The Perks of Being Pale

Myself and many others are lucky enough to be blessed with the stubborn 'I will not tan' skin gene, meaning we are sunburnt through factor 50 sunscreen, not just on summer holidays, but also in England! (Well, on the few sunny days there actually are in England) As we get older and wiser, we also develop a phobia of the equator and become convinced it was put there as a death trap for us pale-skinned folk, so we're forced to avoid holidaying in places such as Dubai and The Caribbean and 'staycations' become more our thing. In spite of this, hundreds of the fair-skinned tribe, myself included, still brave the strong sun rays and take an annual summer break to somewhere intensely hot.
After all, I've always been taught that facing your fears is good thing!

 Forever Fashionable

To begin with, the first and foremost obvious perk to being pale is of course the fantastic tomato colour we turn when spending any time in the sun. This colour tends to last for a few days and causes us to spend the summer how we spend every other day of our lives - indoors and on the internet. Or for those wanting to go for a more crimson shade, more time in the sun is required.
Peeling red skin is the summer trend that never goes out of fashion and us pale-skinned fashionistas are able rock this look year after year without fail. Painful sunburn is always the cherry on top of a perfect summer holiday and holidays for us just wouldn't be the same without it.
Many of us can even pull off the 'patterned sunburn' look, allowing us to strut down the promenade with everyone staring in awe. Although they're making cringing faces and giving us sympathetic looks, you can tell this is just to cover up their jealousy of our burn lines, while they shamefully try to hide their tan lines. Here is an example of some extremely painful (but nonetheless fashionable) sunburn I gained in Cyprus last summer.

The everlasting search for 'The One'

Another perk of having skin the colour of tipp-ex is the fun we have whilst searching for that perfect foundation. Hours of our lives are spent googling things such as 'foundation for pale skin' 'WHERE CAN I GET SOME GODDAMN PALE FOUNDATION???!!!' in hope of finding a brand kind enough to create a product of a suitable shade. The process of actually testing foundation however is very simple for us. We just walk into Boots (or Debenhams for those upper class ones amongst us) and head straight to the lightest shade each brand sells, but usually just to find that each and every one still makes us look orange. Oh and even better, when we finally find a foundation thinking 'YES! This is the one!' only to put it on at home and it's suddenly became 10 shades darker than it looked in the shop.
Just the other week, I had a consultation with Clinique where I expressed my difficulty in finding a foundation light enough in the hope they would have one for me. Instead, I was sent away with a small sample of their 'CC cream' as their foundations didn't cater for people like me.
So far I'm impressed with the CC cream however it's almost exactly the same colour as Rimmel's Match Perfection in the colour '010 Light Porcelain' which I discovered a few months ago and is also a lot cheaper than the CC cream so I think I will stick with Rimmel for now, until I can find an even lighter colour.

Meeting Society's Standards

Maybe the reason for the lack of fair coloured foundations is due to the fact that it's recently become socially unacceptable for anyone without a tan to dare to go out in shorts in summer, but that doesn't matter, I mean there's plenty of fake tan to go around, right? And it's not like we mind forever smelling of biscuits or having to spend a large percentage of our well earnt money to fit in with society's standards - decent fake tan is not cheap fyi!
Fake tan isn't the easiest thing to apply either you know, and life is made 1000x better when we've spent our own precious time and money to make ourselves look that healthy tangarine colour just to find we're covered in streaks leaving us with that awful decision... Streaky fake tan or pale legs?
Most people adopt the streaky fake tan option; at least that way other people know they have made an effort in trying to hide their shamefully white legs.
Those hipsters among us who say that having a tan is just 'too mainstream' like to take the other option - to just not bother with fake tan - and here is a picture of me bucking the trend (although I don't class myself as hipster - just too lazy and too poor). I have been described as looking as though I've spent my whole life hiding from the sun and I've even been compared to an albino rabbit before and I still haven't worked out whether or not that's an insult?!

So what do you think, are we blessed to be pale or is it some sort of punishment? Are you a part of the 'untanable' tribe or do you have beautifully tanned skin?

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