Tonnes of Tanning

As a girl born with olive skin I am very lucky, in my opinion, that I tan very easily and don’t tend to burn. I say this makes me lucky because I am completely obsessed with being tanned. This is an odd obsession to have as someone who has grown up in Scotland my entire life, basically meaning that the tanning opportunities at home have been very scarce. I crave holidays, mainly for the fact that I know as soon as I step off the plane I start bronzing up. Over the very very long British winter there has obviously been very little tanning time in the last 6 months, which has meant that I have started using sun beds. I know, I never thought I would be that girl, but I couldn’t handle the paleness any longer and for me, being tanned makes me feel ten times better about myself and a lot more confident.

But where has this incessant need to be tanned come from? I’m certain that I am not the only one who loves the sun kissed look but at what point did everyone become so obsessed with altering the colour of their skin? There was the obvious oompa loompa phase at some point in the early 2000’s for teens and twenties, where if you look back on old photos you can tell by the colour of everyone’s faces that this phase hit the UK like I tidal wave. I feel it has come about over the last five or so years that teenage girls and even boys feel the need to darken the colour of their skin to look better. And the more one person does it, the more their mates will, then everyone just keeps getting more and more tanned but you feel as if nothing is changing. Sound familiar?

The cost of this obsession causes a major dent as well, a pound a minute on a sunbed or £15 for a bottle of tan that lasts a day, comes off when someone spills a drink on you on a night out, turns your sheets brown and smells like biscuits or, if you are exceptionally wealthy, a few hundred pounds for a quick trip to a sunny country and back.

Not to mention the massive detrimental health effects of some of these methods. Whether it is sun beds or just tanning naturally outside, you are taking major risks in terms of your health. If it wasn’t bad enough that I have become a serial sun bed user, I also rarely wear sun cream on holidays either. It doesn’t matter how many times my mum tells me it’s very bad for me, I always put the thought of maximum bronzing first.

Is it the media? Probably, I mean they get blamed for 99% of problems facing image issues anyway so we’ll just go with that. Maybe it’s reality T.V. and the ‘TOWIE tan’ that became famous back when The Only Way is Essex was at its peak. The most famous family of my generation, The Kardashians, maybe they had some influence on the increase in the orangutan look? You can point the finger in any direction you like, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a craze that will not be dying out any time soon