We can be thankful, when considering the most superficial consequences of self-isolation, that our cultural approach to tanning has gotten more sophisticated over the past decade and a half.
The burnished, deep orange of early-aughts tabloid fame, with those Playboy bunny stickers you could affix to your hip bone before heading into the tanning bed (the worst of all options, Dr. Hale tells me, and the most likely to lead to melanoma, a type of skin cancer that’s actually most common in young women) has given way to subtler things. We’ve gotten too vain about wrinkle prevention to forgo sunscreen outdoors, preferring instead to display a slight hint of vitamin D exposure; at-home tanning goals have followed suit, striving for an aesthetic that’s less Paris Hilton at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards and more Gwyneth Paltrow in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Arriving in a sleek bullet, RéVive’s Self-Tan Booster is meant to be mixed discreetly—just a drop or two at a time—into your moisturizer; Jergens, which ushered in the non-scary indoor tan with its cultish, easygoing Natural Glow, now makes a clear, coconut-infused mousse. Part of its Sol by Jergens line, it promises a subdued finish that’s merely “sun-inspired.”
Outside my window in upstate New York, it was 40 degrees and a steady drizzle fell for days from a sky that looked like iron. I was never going to start a vegetable garden. My cheek shimmer wore off by lunchtime, and on the rare occasion that I looked in the mirror, I winced. This is how I came to find myself in my bathroom, in early April, inserting my hand into a foam tanning mitt printed with a Monstera-leaf pattern, hoping to benefit from a mood-boost inspired by memories of warmer times. I pumped chemical-beach-scented mousse into my palms, then coated my lower legs, then my thighs. “Apply a second coat on all the areas you want to look a little leaner, like maybe the butt cheeks,” Fabiola Trujillo advises me on a call from South Beach, where she is unofficially known as Miami’s spray-tan queen. I pleaded with my boyfriend, who was glued to a jigsaw puzzle, to do my back before mixing Sisley’s Self-Tanning Hydrating Facial Skin Care—a silky, gradual tanner with aromatic hibiscus flower extract—into a dab of my Fresh Crème Ancienne moisturizer, and massaging it all tenderly into a face that only became real to me on Zoom calls. Then I ran around the house naked for 10 minutes so I wouldn’t stain my precious sweatpants. Every so often, I checked inside my shirt and saw a little bit more bronze. By nightfall, I looked like I’d spent the day gossiping over a coconut. There were a few muddy swipes on the backs of my hands and my feet—a classic rookie mistake: not moisturizing one’s over-sanitized paws sufficiently—but the overall effect was shockingly natural. It wasn’t quite the real thing, the way a group FaceTime isn’t like meeting your friends for a long, lazy, silly dinner. But ’tis the season to be thankful that these artificial substitutes exist at all.
That’s the brutal edge of small pleasures in a world increasingly governed by emergency. Frivolity, especially, seems anathema. And yet the part of us that craves ease and bliss and wildness isn’t separate from the part of us that longs for a better, safer world. This was one way to ride out the long and sometimes lonely days, I thought, as I put my bottles of self-tanner in the cabinet, to be retrieved the next time I needed a pick-me-up: We can absorb the luck we have, turn every inch of ourselves towards it—like sunbathers to the blazing sky—and then, for whatever comes next, we will be warmer, we will be ready to do everything we can.