Is Fake Tan Racist?
White people, listen up.
That’s the question being asked on Twitter, and an entire subset of Instagram is raging about it. Many of them are white people who don’t like being told their beauty regimen might be a little problematic, and others are those pointing out that darkening one’s skin to the extreme degrees seen in certain photos is akin to blackface. So what’s the deal here?
White people have a nasty habit of doubling-down on their racism when it is pointed out. People really quite enjoy using fake tan, and they don’t want it to be labelled as racist, because they themselves might then be called racist — and we all know that an accusation of racism is far more damaging than the actual racism, amirite?
When the craze for fake tan really took off in Britain, about 20 years ago, there were plenty of jokes about tangerines and other orange-coloured things. Basically, if you wore too much fake tan, you’d be subject to mockery, be you a celebrity snapped by the tabloids, or just some regular person who’s spent too much time in the spray booth.
Around that time, girls (like me) would get body-shamed for having pale legs. A part of me did want to make my legs bronzer, but another part of me thought “Katy, you’re ginger. You will look ridiculous” — and so I just wore trousers to school instead. I still got bullied for having red hair…
