It's only skin deep!

There is a shade of brownness beyond which I do not go.

I do recall a summer trip to Scandinavia where a combination of constant good weather (apart from the damp city of Oslo) and malnutrition (food was far too expensive to buy on a regular basis) meant that I did get browner that I had ever been before.   
There was also the three-week trip to the Isles of Greece (where burning Sappho etc etc – though I didn’t actually go to that particular island) where I backpacked my way from Athens to Crete, staying along the way in some of the most basic, unfinished and insalubrious places that little money could buy.   

My accommodation was so Spartan (so to speak) that it did not afford the luxury of a mirror in what could laughingly be called the bathrooms, and it was only in Crete at the end of my journey that I actually saw my reflection and did not recognize the coloured gentlemen that looked back at me.

But normally, I go brownish and stay at a level of discolouration that, while darker than most of my white skinned compatriots, is nowhere near the golden depth that I seek.

In the past I peeled.  Didn’t we all?  A fortnight’s holiday in the foreign sun and a desperate necessity to get some sort of colour for our money, meant that we stayed too long too soon on the sunny beach and then suffered a shower at the end of the day.  As one of my friends so eloquently put it, “If, at the end of the day, the shower doesn’t hurt – then you haven’t sunbathed properly!”  And you actually looked forward to the first peel, because the skin under your shedding would stay that colour for your return home!

As I now live in where I used to go for holidays, my strategy is a little different.  I ALWAYS use sun tan lotion – and not (definitely not) the stuff that is only one step removed from cooking oil.  The minimum I use is factor 30, though I do deviate to factor 20 sometimes when the flesh is weak.  When I think that I used to use factor 5 or even factor 0, I shudder!

So, I am more sensible, but I do not seem to get returns for my carefulness.  Where is the deep “honey skin” that has ‘ere been my quest?   

Where indeed!

My mother was light skinned, fair haired and blue eyed.  My father was swarthier.  My mother was a sun worshipper, though in Britain she often said that the only place that she ever felt truly warm was in a Turkish Bath!  My father tanned naturally, but moderately.  I am more naturally dark skinned than my mother, but I seem to lack my father’s ease at getting a reasonable colour.

And what, after all, is the worth of all that effort?  Skin cancer is an ever-lurking threat and the advantages of Vitamin D, or at least the quantity of it that is required for a healthy life, is more than probably gained by reasonable outdoor life rather than soaking up the sun as an end in itself.

I am also well aware that white people trying to go brown is a relatively recent activity – at least by choice.  Up until the early years of the twentieth century white skin was the more highly prized; brown skin merely indicating that you worked outdoors and were one of the great unwashed.  But the ‘healthy outdoor types’ managed to equate brown skin (on white people) with good living and harmony with life.

In any discussions of skin colour and the vast industry that encourages the acquisition of a tint, I am reminded of the back page of a magazine that I subscribed to in college: The New Internationalist.  This magazine was the child of the ‘militant’ wing of Oxfam: Third World First or 3W1.  I signed a standing order for the magazine over fifty years ago and the money still dribbles into Oxfam’s funds – though the magazine has long since departed.  Or, at least, they don’t send me it anymore!

Anyway, one of the more memorable back covers of the magazine showed two advertisements.  The first was for a proprietary sun tan oil, while the second was a Nigerian (?) skin lightning advert.  Of course, apart from the obvious irony in such a juxtaposition, there was also the fact that the first advert had ‘white’ people and the second ‘black’ people and the ‘white’ people in the first advert were actually darker than the ‘black’ people in the second!  I have not been able to find the original advert, but have illustrated a contemporary one!

One doesn’t need to labour the obvious idiocy in the activity, or the social and political overtones, but I have to admit that I feel healthier when I am tanned.

Yes, I know that my ‘feelings’ are constructed by a vast and all-powerful advertising industry that cares little for my well being and everything about the bottom line – but, even knowing how manipulated I have been and am being, I shall continue to laze in the sun in the hope that this year will be the one in which the ‘honey skin’ of my longing becomes visual reality.

It's a goal of sorts!