Fake tanning is a multi-million-dollar industry built on insecurity. The pressure to use fake tanning products to look “put together” is understandable when the tanning bottles are actively insulting you for your natural pale skin. But, it still makes me uncomfortable when my white peers fake my skin tone for special, elegant occasions like prom after years of being told I was different and alienated for my darker skin.
Using my ethnicity as a means to look more attractive is ignorant. I don’t want to villainize my peers who fake tan, but I would like them to hear my perspective as an Indian girl in a majority-white town. Not only do I have to feel othered in EL for my culture but also for my skin color: a visual reminder of my difference.
Darker features are being recentered into the context of white mainstream media and beauty standards.
Those who fake tan need to be made aware of the industry that tanning comes from. “Black Fishing” is changing one’s skin tone with makeup or tan to achieve a different race’s look or look ethnically ambiguous. Celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian are known for this.
I can’t scroll through my Instagram Explore page or Pinterest without seeing white celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande, and other standards of beauty in the U.S. with heavy artificial tans.
Ultimately, I feel like this leads to the larger problem of cultural appropriation within the United States. When Ariana Grande is applauded for looking glowy with a fake tan, it’s no surprise she adopts other features of non-white culture like a “blaccent” and intentionally mimics the dialect of African American Vernacular English, which she
often does at concerts and in interviews where she wants to appear more confident.
Tanning is quite literally the spraying of a darker pigment in order to achieve one’s “desired” tone of skin. I always hear the “I am so pale,” and “I look so white,”… from people who are, literally, white. Please consider your language, empathize, and understand how comments are heard by those around you.
In India, there is a demand for fair-skinned women and men. After watching the “Indian Matchmaker” on Netflix, I was shown the reality of how women are almost immediately rejected in relationships for having darker complexions. Seeing people I know so easily crafting a new skin color invokes a feeling of jealousy in me. Their ability to easily change the features they don’t want to embrace makes me feel uneasy as it has taken me and many brown-skinned girls like me years to accept our natural tone, which is eerily similar to the shade they pay for.
As you try to achieve that tan, remember that people of color cannot lighten their skin, and take the perception of the privilege you have to manipulate yours.
No one understands more than an ethnic person the desire to change your skin tone as some of us have been insecure about ours.