Just for the record, I have nothing against tan people. I don’t think they’re gross, and I don’t care if they tan obsessively for vanity, or if that’s just the way their skin happens to be. I wish my legs had a little bit of color; you can see my veins through them. I might have to check out Kyla’s suggestion for Aveda’s sunless tanner.
Sing it on the mountain sister!
And so many of the people who feel compelled to take me to task for my incandescent whiteness are TOTAL STRANGERS. I don’t take it upon myself to inform people that their makeup makes them look like a cheap hooker - or that they could stand to loose a few pounds. I wish they could manage to return the favor in regards to what they see as my appearance flaws.
I, also, do not tan. Not only am I amazingly white, I have rosy red cheeks. This leads a number of people to assume that I can tan, I’m just being stubborn about it. Which leads them to nag me about my incandescently white flesh and leads me to forcibly throttle back the urge to thump them upside the haid.
I avoid the sun. Obsessively. Not only does it cause me to burn almost instantly (not tan - not burn and fade - burn, peel, and reveal freshly white skin like a new piece of paper again to the world), but it turns my hair flagrantly red with nice blond streaks - faugh. Also it hurts my eyes. So I burn like campfire marshmallow and am photosensitive. I do my gardening at dusk.
I’ve had a few truly nasty sunburns - all accidental - and I have a mother who’s fought off two bouts of skin cancer already. So even were I not interested in avoiding another case of cleavage burn (Sunburn of the cleavage is particularly heinous, incidentally. You don’t know what misery is until you’ve sunburned your cleavage - bras are a MISERY with second degree sunburns and I haven’t been able to go braless in almost twenty years), the cancer risk alone would cause me to slather on sunscreen and stay in the shade.
Then that’s a free shot for you. A total stranger deserves no mercy, and you should tee off on them mercilessly, verbally turning them into a gibbering heap. Suggestions include weight, odor, height, fashion sense, orthodontia, hairstyle, and questions of parentage.
Get inventive and have fun!
FaerieBeth, your post reminded me of when I used to live in Arkansas. Every year, once it got warm, I was subject to constant commentary by the tanning divas who insisted that everyone looked better with a tan. (I’m a member of the “burn, peel, and turn white again” club. Trust me, I neither look nor feel better if I slather myself in baby oil and park myself in the sun for hours at a time.) Weirdly enough, now that I live in SoCal, land of the endless summer, my white skin gets lots of compliments.
I wear sunblock and hats in the sun, and now people say “You’re 36?! You look so much younger!” when I tell them how old I am. My guess is that those women who hassled me so much when I was younger about not being tanned aren’t so lucky.
There’s no way I’m going to look like a geriatric porn star’s twat, thanks 
Haven’t seen the sun since 1986 or so…I’m 35 and people think I’m 25. Coco Chanel did not age well. She started this whole tan business…
Tan schman!
I have sle (lupus) and sun exposure causes the disease to flare. I break out in hives and become ill. I cannot wear sunscreen (because I have sle and my skin reacts negatively to most products, I break out in hives and become ill) so when I venture out in the daytime I am covered head to toe. I garden on overcast days, and wear a pretty woven hat my mom picked up in Hawai’i.
I used to tan easily, before developing lupus, although it was never something I worked on. I was just an outdoor kind of person. Now I am very very pale. I have the lupus malar rash, which, if I am not in a flare, is just a flush across my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose. You don’t know how many times after a period of sunny weather I hear “Oh, you certainly got some sun!” It used to bother me a lot, but now I just try to smile in a vague sort of way and change the topic.
I really like being a tall dark haired man with pale skin. I like the sun just fine, but I’ve always got better things to do than lay around on the beach trying to get some sun. Screw that. I have no problem with getting some sun but I’ve seen too many leathery looking brown as a nut folks. Yeah, the skin cancer thing is icky, but I find that the guys I like really like my smooth milky white ass just fine. Cuz it is kinda different, y’know? 
I am amazed so many people have had to deal with this excessive rudeness! Wow… I’m fairly pale and no one (especially not a stranger) has ever felt compelled to comment on my skin tone.
Where did people get the idea that this was OK?
- Daphne
I think your co-workers are incredibly rude, and you should tell them so.
Now, about Vitamin D. For those of you who are avoiding the sun like the plague and slathering on the sunscreen to run from the house to the mailbox and back, are you inhibiting your absorbtion of Vitamin D?
I don’t like to sunbathe. A couple of times when I was in high school for some reason my face swelled up like a balloon after sunbathing. My eyes were swollen like someone had punched me in the face. I don’t know what happened, but my days of laying in the sun baking are long past.
I’d always heard that the small, incidental exposures to sunlight during the course of a normal day were enough to ensure adequate vitamin D.
And yes, my coworkers can be quite rude. It’s like they have a faulty wire in their tact connection, and somedays it just shorts completely out.
Gah. My dad used to do this all the freakin’ time!
My dad is half-Greek, and has very olive skin. I’ve inherited some of that olive skin (though mine is nowhere near as dark as his). I don’t just tan; I tan. And, when I get enough sun to tan, my hair bleaches out a bit. Therefore, my hair and my skin end up being nearly the same color.
This was fine with me until I was about 13 (it wasn’t as though I was trying to tan; but you’re outside a LOT when you’re that age and it’s summer). At that point, I decided that I didn’t want to tan. Ever.
I haven’t tanned since then (though I burned once, when I was in Florida in May and screwed up applying my sunscreen). I think I look better that way. Ironically, my sister has not inherited the olive skin; she’s fair-skinned and blue-eyed. She likes tanning (or at least, she used to; she hasn’t said much about it for a while). We’d go shopping for sunscreen, she’d use the SPF 4 tanning stuff, I’d be looking for SPF of “Yes.” It was hilarious.
Besides, I like to goth out. It’s hard to goth out with a tan. Trust me on this one.
I don’t think it’s vanity to accept yourself the way you are.
LifeOnWry, do you get people IRL criticizing you because they think you’re a tanoholic? I wouldn’t think you do, if you’re not casting the first stone by telling pale people they should tan. However, if you get remarks out of the cloudless blue, then that’s just wrong. Any unsolicited suggestion about someone’s appearance is rude, IMO.
Try calling around to some of your local salons and inquiring about the airbrush tans. They cover better (if the person doing it is good) than the lotions. Or just get the spray-on tans. My MIL was doing airbrushing last year and I got free tans all the time, they looked very natural. But she was very anal about getting the stuff that makes you look TAN not orange.
So when she stopped doing it, she gave me all of the bottled stuff she ordered. But you have to have a pretty strict regimen. Shave in the morning, shower in the evening and exfoliate (use an exfoliating scrub!), apply a light lotion to your rough spots (elbows, wrists, ankles, knees), wait 5 minutes then apply sunless tanner, TIP: make sure you wear gloves, when you’ve completed the rest of your body, take a sponge or a terry applicator and lightly dab the tops of your hands for a natural look, the same can be done for your face, just make sure it won’t clog pores. You’ll have to wait until it soaks in before you put your clothes back on, some only take about 15 minutes, others about 30. Put on some light pj’s, avoid water at all costs, and go to bed. In the morning, shower to wash off the residue and you’ll have a nice light tan! You can repeat consecutively about 2-4 nights in a row for a darker tan, but do NOT exfoliate on those nights. The key to making it last is applying lotion head to toe everyday.
Sorry, got off on a tangent here. I love the sunless tanning stuff. I’m another auburn with pink skin who married into an olive-skinned family. So I get picked on a LOT. Plus, I like the look of a tan, it takes off 10 pounds quite easily and makes you look toned.
Most of me tans in 20 minutes. No really, if I’m out in direct sulight, and say, wearing sandals, for 20 minutes, I will have sandal lines on my feet. I never burn. However, my legs never tan.
Tanning booths are the stupidest things in the world, I think! Wear your shorts and be pale, who cares?
Um…I’m female, and straight, and I find you attractive.
I’ll admit, I used to lay in the sun when I was a teenager for 10 minutes at a time. The sun exposure completely cleared up my backne. More than 10 minutes, though, and I would burn.
Some sun (in small doses) can be beneficial.
I get this from people all the time.
Then I tell them about how going to the funeral of my co-worker Scott, who died at age 32 from melanoma, cured me of the desire to tan.
That usually shuts them up real fast.
There is no such thing as a “healthy tan” turning brown is your skin’s reaction to being injured by the ultraviolet rays of the sun producing melanin for protection. Some people have more melanin to begin with and some produce it more easily and bully for them because they has less of a risk for skin cancer. For the rest of us it’s big hats and sunscreen and umbrellas.
What I don’t get is why making negative remarks about a person’s skin color is somehow OK if they’re pale. These same people wouldn’t dream of making a remark about how a very dark person would look better lighter. Maybe the comeback is “well I’d prefer you ducktape your mouth shut but that’s not going to happen either now is it?”
My response to remarks about my extremely pale skin (and I live in Florida :eek: ) is “I prefer to remain pale and wrinkle free”. People usually don’t have a come back for that one.
Mine is usually something to the effect of:
“If you make it to 40 you’ll be jealous of how beautiful and young I look.”
or
“I’m human, not a Coach bag.”
or
“Tans are just an idication of manual labor.”
or
“Why yes, I SHOULD be tan! How nice of you to care so much. Tell me, how much haved you saved of your money to pay for my chemotherapy?”
or
“You may look beautiful now, but imagine how ugly you’ll be in ten years . . . if you make it that long.”
Usually, if people just look at my next door neighbor, they get my drift. She’s tan all year, but is wrinkly and fried. YUCK!!! Her husband looks 15 years younger than her. Poor guy.
I’m with you. The old biddies in the OP should go fuck themselves.