FauxTan - Beyond the Pale

Despite what Nicole Kidman says, pale skin is horrible. Although Kidman was married to renowned professional nutjob Tom Cruise for over a decade, so how good can her judgment be anyway?  While I don't generally look to movie star actresses for my health and safety bulletins, Kidman is a great, unintentional role model for the skin cancer cause.

One is not amused by pale skin, the type of which one was distressingly born with. If my lineage had the indecency to thrust pale skin upon me, it could at least have gone full circle and provided it with a translucency that rivalled Nic's.  On the plus side, at night I don't glow like a cheap and tacky christmas tree angel with a fur tree pole stuck up my arse.

Having said that, I’m all for avoiding the sun at all costs (my life is full of inconsistencies. I just roll with it). Despite its life-giving properties, the sun really is a massive pain-in-the-arse, with its key attributes falling more into column A (bad) than column B (good) when it comes to human contact.

The incidence of skin cancer stats freak me out a little bit, so I try not to think about it other than always slipping, slopping and slapping before, during and after sun exposure. It really is a burden but, hey, I don’t want to die from sun. Apparently two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they are 70, so that’s just great.

The person who brain-washed women into believing a particular hue of tanned skin is more pleasant than white skin should be slapped hard in the face.  My desire for tanned, brown skin and my terror of sunbaking do not really correlate.

To get around this, for years I have invested in a good fake tan product that I apply myself.  I have never really been that bothered over the years applying this fake tan, but I’ve recently bought a new product – Johnson & Johnson’s Holiday Skin Body Lotion - that alleges to blend a moisturiser with a fake tan, that “gradually builds a beautiful, light tan”, which is proving to be a complete annoyance.

Of course I was sucked in by this nonsense, and I'm sure it works a treat, but here’s my beef. This product says it provides “24 hour moisturisation”, but also says to “avoid contact with clothes and other items until the lotion is fully absorbed”. So if it takes 24 hours to “fully absorb”, when am I supposed to sleep? It would be helpful if the big cheese of this multinational had used the product before marketing it to millions of women who now only get to sleep in winter.