them, I still ended up streaky except for my heels where the stuff collected and made me look like I had dirty feet and the palms of my hands and wrists, where the stuff was absorbed. I scrubbed my feet and ankles raw with a pumice stone and was still uneven. Now I just pretend I’m into the goth look 😉
I don’t tan, I’d rather avoid those UVA and UVB rays! So don’t worry about it – tan is so overrated.
um…
guilty as charged.
I go nowhere without my tan.
Ha! Like my namesake commenter ::waves to the other Maureen:: I used to get a solid racing stripe of freckles across the middle of my face every summer… Except the very nip of my nose which never stopped burning and peeling so usually had a scab. (Yes, gorgeous child I was.)
My forearms still do the merged freckle thing, but my legs stay white no matter what (unless I’m in the sun more than 20 minutes and then they go red, peel, and go back to white). I’ve given up on trying to tan.
Just think how much younger you’ll look than the rest of us! And I shudder to remember the many times I not only tanned but fried when I was growing up. Remember the iodine/baby oil combination?
p.s. did you know Paris Hilton had her personal tanner come to her house and spray her during her one day of home incarceration? How’s that for desperate for a tan?!