Diary of a Gen Z Student: I'm just naturally this pale — and fake tan is more effort than it's worth

Jane Cowan in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin. Photograph:  Moya Nolan

A few months ago, I got a tetanus vaccine booster. 

Afterwards, the nice lady who gave me the vaccine asked me to stay seated in the waiting room for a little longer than usual. 

She said I looked ‘a little too pale’. She was concerned I might faint. 

Now, I was feeling perfectly fine and tried to protest this precaution. ‘I’m always this pale’, I offered, but she wasn’t convinced. 

So, I was sat down and given a glass of water. Twenty minutes later, when the lady relented to my naturally pale disposition, I was free to go. 

This isn’t the first time people have expressed concern for my health, due to the evident lack of melanin in my skin. 

As a teen, my concerned mother considered anaemia or lack of sleep. But iron supplements and sleep routines did little to improve things.

In Ireland, being too pale isn’t usually considered a good thing. We think paleness looks like poor health. 

But we’ve come up with the perfect solution: it may smell like chicken curry mixed with Custard Cream biscuits, and it may turn your skin more tangerine than sun-kissed, but fake tan is a part of our culture — like Guinness, and being shouted at for leaving the immersion on. 

From the age of 12, most girls in Ireland start to wear fake tan. 

At first, they’re lashing the tan on the night before a disco in the local GAA. Then it becomes more routine. 

Every week, you might put on a fresh layer. You’ll be told that it looks like you just stuck your hand into a packet of cheese-flavoured Doritos, but it’s better than being told you look like you’ve got an iron deficiency. 

Every year, we go months on end without seeing a clear sky in Ireland. But by God, we don’t want to look like it. 

Even if it was just for the ankles poking out the bottom of your school trousers, the status quo meant that those ankles needed to have a suggestion of sun exposure, at the very least. It didn’t matter if it was January.

The problem with fake tan for me is always the amount of effort it demands. 

Exfoliating, shaving, moisturising, and applying the tan. And then a few days later, you need to start scrubbing the tan off, before it begins to resemble scales on your knees and elbows. Oh, the things we do for beauty. 

I never particularly enjoyed the process, so, for most of my teens, it was only out of obligation that I wore it. 

I couldn’t fathom going to a junior disco with my milk-bottle legs glowing in the dark. I wasn’t prepared to be the only one going au natural. Being tanned was an obsession.

When I first visited a country that didn’t idealise tanned skin, it was honestly surprising to me. 

I was trying to buy soap in the Philippines and noticed that all of the soaps advertised their ‘skin-lightening’ properties. 

Of course, in many countries, the idealisation of paleness is a terrible relic of colonialism. But seeing those ‘skin-lightening’ products lined up on the shelves of a shop, cemented my previous understanding of beauty as something that is constructed.

Over the past few years, I’ve sort of let go of the idea of having tanned skin. 

It could be my frontal lobe developing, but I’m just not bothered by being pale anymore — especially if it means I can avoid routinely dying my bed sheets orange. 

Maybe I’ve lost patience for the tyranny of exfoliating and moisturising and exfoliating again. But I’ve laid down my tanning mitt. I haven’t touched a bottle of tan for years now. 

My tanning breakup was unintentional, really, I just stopped worrying about being the one with the light-reflecting legs on a night out. 

I was able to see fake tan as a product invented by people who wanted to make money, not a necessity for beauty.

Being told my pale skin makes me look a bit unwell by the kind lady giving me a vaccine may have been a low blow a few years ago, but now I’ve got this column to channel my frustrations into. 

And that vaccine was certainly helpful, while I was thinking about how to discuss my rocky relationship with fake tan as a pale and pasty Irish girl. 

Maybe I look like I’m lacking in vitality and sun exposure. But at least it has been a few years since I was last told that my hand looks like it was rooting around a bag of Cheese Doritos. 

A win is a win.