If you are like me, you’ll agree that we did a lot of foolish things when we were young and in the midst of desperately trying to grow up. We followed trends that made absolutely no sense and took risks that I look back on now with a mix of horror and bewilderment.
The 1970s themselves were full of crazy fads that we accepted as ‘modern’ rather than as the senseless nonsense they were. Those were the days of appliances coming in avocado, harvest gold, or that oppressive dark brown. It was a time of shag carpeting, beanbag chairs, waterbeds, and lava lamps. We were so easy to impress back then that all they had to do was show us how blacklights worked and we were able to amuse ourselves for several years. Everyone was eager to do “The Bump” on the dance floor and we bought into ‘jogging’ to keep us in shape. We wore platform shoes, leisure suits, tube tops, and bellbottoms, and made sure our hair was cut into either a shag, had feathered bangs, or for those who were lucky enough, an afro. Coooooool!
The 1970s was also the decade in which suntanning was widely embraced by white people. Suntanning on purpose had been viewed with distain until fashion-following ladies in France adopted it during the 1920s. It seems to have been a combination of skin-colour-envy of the captivating singer/dancer Josephine Baker, and of an accidental sunburn-turned-to-tan that fashion designer Coco Chanel brought back with her from a holiday on the French Riviera. She was then quoted in Vogue magazine as saying that having a golden tan was tres chic. Her adoring fans were quick to buy in. Everyone else took a bit longer.
Spending time in the sun—sunbathing—already had a growing healthy vibe as various doctors and scientists had been working to link the benefits of Vitamin D with the healing of a number of illnesses since the 1600s, but once the 1920s fashion industry turned its eye on suntanning, it was never able to look away and its popularity slowly started to grow.
Commercial sunscreen wouldn’t be market ready until 1946 when an Austrian chemist put out a sunblock under the name Gletscher Crème. We would come to figure out in time that it had an SPF of 2. There was obviously room for work to be done.
One very vivid memory I have from my own pre-sunscreen youth is gleaned from a March Break trip to Florida in a highway bus packed with other teenagers. I was with 2 other ghostly pale friends who snubbed common sense just as much as I did and, in an attempt to tan enough in a single day to look as though we’d lived our entire lives on a beach in the Caribbean, we got to the shore early in the day. We then passed a slippery bottle of baby oil between us, slathering as much of it onto our pasty white Canadian skin as was decent to show. A gentleman of a certain age, observing our antics, offered us the valuable advice that if we insisted on suntanning and using oil on our skin, we would fry like bacon. After a beat, all three of us grabbed for the bottle in a frantic attempt to layer on as much as our skin could possibly hold. It worked a treat. We were sunburnt and sun sick by nightfall. Fried just like bacon—prophesy fulfilled. I have several other memories of sunbathing in the company of one or the other of those friends. We were very slow learners.
When I was in my early teens, my doctor, who was a bona fide crackpot and who should never have been given a medical license in the first place (if he even HAD one), decided that he should treat my acne, which was easily within the limits of every other teen at the time, with ultraviolet therapy. I went to his office regularly to be sat facing into a sun lamp. This, he assured me, would clear that pimply face of mine right up! Instead, I continued to enjoy the embarrassing benefits of teenaged skin well into my early 20s. What I WAS gifted with through these repeated ‘treatments’ was a sun-burnt face after each and every appointment. Eventually, my parents said, “Moving on” and the treatments were ended. Thinking back over those years, getting systematically sun burnt in hope of ending up with clear skin might have been the LEAST odd therapeutic remedy that this doctor put me through. I will mention that in the hands of qualified professionals, ultraviolet rays are still used in the treatment of some very challenging skin diseases. But, quality matters!
Tanning beds were invented in 1975 by a German scientist and the idea somehow caught on like wildfire in North America by the end of that decade. Of course I tried it. I was in my early 20s and working a job that kept me indoors during daylight hours, so I decided that I should get my ‘healthy summer suntan’ from the tanning salon located next door to the gym I attended (the one with the great bathrooms). I only lasted for a few sessions because even I could see that it made virtually no difference to my overall pallor.
I have always seemed to buy into the idea of changing my blue/white skin into a warmer, browner version, but I finally gave up trying to suntan it into submission and started listening to the professionals.
These days, I toy with self-tanners periodically and while I have a line on one that doesn’t turn me the fluorescent orangey colour that has found fame within certain political circles over the last few years, I’m just too darn lazy to keep at it for any length of time. The EFFORT it takes to transform me in a bronzed goddess of breath-taking proportions, is just out of reach for my very real life. I have come to accept that I am able to carve out one slathering of lotion per day before I lose interest, and these days that one layer is ALWAYS going to be sunscreen.
I cringe at the callousness with which my skin has been subjected to the many forms of UVA/UVB rays over the years—some through ignorance, most through vanity. I am grateful that my lack of patience to hold still long enough to get a suntan, has been able to overpower my dreams of being golden brown, during most of my fruitless attempts. I feel as though my inherent shortcomings have saved me from myself once again.
At least for this long!
