AGEING BY SUN: DON'T LETTHE SUN SHINE ON YOU
I like to think of myself as fairly easygoing - there's very little that irks me and much more that makes me laugh out Loud. But if a patient wants to see me come undone, they'd know to visit me with suntanned skin. Actually, I should change that to the less seductive, yet more realistic label of 'damaged' skin. On a daily basis I treat patients who are calmly waiting their turn to improve their complexions. Yet they feign innocence when I ask about the telltale signs - usually dark spots coupled with a bronzed, crinkled skin - littering their face, arms, hands and, most commonly, their chest.
The excuses come fast: "I was wearing the sun block that you gave me,' swears the male half of the bronzed couple from Peru. Others are more belligerent: 'I'm not going to stop living so that I can look good at eighty,' says the thirty-two-year-old blonde estate agent with the snazzy convertible and a love of sailing.
Our dangerous love affair with the sun began almost sixty years ago, when tanned complexions were a sure sign that one worked outdoors for a living. Eventually, that changed to being a badge of honour among the chic - a sign that one had the means to spend weeks on a yacht in the Riviera. So pervasive was this image that even Coco Chanel fell into its grasp, becoming the first designer to parade bronzed mannequins on her catwalks. If the message wasn't clear before, it certainly was now: tanned was the ideal - at any cost. Just ask the Ambre Solaire model. Didn't she seem to be having a ball?
Appearances, no matter how utterly convincing, can be deceiving. The simple fact is that a darkened tone is the skin's immediate reaction to the damage that has been inflicted upon it. 'Damage' is the operative word here, because it is this very damage that will, without a doubt, show up as premature ageing on your skin. In other words, the majority of wrinkles and other signs of ageing don't have to be there at all. For every cautious, sunblock-wearing patient that I treat, I see five others flaunting their hard-earned tans. Yet these are the same people who will ask me to "do something' about the lines and spots on their faces and bodies.
This might be the twenty-first century, but perhaps a repeat lesson on what a tan really is, is in order now.
*9\82\8*
