So we’re deep into summer now. How’s your tan coming along? Got that nice golden bronze from laying out in the sun? Maybe you burned first, then it turned golden for the rest of the summer. And now your olive skin contrasts beautifully against the white pants you’re wearing.
I should be so lucky. I could spend a month at the beach, and come back hardly a shade darker. My only consolation is that I didn’t get sunburned. For January or July, it’s all the same when you’re a Pasty White Guy.
Call it what you like: fair, chalky, clear, ghost-like, luminescent, pale, pallid, pasty, see-through, strawberry, washed-out. Or my favorite: alabaster. My doctor jokingly calls it “Victorian.” Then again, he doesn’t want me getting melanoma, admittedly a much higher risk for people with such a fair hue. Why don’t we tan? Pasty white people have little melanin in our skin. We burn easily, then go right back to being white. My entire family is hopelessly chalky. I’ve never had a tan line in my life – though plenty of red neck.
In an era of sun worshipping, those who are fair are at a noticeable disadvantage. And I mean noticeable. We can’t tan any more than you can jump over a tall building in a single bound. It’s physically impossible. I’ve heard store clerks say, “Dude, you need to get a tan!” Gee, thanks for the condescension. Where can I pick one up? Aisle 9?
You might ask, why not use self-tanning lotion, or go to a tanning booth? I’d rather kiss a Wookiee. Besides the risk of skin cancer, such an attitude buys into the belief that only one type of man can be good looking. Madison Avenue has done its best to define the archetype. I call it the Look. He is dark haired, dark eyed, and olive skinned. He forgot to shave…for the last two days (oops). And yeah, he’s hot.
Skin color is simply a matter of evolution. Yet upon this we place so much racism, cultural and class differences. People who live close to the equator have darker skin that protects them from the sun’s intensity. The opposite is true for people of northern European descent. I lived in Germany five years, and saw firsthand why the people are fair. It was cloudy, drizzly, frosty, hailing, overcast, rainy, snowy and spitting two out of three days in the year. White skin absorbs the sun quickly on those rare days it comes out. The reason? Vitamin D.
Vitamin D is a necessary nutrient. You can drink gallons of milk and take supplements, but you’ll never quite get a proper dose like being in the full sunlight. So getting sun is a careful balance – the need for Vitamin D now, versus skin cancer, basal cells, and leathery skin in the future.
The same thing applies for brown eyes. Those of us with fair eyes have increased sensitivity to sunlight. The worst days are those with thin, opaque clouds that scatter the sunlight in every direction. It’s nearly blinding, so painful the tears stream down your face. When my mom asked her ophthalmologist what she could do about her light sensitivity, the doctor responded, “Come back with brown eyes in your next life.”
Recently a couple in their early 80s sat waiting at the carwash. The man was very fair. He removed his baseball cap – one of those foam caps popular among old men – revealing a bald head with numerous sun spots. And several fresh scabs from where the dermatologist cut out the sins of the man’s youth.
I have a hunch that my generation, Generation X, will look much different when we are in our 80s. At least I hope. Yet the short-term desire for a tan wins over the long-term health consequences. Sun worshipping continues, despite the depletion of the ozone layer and the dramatic rise of skin cancer (Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world. It’s a sun-drenched country occupied by Englishmen). There are still a shocking number of people at the beach who don’t put on sunscreen.
Not so long ago, swarthiness meant you were a laborer, one who worked outside for your bread. The elite, on the other hand, could afford to stay inside. Being fair was fashionable. In fact, for much of recorded human history that was the case.
In the erotic Song of Songs from the Bible, the peasant girl is embarrassed that she is so tan from laboring outside. “Dark am I, yet lovely,” she tells her lover apologetically. “Do not stare at me because I am dark, because I am darkened by the sun. My mother’s sons were angry with me and made me take care of the vineyards.”
Blonde wigs became fashionable in the Roman Empire, as the swarthy Romans copied the barbarian Germanic tribes. This fascination with fairness carried over into the Renaissance. Have you ever taken a look at Renaissance art, and noted what the paintings have in common? The Holy Family – Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus – and all the saints, angels, cherubim and seraphim are portrayed as fair-skinned and blonde. The olive skinned Italians held light features as an artistic ideal.
Now the last time I checked, Jesus was a Jew living in the Middle East. Do you really think he looked blonde and blue eyed? He was Semitic, for Christ’s sake! I highly doubt he looked even remotely European.
Giovanni Boccaccio, the Medieval author of
The Decameron, wrote scathingly that Florentine women would do anything to become blonde: wearing wigs, dousing their hair with lemon juice, even spending hours bleaching their hair in the sun (but without exposing their faces). And we all know that Queen Elizabeth I dabbed lead-based white makeup on her face. Ghostly white was the Look of her day – and it was hip.
Then one day I had a revelation: some people are actually attracted to whiteness. It’s the timeless lesson that opposites attract. How well light and dark are together, like chocolate sauce with vanilla ice cream. And everyone wants what they don’t have. In Argentina, most of the upper middle-class and wealthy women have blonde hair, even though they’re of Italian and Spanish descent. Their blondness comes from a bottle.
Being fair was once an aesthetic ideal, but it certainly isn’t today – thanks to skimpier beachwear and Coco Chanel, two trends that date from the 1920s. Smaller swimsuits show a lot more skin, and fishbelly white suddenly became gross. Chanel started the craze for the “healthy tan.” (Healthy? More like cancerous and wrinkled.)
Today there aren’t many well-known pasty white men, other than former Pope Benedict XVI, probably the chalkiest Holy Father in history. House Speaker John Boehner has a suspicous orange tan that makes you suspect he regularly visits a tanning booth (puh-leaze! He works indoors all day long. When does he have time to be out in the sun?). Hollywood favors actors who are tall, dark, and handsome.
My ticket to fame is to create a line of cartoon superheroes: the PastyPuff Girls. They’ll blind their enemies with their brilliant luminescence. “Take that, Dark Vader!” says Buttermilk as she wields her SFP 30 dispensing wand. “You’ll never seduce me to the Dark Side of the Force! Then again, it couldn’t hurt to try. Would you rub this sunscreen on my back?”
There are some advantages to the Victorian look, especially in our youth-obsessed culture. So maybe we pasty white folk don’t have that “healthy tan” – but at least we won’t be prematurely aged. Sunscreen and moisturizer are my secret weapons. No need for Botox. And guess what? I still get carded occasionally when I buy alcohol – and I’m in my mid-forties.
Who says extreme fairness can’t be attractive? There is more than one kind of beauty. Can’t we appreciate the entire spectrum, from light to dark? We pasty people should embrace our pastiness. Repeat after me: I will wear shorts! I will not put on bronzer, self-tanning lotion or use a tanning booth! I will wear my sunscreen and reapply! I will not have body issues over being the whitest person at the beach!
The rest of you have been warned: put on your sunglasses or prepare to be blinded.
Garrett Peck
