Susan gets a spray tan
It’s 9:30 in the morning and I’m standing naked in front of a stranger who’s holding a hose and a nozzle.
Her job: to give me an airbrush tan, fostering the illusion that my skin occasionally sees light that doesn’t come from a fluorescent bulb.
It’s a pretty tall order.
I stopped tanning 20 years ago, after the doctor started burning bits of skin cancer off my father’s face.
So now I’m habitually pasty.
But Ranko, my dance partner and instructor, told me that I needed to get a tan for our Dancing with the Forsyth County Stars performance on April 9. We wouldn’t want the audience to go blind from the stage lights reflecting off of my shiny, white legs, would we?
So off I went for a spray tan.
I decided to do a dry run, so that I’d know what to expect. And also so that if it went hideously wrong and I ended up looking like an Oompa Loompa, there would be time for it to fade before the show.
After gathering some advice from my Facebook friends – the gist of which was: exfoliate, exfoliate, exfoliate! – I set out for a local tanning salon, ready for a little tropical pampering.
But, as it turns out, there’s nothing tropical about getting a spray tan.
The brown mist that came out of the nozzle and covered my skin was downright chilly. And no matter how much I moved around in the process of making sure I was getting evenly covered in goop, it didn’t get any warmer.
Then, to make it worse, I was left to stand in front of a row of fans blowing cold air onto my skin to dry me off, raising little tanned goosebumps. The only relief came when I was shut into a stand-up coffin of sorts, an upright tanning bed that set the color in a couple of minutes. Finally a little warmth, served with a side of claustrophobia.
Then it was off to get dressed.
I took a look in the mirror. It was me, but better, with a nice, golden glow. No Oompa Loompas in sight.
The technician told me that I’d get about a shade darker by the end of the day, provided that I didn’t do anything to mess up my tan.
She rattled off all the things I shouldn’t do for the next eight hours, most of which involved not getting wet – at all. No sweating, no showering, no washing dishes (hurray!), no washing your hands (boo!), no walking in the rain. And no exfoliating or shaving for a couple of days.
I did as I was told, and by the time I got ready for bed I was, indeed, a shade darker. I liked it. I looked healthier than I had that morning, and about five years younger, which is never a bad thing.
But good things don’t always last.
Twenty-four hours later, my natural pallor is already starting to reassert itself. I’m fading rapidly. My body is rejecting the spray tan.
I still have a bit of color. But not like that first day. I want my tan back and I want it back now.
I can’t wait until the day before the competition, when I can go back to the tanning salon and be nice and brown once again. I’ve already started slathering Jergen’s slow-tanning moisturizing lotion on at night, and I found myself eyeing the self-tanners at the drugstore this morning.
This must be how tanorexics are born.