The New Rules for Blondes (6 page)

PART TWO

Blonde Maintenance

CHAPTER 6

RULE:
Natural Blondes Must Wear Sunscreen

T
he California girl archetype is deeply entrenched in American pop culture history: She’s lean, tan, laid-back, and topped with a head of naturally sun-kissed blonde hair. The Beach Boys built an empire on this character, and
Baywatch
sold it to the American public and beyond (Germans love their Hasselhoff). If there’s one thing that the 1980s taught us, it was the crucial lesson that to be a desirable blonde, you had to have a great tan and a pair of red pumps (if every hair band video is to be believed). The nerd archetype, on the other hand, is grounded in that character’s complete inability to achieve a tan. The
Police Academy
films, the
Revenge of the Nerds
franchise, and ’80s teen films with poolside scenes almost always featured a pasty nerd character whose gangly arms were adorned with water wings and whose nose was covered in zinc oxide. The message of ’80s cinema for adolescents was clear: Nerds wear sunscreen and are clueless about aquatics; cool people tan and swim well.

I grew up watching
Baywatch
somewhat religiously and viewing an inordinate number of tan blonde women running down California beaches in slow motion. These tan blondes were either running in slow-mo to make a rescue (Pamela Anderson, Nicole Eggert, Donna D’Errico), or they were making bad decisions beachside (only to be saved by David Hasselhoff’s legendary character, Mitch Buchannon and that one brunette lifeguard lady who had A cups and actual lifeguard skills). Thanks to
Baywatch
, my young mind eternally linked blonde hair and tan skin. Blondes were tan—that’s simply how it went.

Throughout my childhood summers, every morning before day camp, my mother would dutifully slather me in SPF 15, ruining my chances of ever becoming a tan, slow-mo-running
Baywatch
babe. (Note: This was before parents started coating their kids in SPF 600 to the point that now kids have vitamin D deficiencies. SPF 15 was considered pretty hard-core during the era of
Kids Incorporated
and Milli Vanilli.) I needed my mother to ease up on the sunblock application so that I could achieve the sun-kissed look that I saw on TV and desperately wanted to mimic in my own life.

“Mom, I have blonde hair. I shouldn’t wear all this sunblock. I should be getting tan like the women on
Baywatch
,” I would explain, using the brilliant logic of an eight-year-old who just wants to stop being teased with the nickname Whiteout.

“Selena, those women aren’t natural blondes,” she’d respond. She then leveled with me as to why I possessed natural blonde hair and the pigmentation of a corpse as I clutched my jelly bag and stood there, quaking in my jelly shoes.

“Our family is Irish, English, and Scottish. We are fair-skinned and have light hair and blue eyes, and we’ll never get tan like the women that you see on TV. They’re probably Italian or Greek and color their hair blonde, but their hair is really brown when they don’t color it,” she said.

Huh? The women on
Baywatch
weren’t paragons of natural beauty? My young mind couldn’t come to grips with this harsh reality. First I learn that Santa’s not real, now the cast of
Baywatch
is revealed to be bottle blondes! Next you’ll tell me that their breasts have been surgically enhanced or something completely inconceivable and insane like that! Is nothing sacred? I didn’t understand it. In my mind, blonde hair and the ability to become tan were intertwined. One went with the other, just like peanut butter and jelly, or Laverne and Shirley, or water parks and the unwashed masses. Getting my nascent brain around the fact that these women were completely fake and that tan skin and blonde hair weren’t naturally correlated was like trying to explain existential philosophy to a toddler. It just didn’t compute.

But my fair-skinned and fair-haired brethren should not be ashamed of their look—the stereotype of the bronzed blonde is unrealistic for many natural blondes, as I eventually realized. Pasty ladies should be proud of their porcelain complexions and not feel like they must submit to the platinum-haired, tan-skinned, California girl stereotype. There are multitudes of fair-skinned knockouts in entertainment and fashion: Amanda Seyfried, Scarlett Johansson, Robyn, Taylor Swift, Dakota Fanning, Michelle Williams, Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone, Courtney Love, and many more. These ladies are gorgeous, possess porcelain complexions, and wear their fairness with pride. They don’t layer on bronzer and tanning cream to fit in with the characters from
Jersey Shore
. They cover up on the beach, slather on the sunscreen, and almost never wrinkle. For their inspirational self-acceptance and confidence in the face of a bronzed world, I admire these porcelain princesses.

However, I am unable to be like them. I cannot resist the siren call of the “healthy” tan, and so I have perfected a method to make even the pastiest, palest blonde a bronze, blonde goddess (or at least a less-than-paper-white goddess). You need not be banished to a life as an assumed Goth kid who is allergic to sunlight. My naturally fair-haired brothers and sisters, I decree that you can still wear some sunblock and get a bit of color nonetheless. My blonde bestie, Suzanne, and I developed a strategy for maximizing melanin. Hold on to your socks.

How to “Tan” as a Pasty Girl

I don’t like the nickname, but I have been called a pasty girl on more than one occasion. A few years back, Suzanne and I took a trip to Las Vegas, where we befriended a bachelor party over drinks at the Palms Casino Resort’s Playboy Club. They were nice guys, but they promptly nicknamed us “the Pasties” (and it wasn’t a reference to nipple covers). The guys said that it was a term of endearment, but if you’ve ever endured playground teasing about your fair skin, you know how harsh that nickname can feel. We rolled with the punches, though—hell, this crew was buying drinks and spending money like finance guys circa 2007. But Suzanne and I knew what we had in our back pocket on that trip: an extensively researched sunbathing formula to fight that nickname and be, in fact, less pasty.

People will tell you that on vacation, you should slather on the SPF 30 or SPF 60, wear a hat, not hit the beach between the hours of eleven a.m. and two p.m., and generally have your “beach vacation” include as little beach time as possible. This need not be the case! Do not listen to these losers!
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You should not return from a tropical island looking like you spent a week in front of a computer beneath fluorescent lights, working eighteen-hour days of computer programming. Ladies and gentlemen, I shall now reveal my secret weapon: SPF 8.

You’re thinking,
SPF 8? What, is this the 1960s and people are using reflective mirrors and baby oil to maximize their tans? This author may have a sick weave, as I saw in the author photo, but what is she thinking?
I’m thinking that everyone looks healthier with a bit of color, unhealthy though it may be. I’m thinking that when I was a kid, my rich peers would go to the Caribbean during February school vacation (while I spent five straight days putzing around our local mall) and come back oozing a sense of relaxation, health, and wealth. I’m thinking that there is no reason to act like you are allergic to sunlight. (Unless you really are allergic, in which case, please skip to the next chapter and
do not
heed my advice. I have no idea what I’m talking about, OK?. . . Are those pasty sun allergy kids gone? Good, now
listen up
!)

SPF 8 is like manna from heaven. It usually comes in a brown bottle (because it technically qualifies as “tanning lotion” on the sunscreen continuum), which looks a hell of a lot cooler in your beach bag than a stark white bottle of SPF 3000. You’re getting cooler by the minute, reader! Sunblock should never be applied beachside or poolside, if possible. It’s much easier to get a uniform layer of sunblock on your entire body if you apply it while you’re still indoors, before you go out in the sun. That way, you can spread the sunblock on your entire body and not worry about missing spots or getting burned near your bikini straps or edges. Also, if it’s done in private, strangers don’t awkwardly observe you rubbing down your entire body (back of thighs! ears! tops of feet!). Private application is a win-win for everyone. Once you’re coated in SPF 8 and have assembled the requisite beach accoutrements—chair that can recline (to avoid tiger stripes on your stomach),
Us Weekly
(
People
and
In Touch
are also acceptable, but NOT
Time
or
The Economist
or anything remotely informative), snacks, and iced Dunkin’ Donuts coffee
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you are ready to hit the beach.

So you’re on the beach—what now? First things first: chair placement. Do
not
face the water unless the shadow permits it. Some people place their chairs facing the waves no matter what. That’s a nice view, but do you want a nice view, or do you want to achieve a bit of a tan and drop the albatross of pastiness once and for all? No pain, no gain—or more appropriately: If you sit at a weird angle with your beach chair casting a shadow on your thigh, you will end up with a half-tan, half-pasty thigh. I’m trying to save you from yourself! So place your chair with the shadow casting directly behind you as you face the sun and rotate that chair to follow the sun as the day unfolds. Whoever said that what you learned in eighth-grade Earth Science would never come in handy?
26

If you’re at the beach with a pasty friend who isn’t intent on escaping pastiness, she’ll probably encourage you to reapply your sunblock as the hours tick by.
Do not listen to her.
She knows nothing. Much like how the infamous dating book
The Rules
tells you not to talk to your therapist about
The Rules
, do not talk to pasty people about your attempts to escape the pasty prison.
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They want you to stay with them, looking paper-white and ill, but you’re blowing this proverbial popsicle stand and you’re going to get some color. If you reapply sunblock, even SPF 8, you will undo all the hard work (careful initial application, chair rotation) that you’ve put in. So resist the urge to reapply and instead, go get another delicious Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee.
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Once you have read through all of your magazines, chatted with your beach crew about every possible topic of conversation, polished off a few iced coffees, and generally had your fill of the beach, stick it out for thirty more minutes. The sun needs to work its magic, and if there’s one thing that we know about the sun, it’s that it doesn’t move quickly. Well, it doesn’t technically move at all—rather, the earth orbits around it—but you know what I mean.
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When it comes to getting color, patience is key.

Head home and wait for the fantastic results to blossom in four to five hours. In the meantime, you should definitely shower since a day at the beach leaves most people smelling extremely funky. If possible, don’t shave your legs after that day of SPF 8 experimentation, as I have a scientifically unproven belief that you will shave off whatever color you just got. Post-shower, you will enter the second phase of the quest for tan, and it’s a step that is even trickier than the previous one: Apply bronzing lotion.

When most people think of bronzer or tanning lotion, they picture Christina Aguilera on the red carpet, looking like a transvestite cinnamon stick that has been dusted with glitter. She’s an example of bronzer gone wrong—you need not look like an orange disco ball with a wig on top. Other examples of bronzer abuse include George Hamilton, Valentino, and everyone on
Dancing with the Stars
. Thankfully, great advances in bronzer technology have been made in the past twenty years, and now even the pastiest pasty can achieve a subtle tan thanks to bottled sun. Said sun can either be self-administered at home (using a tanning cream) or by a trained professional in a spray tanning salon (using what resembles a backyard hose filled with filthy water). Since I am a believer in the pioneer spirit (and I’m usually broke), we’ll discuss the at-home bronzing process because every wannabe tan gal should know how to take care of her own business.
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Let’s do what Fraulein Maria of
The Sound of Music
taught us in the opening of “Do-Re-Mi” and start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. (After all, when Maria was played by Julie Andrews, she had a sweet bowl cut of blonde hair, so she can definitely be trusted.) With bronzer, starting at the beginning means shopping for the proper tanning product. You don’t need to drop a ton of money for a good result—you just need to be informed. From age eleven to fourteen, I regularly stole my mother’s antiquated tanning lotion from her bathroom and conducted bronzing experiments on my own body.
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Back in those heady days, most tanning creams emitted a distinct and foul odor and took hours to develop. Not so anymore. It’s the new millennium, and soon we will be placing our fake-tanned bodies on hoverboards to ride over to the floating Zipdorp shop.
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In the interim, we should all achieve bronzed perfection by using a product that changed my life: L’Oréal Sublime Bronze in Medium. This product harkens back to the carefree days of the late 1990s, when every major cosmetics company released some sort of bronzer product for the summertime. This L’Oréal product is the best of the bunch, and its staying power in the marketplace proves that superiority. The dark shade of the bottle and bold, dark shimmer of the product might intimidate some tan-seekers, but there’s no reason to fret, my pets. If the bronzer is too bronzed for you, simply cut it with any old lotion for a less severe look. Simple as that. Just as you might overseason a curry dish and then dial it back with some shredded coconut for balance, body or face lotion can be added to the L’Oréal solution to exactly match the shade you are seeking. In the wintertime, you probably want just a touch of color to remind others that you aren’t a zombie dancer from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. In the summertime, you probably want to let it rip with the bronzer so that strangers will think that you’re a relaxed, laid-back beach bum who spends her Saturdays in the sun, not at home crying while clicking through her ex-boyfriend’s Facebook photos (or whatever).