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"  In California, in the early 1950s, when my parents had a house on the beach in Carmel, I would walk up and down the shore by myself. My mother would have slathered suntan oil all over me and made a tunafish sandwich, no crusts, wrapped in wax paper. The walk never bored me. A golf course above the beach was a tall protector, cypress trees a family. Abalone shells, when I found them, were a reward for being in the sun. The bathing suit I wore most often on those beach walks was one-piece cotton, green and pink, with scalloped straps. I was too young to think about a suntan. Anyway, in Carmel most summer days are foggy. But the sun from a gray or ordinary blue sky was a reliable friend, leaving a rosy glow on childish skin. In Palo Alto, where we lived when it wasn&amp;#039;t summer, there was a garden, oranges trees and bougainvillea, and a pool off the terrace. I was 14 by then, more conscious of the effects of a tan at school. I would lie by the pool, giddily waiting for the sun to make me tan, a daily fixation with striped towel and ticking alarm clock. Thirty minutes on my back, face to the sun, 30 minutes with whole self turned over, hair pulled across half a face for shade. If the sun was too hot, I would lie on a raft in the pool. I liked the wet, rubbery sensation and some water under and around my body, a cooling reprieve. One summer, when I was 16, my tan was so dark that a boyfriend called me Pee Waw the Indian Maiden. Recently, a friend told me that in airport code PEE is Perm and WAW is Warsaw. &amp;quot;An odd coincidence that they&amp;#039;re both nonsunny places by repute,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;There are flights from PEE to WAW.&amp;quot; (Pee waw bick in some Indian language \u2014 maybe Algonquian \u2014 means iron.)  After my parents moved to Atherton, in the 1960s, I would lie on some grass, as close as possible to a large bed of gardenias \u2014 not far from the pool \u2014 to pretend I was in Tahiti. This was one way to get a tropical tan, like Gardner McKay&amp;#039;s in Adventures in Paradise. Another teenage tan was acquired with my mother in a rowboat on Lake Tahoe. My mother was a good rower, strong. By then I had seen A Place in the Sun. But with my mother, nothing like what happened to Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters ever took place, though I thought about it. Nowadays, devotees of the faux \u2014 tan, hair, eyebrows, Botox, other facial enhancers \u2014 might consider lying on a beach in the Golden State, on the Riviera, or anywhere else under the sun a lot of work. But the rituals of a life devoted to the faux \u2014 including a tan without the sun \u2014 are also work. In winter, when booking a trip to the Caribbean or Gstaad, one must carefully plan one&amp;#039;s tan in advance. Figuring out the right shade isn&amp;#039;t easy; it&amp;#039;s like choosing makeup from the vast cosmetics floor at Bergdorf Goodman. There are nagging questions, such as how many trips to the tanning bed (running in and out at lunchtime, say) or whether to go for airbrush tanning or spraying. How many applications of over-the-counter tanning products are necessary to achieve the desired level of tan-upon-arrival? A tan has gone from being a sign of the good life to being an oppressive ritual. An overtanned look could be most humiliating. There are those who think their fake tans go unnoticed. I won&amp;#039;t name names. It&amp;#039;s appalling how many deluded tanned types (men and women) appear on TV every day. Fake tans on television can be a major distraction from paying close attention to world events, doomsday predictions, and other, perhaps even optimistic, news. The news anchors sometimes have confusing tans. Brian Williams of NBC is often tan, with tan lines around his eye area. Other times his skin appears to be an average shade of normalcy. On the other side of tanning, Chris Matthews, the good-natured MSNBC host, has pale Irish skin, to accompany his light blond hair. His look is the antithesis of the ultimate fake-tan orange of John Boehner. The Speaker of the House&amp;#039;s Hollywood counterpart is perhaps Jennifer Aniston, who, despite her appeal as All-American Girl, always looks suspect, slightly phony in her portrayal of a highly tanned, vigorous blonde. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s say you want a nice orange glow,&amp;quot; a not yet middle-aged man, perhaps nostalgic for his misspent youth in Sacramento, told me. He went on with factual enthusiasm: &amp;quot;Getting the right fake tan is like making toast. You put the toaster on light, medium, or dark, right? You have to make a firm decision and pray.&amp;quot; A young, tanned brunette was trying on lingerie at Barneys one autumn day. In front of a large mirror outside the dressing room, I said I admired her tan. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a Brazil bronze,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;When they spray you, you have to wear nothing, or else a bikini. On the beach I wear the tiniest bikini that shows the most skin. The skin has to tan.&amp;quot;  A friend wondered about Europe: &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t being fried to a crisp more acceptable there, along with a pack a day and a mistress?&amp;quot; Valentino and Silvio Berlusconi would make convincing case studies, at least of aggressively pursued power tans. A French person I know told me, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a fantasy American idea we smoke a pack a day.&amp;quot; A slight pause. &amp;quot;Of course, we smoke Gauloises. There&amp;#039;s nothing glamorous about smoking Marlboro Lights.&amp;quot; But what about the central issue: being orange? &amp;quot;Fried to a crisp? Non.&amp;quot; My French friend suggested I do some research on my own culture. The worst Jersey Shore YouTube offering I watched featured a song of sorts: &amp;quot;I Am Not a Whore.&amp;quot; There are three tanned, longhaired Jersey Shore girls \u2014 Deena, Snooki, and JWoww \u2014 dancing. Ronnie, a pale, pudgy male wearing a tight string of pearls around his thick neck, appears on the screen every so often, the upper half of his head bobbing to the song, whose only lyric is the song&amp;#039;s title. No Marlboro Lights in sight.  The tanning ethos dates back to The early 1920s, when Coco Chanel inadvertently got sunburned on the French Riviera \u2014 or, some say, on a cruise near there. It started an international trend, which has simply gone on adapting to shifting tides of fashion ever since. Before that, though, and seemingly throughout history, the sun was out of favor in the Western world. Because only farmers had farmer&amp;#039;s tans, and outdoor work in general was confined to the lower classes, upper-class women went to great lengths to keep their skin fair: the powdered visage of Marie Antoinette. Some went so far as to use lead-based cosmetics or lightening powders, or even arsenic, to whiten their skin artificially. There was, among the ill effects, the occasional poisoning. By the 1940s the amount of skin that swimsuits covered had begun to decrease, with the bikini making its appearance in 1946, seemingly just seconds after the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The 1950s were the decade of the Coppertone girl and her cocker spaniel and of Man-Tan, the first self-tanner. In 1960, Norman Mailer wrote about John Kennedy at the Democratic Convention, &amp;quot;One saw him immediately. He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of 50 yards.&amp;quot; The meaning of a suntan had turned completely around. Now a woman with a rosy glow in winter was regarded as someone who had been vacationing at a ski resort \u2014 Sugar Bowl or St. Moritz or Cortina. Or who had been recently waterskiing, snorkeling, and sipping a Tequila Sunrise in Mexico. Whatever the location, she was looked upon as a woman of means. Ursula Andress and Brigitte Bardot had meaningful, alluring suntans, real or not. Cary Grant had a tan to offset Grace Kelly&amp;#039;s pallor in To Catch a Thief. In the 1970s tanning beds appeared. It was the heyday of Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Bo Derek, and George Hamilton in Love at First Bite. (Hamilton would become the improbable hero of Zonker Harris, the perennial stoner who took up tanning in Doonesbury.) Today there are an estimated 50,000 outlets for tanning nationwide, and the tanning business in the United States is a $5 billion industry. According to the Indoor Tanning Association, established in 1999, more than 140,000 people are employed as indoor tanning professionals. Many in the indoor tanning business rail against the idea that there is a causal relationship between tanning and melanoma. This is a misperception caused by the &amp;quot;anti-tanning lobby.&amp;quot; But there could be other issues. I read in the New York Times that &amp;quot;people who frequently use tanning beds experience changes in brain activity during their tanning sessions that mimic the patterns of drug addiction, new research shows.&amp;quot; Perhaps most worrisome, tan is most often the term of art, not suntan, as if to emphasize the noninvolvement of sun. Of course, suntan is prettier in every way. The last summer I had a serious tan was in the early &amp;#039;70s, in Malibu. An outdoorsy, blue-eyed towhead, Jim, was living in the house next door, right on the beach. The houses there are close together, pretty much all in a row. The first time I touched his shoulder, it felt like an apricot. He smoked Kent cigarettes between long, tanned fingers. The white of the Kent close to his tanned face, his hand bringing the cigarette up to his lips to inhale, one blond-furred tanned arm reaching for a vodka-and-tonic, an unsteady glass on the sand: There was nothing faux, fake, or orange about Jim&amp;#039;s tan. His long tanned legs in white tennis shorts were enviable, a knock-out. On the court his suntanned arm coming down to slam the ball over the net, a killer serve and backhand... Well, he was a sporty tow-head with a suntan: startling. A towhead showing white flesh under the Southern California sun would have been unimaginable. When it came to bathing suits, my green-and-white-checked two-piece was the towhead&amp;#039;s favorite. Slippery skin, the result of suntan oil after a day in the sun, is always better off without the nearness of fabric.  Bare legs, a sundress, sandals feel good. A suntan with a strapless dress works well. At night, with or without a nightgown, slightly sunburned, rosy shoulders emerging from light bedclothes, maybe a sheet, is as summery and beachy as it gets. Hair, blond or not, getting lighter while skin turns golden (preferably) or ruddy, is part of the pleasure of tanning, particularly if one is a little bored with oneself, or finding life itself a bit tiresome. In a tanning salon, before they spray you down, they cover your hair with a shower cap. Another loss of subtlety, although there are hair salons for that: more work. The last time I was sunbathing, on a wraparound terrace on Sutton Place in Manhattan in the summer of 1977, I was by myself. A blue-and-white-striped bikini was the only barrier between me and the hot East Coast sun beating down on my body. Sunbathing and suntans, even if not Californian, once made the best of times, lending a certain glow to solitude. Well, for some of us. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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