Blogs and Stories
My Great Fake Bake Experiment
Day 10
There is a photo I keep of my mother, sister, and me meeting my late Republican stepfather for the first time. Taken in 1987, after I spent the summer in Ocean City, N.J., working as a parking attendant behind Steel’s Fudge on the boardwalk, it is the only photographic record of my being darker than my sister, a self-avowed tanorexic.
“Try the tingle cream,” she texts me when I tell her about my experiment. “You haven’t suffered for color until you have.”
Day 12
In the 2006 horror flick Final Destination 3, Chelan Simmons and Crystal Lowe go to a tanning salon. Improbably, a couple of broomsticks fall through the tanning bed handles, locking them both inside. Their flesh sizzles. Flames encircle their blistered bodies.
This is how I feel today when I use the tingle cream.
I slather my body in Swedish Beauty Black Diamond cream with “Tingle Tanning Power.” The active ingredient is Benzyl Nicotinate (niacinamide), part of the drug group of vasodilators that widen blood vessels. Others vasodilators treat hypertension, help with boners, and plump up lips. Used in creams like Black Diamond, it oxygenates and flushes the skin’s capillaries, allowing more melanin to brown.
For 12 minutes in the Sunstorm 44/4 tanning bed, armed with 11,000 watts of “extreme tanning power,” my skin tingles, then toasts, then torches. Even the Feist CD I’ve brought with me can’t reassure me I will make my way out alive.
Day 13
My daughter does not recognize my face this morning when I lift her out of the crib.
Googling “dark suntan,” I come across a 2003 Cindy Sherman photo, “Untitled (Woman in Sundress),” in which the conceptual portraitist portrays herself as an orange-skinned lady who lunches. Looking at it, I fancy that I, too, have transformed myself for art. But this has become more than just a quirky experiment. I don’t want to leave Real America. I don’t want to lose my daily dose of tanning-induced endorphins. My wife looks at me in horror when I admit I’ve come to enjoy my tanning sessions.
“You’re going to keep doing it, aren’t you?” she asks, holding her breath. Don’t be silly, I tell her.
Maybe just once a month. As maintenance.
Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen I and II and is currently finishing How to Be Inappropriate, a book of essays. He lives in upstate New York and teaches at The College of Saint Rose.
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Very entertaining. More from you would be deeply appreciated.
Please....google up some pictures of melanoma!! If you are worried your daughter doesn't recognize you now with a dark tan imagine the horror she'll feel looking at you when you are racked with cancer! The US Department of Health & Human Services, Public Health Service, National Toxicology Program Report on Carcinogens states that UV solar radiation, and use of sun lamps and sun beds are "known to be a human carcinogen." Women who visited a tanning parlor at least once a month were 55% more likely to later develop melanoma than women who didn't artificially suntan. Those who used sun lamps to tan while in their 20s had the greatest later risk, about 150% higher than similarly aged women who shunned tanning beds. Ok - you're not a woman but as you reported in your article, women make up the higher % of users. This blog should be pulled or at least a warning posted about the dangers to readers who might want to try this "experiment" at home. If you want to feel an endorphin rush have sex, sing, or excercise!
I LOVED it! Great take on what is becoming more and more a way of life for so many in this country!
I do not like the beds, thoughts of future cancer melt downs run through my brain BUT I have done it when I had something important coming up such as a Ball.
This past December when I had to help host a local generosity ball I decided to try the spray on...NEVER again. One bath and it's gone. Get any part of the body wet and it runs like a hooker standing outside the car of Hugh Grant.
...I have to admit, you look better with the tan! Tell the wife to get over it or there are tanned women on the other side of the fence!!
Funny how those stats reported above don't seem to have any facts as to times and duration...kinda makes me wonder if in fact the information is factual? I mean once a month and you raise the chances to 55% of getting cancer??? How many years of once a month? LOL 1 time? If your going to strap on that "brain from reading an article" then you, and we, would be bettered served by more true facts and not one site on the net that apparently blurbs.
Are people more worried about pasty skin than cancer or wrinkles? Or is the next article in the series about Botox and Rejeuvaderm?
As an Albany resident I am pleased to see Jerry Jennings tan get the attention it deserves. This also gives me the chance to share with the world the nickname he has in my house: PermaTan Man.
i think agree with noesis. i very much like the humor in your article, but i wonder if your writing style is getting bonus points because the article i read previous to this was the bag lady part 3 (heinous).
i would definitely like to see more!!
PS. ignore the humorless cancer-obsessives who will inundate this comment section. uhhh...satire anyone??
I really like Obama's tan!!
This is very very funny. He should keep the tan, he looks much better. Also, there was an obit recently in the Times of a dermatologist who believes that tanning doesn't cause cancer. So there's hope.
You got arrested four different times with four different tans? Impresive.
I loved this article, very funny, very self aware and so true about the different ways the left and right demonize this vanity.
I spent the year I was 20 enjoying my tanorexia. I am naturally very blonde and fair, and I was so dark that my complexion came out strange in photographs. I look back and cannot imagine how I let it get that bad - I just went regularly, increasing to the point I lay there for as long as they'd let me.
I worry now, nearing 30, that a year of taking my zen time in a tanning bed permanently damaged my skin... but I absolutely loved every second. Even the weird smell became enjoyable, because it triggered my happy and relaxed feelings of tanning.
Oh! the tan phobia's "we're all gonna die" with sun exposure/tanning beds. While googling, google Vitamin D and the NEW avalanche of data showing sunlight Vitamin D deficiency causing earliest deaths from everything, including melanoma cancer, and the NEW linking of hiding from the sun with Autism. Can't get enough in a pill or from food, humans need hours a day in the sun. Can't? use a tanning salon then!
I never though looking 'tubercular' looked healthy anyway....
freelisa, while you're googling Vitamin D deficiencies, also look up how long people need in the sun to get Vitamin D. Not long, if its regular. and you can do it clothed, as the Vitamin D goes through clothes.
Maybe its coz i'm Australian, and skin cancer is the most common cancer in Australia, that i think tanning beds are heinous. Funny article though
Thank you.
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