Annie says, “You’re Gonna Die!”

This time of year is when all the women’s mags start transmitting mixes messages about tanning, pairing the time-honored message of “FOR CHRISSAKES STOP TANNING ALREADY” with pages and pages of advertisements, articles and free makeup samples designed to render you as coppery as a freshly minted penny. But they tell us every year, “You’re gonna die!”

More embarrassing still is each article’s dutiful regurgitation of the suntan’s rise to aesthetic prominence, reminding readers that before 1923 pale was pretty, and had it not been for Coco Chanel and her yachting trip, we might now be happily bleaching our skin like large numbers of women outside the U.S. What these writers fail to mention, time and again, is the role played by magazines in which these histories appear: promoting, distributing and dare I say fetishizing images of the tan body.

The magazines obviously had no more idea of the damage tanning can do than Miz Chanel; a tan, for the better part of this century, was considered beautiful precisely because it suggested health (and then wealth). Being bronze symbolized carefree youth. Then of course a definitive link between sun exposure and skin cancer was discovered and the headlines flipped, yada yada yada. What’s creepy is that even though the methods may have changed (bronzing powder, mystic tanning, those pills the guy in Soul Man ate) the tan remains desirable, a testament to its currency as a social marker and a flip-off to the melanin deprived everywhere.

It’s the same way they have articles about surviving eating disorders next to models with eating disorders. Despite the campaigns of the dear Cancer Society, I doubt that women’s magazines are going to change the mixed message or are very interested in doing so; they and their advertisers have everything to lose the moment anything but an unachievable standard of beauty is mentioned. I know, duh.

It seems appropriate, then, during Philadelphia’s Year of Evolution, to adopt a Darwinian approach to the problem of brainwashed sunbathers: let ‘em die. As Nina Jablonski, Professor of Anthropology at Penn State, discusses in her book Skin: A Natural History, global differences in skin color evolved over thousands of years in accordance with a people’s proximity to the Equator.

Judging by the veins clearly visible in my forehead, therefore, I have obviously descended from the Polar Bear People of the North. I do not belong in Philadelphia. I am far, far too delicate, in dermatological terms at least.