Oh my god I thought to myself. Did I used to look like that? How embarrassing. I could actually now recognize what the hell my friends were talking about. It was like looking in the mirror. I couldn't stop staring at how bizarre this guy looked.. This guy at the table I was waiting on had spent too much time in the tanning salon. His whole family was white and he was the total sore thumb sticking out. I didn't even know skin could turn that color brown. He looked like a raisinette. I cringed inside knowing that I too was once that tan. My friends had all warned me that I was overdoing it. My god, I thought to myself...how did I ever get laid?
I'm not exactly sure when it all started but at an early age I can remember being obsessed with being tan. Maybe it was because all of my good friends were from South America and had beautiful golden colored skin. Maybe it was because I was the Queen of Spain in a past life. All I know though is that being tan has been a very important thing to me for as far back as I can remember. In seventh grade I even asked my mom to buy me tanning sessions at the local tanning salon. To monitor my results, I would stick a heart sticker on each session. I took my tanning very seriously and my dream was to be the tannest girl at school.
One night I took my obsession to a deeper level. I took every lamp in our house and plugged them in. I even had extension cords in outlets from other rooms and plugged in lamps so that they would reach to my bathroom. I put on my favorite swimsuit and covered my exposed skin in Johnson and Johnson baby oil. Then I laid down in the midst of all the plugged in lamps. I must've had about seventeen or eighteen lamps around me and I believed I was getting a tan this way. As I laid there I thought to myself," How come I haven't thought about doing this before?" God I am so clever.
It was around 9:00 or 10:00 at night and my mom came marching into the bathroom with a very confused look on her face and asked," What the hell are you doing." I replied in a very matter of fact tone like duh..."What does it look like I'm doing, I'm getting a tan." She started laughing hysterically and exclaimed, "You can't get tan from lamps, there's no UV rays." I gave her a total junior high school girl look like. As if. She said," Suit yourself."
I laid there for about an hour or two in the midst of the lamp chaos constantly moving the suit to the side checking for progress. I think I believed in it so much that my imagination conjured up a tan line. This was the first of many of my secret compulsions to achieve the ultimate tan.
In high school I kept up my regular sessions at the tanning salon across the street and became a tanning icon to most of my friends. They began to ask their parents to buy them tanning sessions. Soon the tanning salon was filled with all my girlfriends on a regular basis. It was the new hot spot in Montgomery Village. This wasn't just about tanning anymore. This had become a social event. I had even convinced guys that we went to school with that they needed to be tan as well. I was marketing the salon so well in fact that I'm surprised they didn't just let me tan for free. We would sit out in the lobby waiting for the beds to be cleaned and do rock, paper, scissors, for any bed that's bulbs had just been changed.
We started learning about all of the tanning lotions. At the time Swedish Beauty was the most popular. Although the tanning technicians would warn us that people with sensitive skin shouldn't use Swedish beauty because it could possibly cause a rash. Most of us endured the rash because it only lasted an hour or two and the results with Swedish Beauty were instantaneous. It had some kind of chemical in it that brought all of the red blood cells to the surface and increased the rate of your tan by thirty percent. I had friends that turned to me as if I were the Zen Master of tanning. They would complain about how itchy and uncomfortable they felt and I would reassure them," Just sit through the pain." Just be with it and it will be well worth it. I didn't care that I felt like I had poison ivy for two hours after Swedish beauty use. The pain was worth it. Especially if I wanted to remain the tanning icon.
I think looking back that I probably looked really stupid and too dark but at age fourteen you just don't know any better. I'm afraid that people probably thought that I tanned at the same tanning salon as George Hamilton.
In tenth grade my friend Gretchen and I went to my parent's beach house in Bethany Beach, Delaware for Spring break. Unfortunately, unless you go as far as South Florida for spring break on the East coast its too cold out to lie out. Gretchen and I were desperate. We had friends that were going to Florida for Spring Break and we needed to be tanner than them when we returned to school.
We called around and found a tiny beauty salon about thirty minutes away that had a tanning bed. Thirty minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of Ruby's salon. This was a real live beauty salon- kind of like a scene from out of Steel Magnolias or something. When we walked in we saw little old ladies who smelled of musky rose perfume that had curlers in their hair and were sitting under the dryers. There were also these strange machines with other little old ladies on them that vibrated. The owner was telling us about how the vibrating machines helped to burn fat. Personally I think the ladies enjoyed the cheap thrill of the vibrating machines. There was a definite feeling of nostalgia going on in ruby's that reminded me of being back in the tanning salon at home. The only difference was that instead of a bunch of teenagers talking about how the cute soccer player winked at them in the hallway while walking to math class these ladies were talking very nonchalantly about who had recently passed away. Is this what it's going to be like? I thought to myself.
Anyways the bed was weak. The bulbs were probably old and Gretchen and I weren't getting the results that we were looking for. One of the little old ladies recommended a product called QT. Quick tan made by Coppertone. For those of you who don't remember, Quick tan was the first sunless tanning product on the market back in the late 1980's.
We went to the local grocery store and sure enough Quick tan was right there on the shelf. We used QT and a few hours later we were dark. We only had each other to compare ourselves to and we thought we looked pretty damn good.
We began to use QT everyday for the rest of our vacation. We hadn't perfected the application process and there were weird lines where we missed spots on our hands and feet.
Spring break was over and when we arrived to school all hell broke loose. No longer did we look good. We looked flat out ORANGE. Compared to our friends that went to Florida, we didn't look right. We were being called UMPA LUMPAS. I swear all I needed to do was dye my hair green and get the white outfit and Willy Wonka himself would've put me to work.
I remember being in the locker room getting ready to change for P.E. and a girl was staring at me. I thought that she was staring at me because she was jealous of my cool titanium earrings and my new bad ass outfit from units. (Units was a very short lived store that...( got to think of what to say about unit's still..) But no, she was looking at my feet where the Quick tan lines shown. She asked," Is that tan real?" I was embarrassed. She had found me out. It was like walking down the hall naked and all my crushes seeing me. I had been exposed. Fortunately I was good at lying. I said,"Yeah, I was at the beach and dug my feet in the sand and fell asleep. That's why it's not even." She replied, "OH." And I knew that she knew that I was lying but I gave her my meanest, toughest look like if you say anything I'll kick your ass. She nodded and I knew she understood.
My tanning compulsion had accelerated by my early twenties. I got a part-time job at a tanning salon. By now the beds were new and improved and the products were amazing. My best friend Renee and I would discuss lotions at length. This time our favorite product was called butter. Butter was absolutely amazing. It was thick like whipped butter and smelled delicious. It left my skin so soft and so dark-tanning products had evolved since the early years of Swedish beauty. This product left me rash free.
By now there were different lines of products- some of which in the tanning world would be rated with or without tingle factor. Products that were similar to Swedish Beauty contained tingle factor. Anything with a tingle factor of five or higher was bound to give you a rash. But there were plenty of products just as good that contained no tingle factor and butter was one of them.
I started to analyze the clientele at the salon just by how they looked. If I sensed that one was a masochist I would point them in the direction of a product with tingle factor. I knew that they would love the rash. If one seemed calm and at ease I'd give them something like butter. The super tanners I'd sell new and improved Swedish beauty with bronzer. This product contained a tingle factor of eight or so and had bronzer added in.
We also had new and improved beds. There were three beds. There was the regular bed, the orbit bed, and the omega bed. The omega bed was a thirty thousand dollar bed that had a mattress on the bottom side and claimed to have no burning rays. It lasted sixteen minutes and beeped halfway through so you would know when to flip over. This bed would give you the deepest tan that you could possibly achieve. It took me, a German descendant and turned me into an Egyptian. I remember someone asking me one day if I was of Egyptian descent because of my tan and I was immediately flattered, even though I think Egyptians are really black. This was a great bed to lie in after a night of drinking. It just dried your hangover right up. I was very passionate about the omega bed.
Unfortunately we were only allowed four sessions a month in the omega bed and anything over that we had to pay for. We were allowed unlimited use in the regular beds. But after I tried the omega I could never go back to the regular bed. It's like that saying I presume, "Once you go black you never go back." Or it would be like test driving a BMW and then going back to driving dodge neon. I was obsessed with the omega.
I had to find a way to get more sessions and the only way you could turn on the bed was to log into someone's package in the computer and then the bed would turn on. But I was twenty one, and my criminal mind was at its peak. I was the queen of all scams, all things dishonest and devious. I would find a way. It was important to me because in one month two of my friends and me were going to Orlando, Florida for Halloween and damn it I wanted to rekindle the tanning icon in myself.
When we were dead at the salon I would browse people's packages in the computer. I had a list and went through starting with last names starting with the letter A. I was particularly interested in packages of people who had purchased many omega tans and who hadn't been in the salon in about a year. I figured someone who hadn't been in the salon in awhile would probably not remember exactly how many tans that they had left. So I had a long list of names of packages that I could log in under and tan in the omega bed when my four sessions ran out. This was a clever scam I came to find out because I also found that when people walked in and just wanted to purchase one tanning session and they were paying cash that I could log them in under one of the packages on my list and pocket the cash for takeout dinner that night.
There were four really nice restaurants in the strip mall. After a week or so I was eating well and getting dark. The only thing that I had to watch was that we closed at 10:00. P.m. Me, being an employee, I wasn't allowed to tan until we were closed. But I couldn't let others tan past 10:00. They had until 9:59 and then they would have to wait until the next day. So I would close at about 9:58 and log into a package on my list, lock the front door and go tan in the omega bed.
The end was near. It was my last shift before leaving right after I got off. We were going to be driving to Florida that evening. That night I did my usual routine and closed at 9:58, and jumped into the omega bed.
To my surprise when I came out I almost shit myself because the owner was sitting on the couch in the lobby. I was exposed once again, and there was no way to lie this time. I screamed, "You scared me!" She asked," How many times have you done this?" I lied and said two times. She asked me whose packages and I told her and she said that she would have to take that out of my paycheck. She then said," I'm going to have to ask you for your key." Right then the phone rang and we weren't allowed personal phone calls. The owner answered the phone and said yeah hold on and handed me the phone. It was my roommate and it couldn't have been worse timing because I was in the middle of getting fired.
I said," Hello." And she asked," Who was that?" I said," I don't know." She said," What do you mean you don't know?" I said, "Ok bye," and hung up on her. When I got home I explained to her that I was in the middle of getting fired when she called. My days of free omega tans had abruptly come to an end. When I told her she was laughing so hard she almost peed her pants, and so did I.
We went to South Florida and I was still the tanning icon.
Here I am today, eleven years later, reflecting back on my obsession with being tan. Now through all my trials and tribulations I have learned the value of integrity in the workplace as well as karma and how it can bite you in the ass if you don't live an honest life. Most importantly though because of my obsession, I have learned how to maintain a fabulous dark tan. I left my hometown and moved to the Caribbean, then Dallas, and now I live in Hawaii. Funny, but all those places have a very hot sun. Even funnier I now have my own business and I'm the only one on this island in my industry- Airbrush Tanning. After all these years of having a compulsion to be tan, who would've ever thought I would have a successful business in the tanning industry. Oh the irony. I guess you never really truly let go of your compulsions, just turn them into something productive. ..