The Fake Sun Tan

Fake Sun Tan

As a man with ginger hair I have had to accept that I will never be capable of having a proper sun tan. It is scientifically impossible. My light hair and pale sensitive skin means that I get third degree burns even when just thinking about spending five minutes exposed to sun light. Most vampires are capable of achieving a healthier sun tan than I ever will be.

Maybe that is why, during my mid 20s, I decided to do something about it. Something that quickly became an addition to the list of stupid things I did in my mid 20s. I decided to get a fake sun tan.

First I had to figure out how someone went about getting a fake sun tan, so, one Saturday afternoon, I walked into the local Body Shop in Haarlem and started asking questions. This resulted in a few strange looks from the people who ran the shop, mostly because I don’t look like the kind of person who would normally walk into a Body Shop and start asking questions about fake sun tan products.

It didn’t help that I had to ask them to explain everything in tiny, step by step detail because I could not read the Dutch instructions of the products they recommended.

I then confused them even farther with my reaction after they informed me that I would need two different kinds of fake sun tan dye; one for my body and one for my face.

“But I can just use one for both right? It’s all just skin.” I asked.

“I would not recommend it.” Replied the shop attendant, looking worried in a way that suggested she ‘really’ would not recommended it.

“It’s ok. I’ll just take the body dye, thanks.” I replied, not picking up on the rather obvious hint at the time.

I returned home, happy that I would soon have a sexy tan. I entered the bathroom, stripped naked and started applying my fake sun tan body dye… everywhere. Soon I would have an amazing tan… or so I thought.

When I looked in the mirror a short while later I discovered that things had gone horribly wrong. I’d left the dye on for too long, far too long. It had had almost half an hour to soak into my skin. I had turned completely brown. Not a healthy sun tan brown but a ‘I just had an accident with a tin of brown paint’ kind of brown. I looked like an out of season Zwarte Piet.

To make matters even worse it seemed that I had not distributed the dye evenly. My new sun tan was rather more ‘patchy’ than you would expect from the real thing. Between my fingers, for example, the dye had been able to accumulate and had turned the sides of each digit extremely dark in comparison to the rest of my hand. I won’t mention the other bodily crevices where this had happened but there were a few, some easily visible, some more private.

There is a serious problem when it comes to using fake sun tan dye. If you mess it up (as I had done quite spectacularly) you can’t simply remove it. You have to wait it out until it fades away a few weeks later. This meant that I had to return to work on the Monday looking like I had fallen into an entire vat of industrial strength sun tan dye when I had left on the Friday as the palest and whitest guy in the office. Obviously, no one was fooled by my fake sun tan. In hindsight, it probably didn’t help that it was already October.

For the next few weeks everyone was asking if what I had done had been by choice or if I had somehow been forced into it. I had to reply, “neither.”

By the end of November my skin had finally returned to a more normal colour for someone of my complexion (just in time for the real Zwarte Pieten to show up).

I told myself that I would never do anything as stupid ever again as long as I lived… That was until a few months later when someone convinced me that I would look good with blond hair with brown patches. Hair dye also takes a few weeks to wash out.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

21 Responses

  1. Jo says:

    Had me laughing out loud here at the airport….now have some Malaysians staring at me in a suspicious manner…..funny though…your description…priceless! Where do I subscribe to your updates? Found this purely by chance!

    • Invader Stu says:

      Glade you like it. The subscribe button is up in the top right, the orange rss feed button.

  2. AstridQK says:

    Hahahahaha If I cannot have my speculoos, I will look like one…. Hahahahahaha

    You crack me up everytime Stu. Why didn’t you go to the hairdresser for the highlights?

  3. Hayley says:

    I can’t count the number of times I’ve dyed my hair a stupid colour… I feel for you there!! The tan story reminds me of Ross from Friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksuDOkqx2k :)

  4. On the bright side, you now at least know what it’s like for us “tanners” whenever we get a stupid, mismatched burn and therefore have to wait out three months for its disappearance. Try sporting a dark farmer’s tan paired with a lighter wife-beater and V-Neck impressions…all at once. :P

  5. A says:

    It could be worse. I say that because I kept wondering for half of the post why you didn’t notice that the business was full of cars. I figured buying car paint was even a bit too out there for you, until I realized that you’d capitalized Body Shop. (Now I have to go look up the word for body shop in Dutch, because I just realized that it’s not part of my vocabulary.) I felt a bit silly at that point but rather glad that you hadn’t spray painted yourself old Buick brown!!

    • Invader Stu says:

      Hahaha. Yes, it could have been a lot worse if I had gone to a car body shop for a custom tan spray job :p

  6. Antoine says:

    Now if you had used Speculoos instead, you’d have got the tan and easily spread it evenly across yourself by licking it into a smooth finish. Then, as the days go by, you’d have had an instant snack-on-the-go and the licking would have helped it fade away …

  7. Alison says:

    I’ve always liked the old Billy Connolly joke about being Scottish he’s naturally pale blue. It takes him a week to get white. My mother is Scottish and my father is a red head. I’m lucky I’m not transparent. ;) So I feel your pain. I’ve also experimented with self-tanners and had the dyed hands to prove it.

    • Invader Stu says:

      I have Scottish asserters on both sides so I’m surprised I’m not blue or transparent either.

  8. VallyP says:

    Haha…I can just picture it. Good thing you didn’t try and do them together!!

  9. dragon lady says:

    When did this happen Stuart? You kept it secret from us. Shame you should have sent photo’s

  10. Eliana says:

    If you were in Netherlands I’m sure that you’d be a famous “zwarte Piet” hahahah

  11. Likeahike says:

    You cheered up my evening again. Many thanks!

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