Rant Alert - The Tan Craze

     It's that time of year again, the trees are flowering, the grass starts greening up, the daffodils are popping up everywhere...and suddenly everyone thinks they need to become seven shades darker.

     I've alway had a problem with the tan craze. For several reasons. One, I don't understand why pale skin is unattractive. It's natural, it's pretty to me, it goes with the natural hair and eye and complexion coloring God gave you. For hundreds of years, it was highly unattractive to ruin your complextion by tanning yourself. Creamy pale skin was the desired thing, and women went to great lengths to preserve theirs. Think about your classic beauties. Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe. Those women weren't bronzed up, they were creamy skinned and still are considered lovely.

    


     Two, I've always been pale, and not necessarily by choice. I can't physically tan, and a lot of my family members share this quality. We're pale by necessity. If we try to get out in the sun, even with nuclear SPF sunscreen, we turn bright red, and get painfully sunburnt. The kind where you turn purple and people look at you with pity.

After all this suffering, we don't turn to a nice toasty brown like most people. We get blisters, peel, and go right back to white. Maybe with an added freckle or two. If we try anything fake like lotion or spray tan, it either looks horribly fake or takes so many applications that it's almost not worth the effort.



     Three, it's expensive. How much does laying on the tanning bed cost? Or keeping up spray tans? Even if you go with tanning lotion, to get the good stuff it's ten or more dollars a bottle. I can't see myself paying for that, when I know it's just going to go away and I have to re-do it, or I have to keep doing it constantly. It's really like an addiction you have to feed.



     Four, and most important, it's just plain not great for you. Tanning beds, staying in the sun, they're killing your skin. Even if you escape getting skin cancer or something else, your skin is dying and aging faster, and by the time you're fifty you look ten years older.

     I'm not just spouting junk I've heard or read from crazy internet articles. I've had people in my family get cancer from that and end up passing away from it, and they would be the first to tell you that being tan and staying in the sun isn't all it's hyped up to be.



     As a teen, I resented a little the fact that I couldn't lay on the tanning bed like my friends, and that I was always the glowing white girl among all my tan friends. But as I get older I appreciate much more my mom being so strict, and I like my white skin.
     Our compromise when I was a fussing teenager about not being able to lay was that I could lay for three months before I got married, simply to be just a little darker than my wedding dress :) I tried spray tanning to see if that would work instead, but on such a pale person, going drastically tan in one afternoon looks so strange, and I'm scared it'd end up rubbing off on my pretty white dress. Even though I'm old enough to make up my own mind, I'm content to stick with my mom's and my old compromise. To me, my wedding is worth a little extra effort, and if I'm going to the extra lengths with my hair and makeup and all that already, I'm okay with making that compromise too.

     I wish we could get back to the notion of beauty as a simpler concept than what our society has hyped it up to be. Beauty isn't so much makeup you don't look like yourself anymore, it isn't huge flashy jewelry, it isn't revealing or tight or expensive clothing or if your shoes have six inch heels, it's not the designer label on your purse, it's not whether you have brown eyes or blue or green, or whether you have perfectly highlighted hair. Beauty is also not fat, nor is it skinny. Neither of those words have any place in determining beauty, but that's another blog entirely. Beauty comes from within first, and it illuminates the outside. Beauty is taking pride in your appearance and knowing that you feel good about yourself. And I promise, once you do that, other people will notice too.