Hannah BETTS
My grandmother, Joan, was one of the white working classes to benefit from the golden (read: charred) age of package travel. In the Seventies, she jetted to Benidorm, the sleepy fishing village that had become the hot spot of Franco’s newly minted “Costa Blanca”. Through the Eighties and Nineties, she did her lotus eating in Malta. In both, she relished sun, sea and sand, but primarily the former. For where today one parades one’s holiday on Instagram, so then it was singed into skin: a holiday wasn’t a holiday unless one returned the colour of teak.
By the time she was a greatgrandmother, Joan boasted two party tricks. The first was to pull back her concertinaed skin via the great folds set in grooves about her nose, causing my youngest sibling to scream. The second was counting the basal cell carcinomas mottling her limbs. Her doctor remained insouciant, only removing them if they bled or caught on clothes, granting the impression that Brummie octo- and nonagenarians were pockmarked with them. And they were.
Yesterday, Cancer Research UK revealed that Britain’s melanoma skin cancer deaths have increased dramatically since the Seventies, our rate rising two and a half times, a shameful 150 per cent. Given that 86 per cent of these cases are related to sun damage, the majority of these deaths are preventable. The risk of developing melanoma is three times higher in people who have had sunburn even once every two years.
Mere reddening of the skin, or tenderness, is a sign of sun damage. And, yet, on we go, searing ourselves into early graves.
Small wonder the corpses are piling up. Cases of melanoma have doubled since the early Nineties. About 16,200 people are diagnosed every year, making it the country’s fifth most common cancer. I’d like to say that Joan would be proud, but, actually, she’d be horrified. She was appalled by the way in which she had rendered her complexion not only raisin-like, but a potential killer. Were she still with us, she would demand to know how people could know so much more about sun damage, yet care so much less. It’s a good question.
Smoking, obesity and excessive drinking have all acquired stigma, yet tanning remains the socially acceptable killer du jour; self-harm at its most modish. As the figures confirm, I use the word “killer” advisedly. There is a misapprehension that skin cancer is a minor event, in which the patient simply has a chunk cut out of them, then off they trot. Tell that to relatives of the 2,353 people whom melanoma saw off in 2018, or my 40-something friend who sacrificed half her face to it.
And, yet, every summer yields a lemming-like surge towards hide tanning, leather metaphor intended. One has only to sit in a plane coming back from – well, anywhere – to see proud British tourists bearing varying degrees of injury from the red raw to the third-degree scald. These walking wounded will be greeted with: “You look well.” They don’t, they look like the burns victims they are; our kamikaze ruddying a source of national disgrace as it is international ridicule.
This year may yet be worse. The confining of sun worshippers to parks and staycations is bound to yield complacency. And, yet, the lockdown sunny spell, plus August heatwave, have resulted in so many displays of self-sabotage.
I ask Cancer Research UK whether this was their motivation in reminding us of the effects of our fatal addiction. In a word, yes. “Look at my farmer’s tan!” brags everyone. “Yup,” I sigh, giving their moles a quick once-over, “skin cancer is more prevalent in pockets of middle-class leafiness than it is in deprived areas.”
I admit it: I’m a freak, a zealot, a bright-white weirdo, but I have never understood the allure of getting Tango’d. Friends joke that I apply SPF merely to emerge at night. I certainly sport it by day at my desk. In sunnier climes, you will find me not only larded with sun block, but lurking beneath hat, glasses and assorted layers, darting between darkened rooms.
I was a teenager in the Eighties, when to be a satsuma shade was all the rage. Where something is ubiquitous, there will be those who find it banal. From the moment I realised that being tanned was a cultural imperative, I felt compelled not to have one. For my pains, I was nicknamed “vamp”, “moon face”, “goth girl”. At school, boys trailed after me clicking the Addams Family theme; at college, the scouts labelled me “The Wicked Lady”.
In addition to death (see above), my motives for eschewing sun scorching are political meets aesthetic underscored by laziness. Translation: no one’s skin is the wrong colour. I find tans tawdry, while – even if I were to like them – I couldn’t be bothered. Add in the premature decrepitude and the incentives aren’t exactly mounting up. What is it with those ray slaves prepared to spend any amount of money on face fixes, only to subject said face to an annual nuking?
There is a curious correlation between those we don’t exactly look to for progressive views on race – white South Africans under apartheid, say, Donald Trump – and the desire to assume what one might call “orange face”. And I, for one, am having none of it. I’d no more darken my skin than expect a black friend to lighten hers. Instead, I am advocating valuing what nature gave us – black, white, or, in my own case, a sort of pale green.
Tanning remains a socially acceptable killer; self-harm at its most modish