I’ve just returned from a semi-holiday with a light tan the colour of a doormat. The weather was mixed and windy but there was apparently enough sun to convert my skin into a public event. Friends expressed shock at how I look. Not because the tan was achieved here, but because I dared to get one.
I grew up in south Somerset, not far from the Jurassic coast, proud heart of the UK’s southern tanning belt. My sister hated the sun, wearing large straw hats like sandwich boards foretelling the apocalypse, but my mother and I loved it. Perhaps because of her Assamese ancestry, it took her eight minutes to resemble a grand oak. I took longer, but soon it became our shared pastime. Having internalised tanning as good, I went on the occasional sunbed at university, and at a fashion magazine in my 20s became very into “au-tans”, a dialled-down but-still-existent fake tan for winter. My main goal was aesthetic but I pretended it was also about vitamin D and regulating my sleep cycle.
