Definitely NOT my cousin... but you get the idea
So the family, assembled around two long tables and dishes of lasagna, held a hands-up poll to see if she could be persuaded to lay off the fake bake for a two-week holiday in sunny Spain, where she could (theoretically) achieve a real tan. You know, the kind that peels and gives you wrinkles. The kind that natural redheads (even ones with dyed gank-brown hair) just don’t get. Everyone voted for her to ditch it, bar me. “Thanks, Rosie!” she smirked, looking to me as the bastion of style and good taste at the far end of the table. She’ll spend the next fortnight with streaky-smeared tan clotted across her back as she prances around a beach in Nerja in a bikini, and it will be all my fault.
I tried fake tan myself, way back when I was a child and then again as a sexually ambitious twentysomething. Unhappy times! But I spent my teenage years looking pale and uninteresting and wearing men’s clothes. Torn jeans and check shirts and baggy jumpers. I couldn’t find ladies’ shoes to fit my size eight feet. My hair hung in lank, frizzy chunks around my beetroot-red, perpetually mortified face. I was the antithesis of style.
Our family went on a two-week holiday to Spain when I was a little younger than Em is now. “Is it a boy or a girl?” the waiter asked my parents, pointing to me. “It’s so hard to tell, these days”. I was 16. I didn’t have the confidence to show my skin, freckled and pale, nor did I have the confidence to wear tan, or make-up, or clothes that fit me. UGLY. And any comment anyone made on how I looked, however well-intentioned, only served to confirm my low opinion of myself.
I don’t know when the change kicked in. Around the time I asked the hairdresser to cut off all my hair, I think. I’d had enough of being mistaken for my friend Philip, who was a “grunger” and also slouched and wore check shirts (sometimes two at a time). “It’s very gamine” said the hairdresser, who looked like she might cry. She’d never cut all of a teenage girl’s hair off before.
Like a new couch showing up a dowdy set of curtains, my haircut meant I needed to change how I dressed. If I wanted boys to fancy me (and I so desperately did, and still do) then I should try to stop dressing like one. I did, and it worked. I got a boyfriend and (in what was to be one of the highlights of my romantic life as a teenager) even proved so desirable that another boy asked me to dump my boyfriend and go out with him instead. I declined his kind offer and a year later he took to wearing skirts and blouses to school. So, for once, did I.
To this day I am surprised that people think of me as being feminine. “Do you mean fat?” I say, and they get cross. I haven’t left my “fat” self sitting on a bench somewhere, swaddled in check and denim. I get up in the mornings, wash, sometimes even shave, dress her in skirts and dresses and send her out to make the best of what she’s got (big eyes and small but lovely diddies, apparently). Em’s fake tan probably smells better than most of my check shirts did, and I’m confident that she’ll grow out of it and into her own skin eventually. It might take a haircut or a holiday or a hot, passionate affair with a cross-dressing goth, but she’ll get there.
Rosie lives and works in Dublin, and www.spanishexposition.
I love this post.
When I was a teenager I also wore battered jeans, check shirts, Doc martens and had mad hair and a shiny face that I did nothing with. When I went to college I discovered that while there were some people like me, most of my peers wore clothes that were, well, normal. Skirts, trousers, blouses, dresses, indigo jeans that clung where they were supposed to cling, nothing outlandish, they just looked nice. They kindly included me in conversations about which moisturiser I used (I’ve never had a spot, I’ve good skin thanks to my beautiful mother and her excellent genes) and what my skincare regime was, looking horrified when I said ‘er, hot water in the shower’. I kinda copped on then that it was ok to brush my hair now and again away from my face to show off the good skin. And that a slick of lipgloss wouldn’t go astray! Am still not into fashion or beauty really but I at least look presentable and happy when I leave the house!
I would probably have put up my hand to vote for her to get rid of the fake tan but your explanation of why you didn’t makes me realise I shouldn’t have. We all go through these phases of adopting different fashions and modes of appearance until we finally (and hopefully) discover a sense of ourselves that makes us feel happy and comfortable.
(And hasn’t everyone experimented with fake tan? I’m shivering at the memories of my own run-ins with the stuff!)
Initially I just felt sorry for her because it felt like everyone was ganging up on her. It was only thinking about it afterwards that I decided I was Right All Along. It’s how I tend to justify all of my decisions (for better or for worse).
And I love you, Annie. I wonder would our teenage selves have gotten on, or would we have been jealous of one another’s check shirts, freckles and shit hair?
How many holes in your Docs, Karen? I had a pair of shoes, when boots were all the rage. FML, I believe they say.
Not holes as such, though they were well lined and creased and distressed at the toe. They WERE ox blood red though. Beat that!
At least you HAD shit hair – I had NO hair. I was meant to look like Sinead O’Connor. I didn’t.
Yesterday I cracked up a friend of mine (originally from Australia) by letting her know that the decidedly pale colour of my arms was me WITH fake tan on – otherwise I’d be the blue-white colour of skimmed milk. Maybe your cousin might think about a lighter shade rather than going cold turkey altogther?
As a younger teenager than your cousin I didn’t like my red hair either, I went the other way though with highlights. Mostly though I’ve been glad to be a redhead and regret the way it needs a bit of help now.
Yay Rosie, I’m so happy to read you here!! Love the post, and not just saying that as a fanatic SpanEx fan….(I can say that, right? You slipped in FML
More Posts, I yell, More Posts! And I would *love* a passionate affair with a cross dressing goth. As a sulky teen in Co. Wicklow, that was all I dreamt about. Brian from Placebo, etc.
In some Asian countries, products like “Fair and Lovely” are sold to lighten skin. In Ireland fake tan is sold to darken skin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustan_Unilever#Skin_lightening_creams
Why is this? Is there some kind of generally preferred skin colour, neither too dark nor too light? Could it just be because people tend to be attracted to what is different and exotic? Or are cosmetic companies trying to convince people to be miserable in their own skin to create excuses for products? It seems a strange phenomenon to me.
In China my guide warned me that eating soy sauce “makes your skin darker”. I poured loads over my food and she had none.
I’m the colour of skimmed milk! Skimmed milk with little flecks of cornflake dust from the bottom of the packet. As for Em going a shade lighter, I doubt it. “I want to be black” she said. She’s only short of colouring herself in with a marker.
Thanks, Holly! Wikipedia tells me that Brian Molko’s single. You should write him.
I’m all for the conspiracy theory, Shane. The Daily Mail have conveniently provided me with a fresh one today – apparently my shampoo is making me fat, and it has nothing to do with cheese after all.
Shampoo doesn’t just volumise hair?! Damnit to hell.
I went through the same check-shirted stringy-haired phase and came through it relatively unscathed, though it still throws me for a loop when people say “you look pretty today” any time I wear a skirt. I think they are perhaps blinded by the sight of my milkbottle, fake-tan-free legs.
Amazing
GREAT post Rosie.
I am whiter than white, and have to throw a glimmer of the fake-tan before I dare to bare. I’d only really put it on before a night out or when on hols, so I’m definitely not the perma-tangoed sort you’d see wandering through Dundrum (I hope!). But then, when I say, that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those girls either. Sure it looks a bit gack when their skin matches the mahogany of the handbags they perch on the crook of their elbows, but sure, if it makes them feel that bit more confident about themselves, then why not really. Being a teenager’s a pain in the orse so any boosters you can give yourself is alright by me, even if they do end up walking around a bit like tangoed clones of one-another.
(I’ve made myself so paranoid about looking orange with fake-tan on that I’ve had to look through photos on facebook and even with tan on, I still look paler than everyone else! Phew. I guess).
Oh my god!! It’s my shampoo that’s volumising the rest of me! Damn! That’s even more convincing than my hopeful self diagnosed thyroid problem!
This is a lovely post, Rosie. I have been there. In fact, I probably am still right there.
I would have voted no tan though. I’m in a ‘young people and their foolishness’ zone these days.
Loved it. Brought back memories of one late August day when my 12 yr old girl sat in a hair dresser’s in Blackrock shopping center because we could no longer get through her salt-and-sand tangled hair after three weeks in Brittas Bay (it was a gorgeous summer) and everybody was in tears – the staff were so sweet and later on there was a round of applause for all and a new smile on my girl’s face as she checked and rechecked her new self again and again in all of the mirrors around her.
Thanks Annie, Jo and Sabine. I’m bad for gawping at how people dress and style themselves; I’d make an awful bitchy fashion blogger. I do try to rein in the pass-remarkable part of my brain, I just don’t try hard enough.
I hope she’s delighted with her new ‘do, Sabine. I remember having a good cry after I washed mine for the first time and it all stood on end, but a tub of styling wax and a brave smile sorted it out. It made me feel like an adult.