Tans And The Quest For Eternal Youth

July 11, 2013

     Tanning is such an obsession in France that an entire segment of Tele-Matin, the French equivalent of the Today show, was devoted to new products to protect against the sun, to fake a tan, to prepare the skin for tanning, to soothe the skin after tanning, and to give a golden shimmer to a tan.

     In fact, for every pale-faced, delicate French beauty, there seems to be an equivalent nut brown.  The French are very fond of clothes and accessories made in the color orange, because of its association with the sun, but also because it sets off a tan well.  Unlike the United States, where skin cancer risks are well-publicized, in France, the association of the sun with the sensual takes precedence.  With the result, especially in South, that many show the effects of too much sun: deeply-lined, if bronzed faces and crêpe-y skin.

     Women, in particular, seem particularly addicted to sunning. In the South, the fashion is beach-driven, so casual-wear, is king.   This being France, though, whether it is a top or a cut-off jean, the look will include revealing cut outs, the better to show off a tan.  Animal prints are popular; so are glittering fabrics; and not least, chain accents.  Think cut off shorts with ocelot-print borders worn over a gold lurex sleeveless top with a bias-cut neckline mimicking a Greek toga's, the other side of the top held on the shoulder by gold-chain links.  All worn by a deeply-tanned woman of sixty-five with streaked blond hair.

     I saw this woman checking out at the giant Carrefour Hyper Marché in Balabuc, near Sète, earlier today.  Her perfect features paid testament to a woman who must have been eye-catching in her younger days, but which the pressure to continue to look like a twenty-five year old had turned into a caricature of faded beauty.

     In the summer beach resorts in France, everyone is living a golden dream of a summer.  Many men are in their Speedos, whatever their age; they too, are not excluded from the pressure to project virility and sensuality, implicitly youthful attributes.  Other men eschew Speedos, preferring bathing trunks, walking around with open shirts over bathing suits, their chests thrust out over their bellies in a gesture of psychological triumph over a sagging waistline.  They are probably men from laboring backgrounds, while the Speedo wearers seem more intellectual, more distant.

     Walking along the water at Bouzigues, the village on the Bassin du Thau renowned for its oysters, I see a solitary man swimming in the ocean between the buoys marking the outer limits of the permitted swimming area.  His head bobs above the water, up and down, as he dog paddles comfortably from one buoy to another.  It is evening, and the sun is sinking in the sky.  The lonely swimmer is completely at ease in the water, surely enjoying the contact of the water against his skin now that the sun is mercifully low in the sky.  He is the only person I have actually seen swimming in the ocean.  He is untanned.

      --A very strange fellow, a dingue, (a nutcase), I can hear the beach-goers saying.  Beaches are for tanning, not for swimming.