Dispatches from the Tanning Bed
All is vanity, really. Use this information wisely.
I didn’t have “become a member of the tan mom community” on my 2025 bingo card. To be fair, there was a lot that wasn’t on my bingo card over the last five years that have all happened nonetheless: motherhood, wifey status, rural exile, going blonde and then back to brunette, the return of low-rise jeans into the cultural doxa, etc. By this logic, me embracing my South Philly Italian-American “summers spent at the Jersey Shore” roots seems like a foregone conclusion. I’m choosing to embrace it. Yes, I am now a frequent tanning bed user.
Upon signing up for a membership (tanning must be a lifestyle—you’re either in, or you’re out—a ritual of upkeep, performance, and pride that, I would later realize, had been quietly passed down to me), I was more embarrassed than I was excited. It wasn’t a “buyer’s remorse” sort of embarrassment either, it was a haughty contemplation on whether I’d gone too far in indulging my death drive or not. And if not too far now, how far would I inevitably push it? Would I develop an impulsive need to tan the shape of a Playboy bunny or a butterfly (the latter of which somehow infinitely more slutty) onto my hip? Would I commit to French Tip acrylics like my near-ancestors before me? What if I overshoot “Amalfi summer with an Aperol Spritz” and end up at “Wildwood hooker?” All valid questions, all stemming from my lingering shame as an Italian-American who came of age in the era of “GTL.”
There is something humiliating about being an Italian-American today. We’re a proud people, but we’re also a self-deprecating people, and we’re increasingly the butt of the joke for those who want to indulge their desire to mock an ethnic identity in a “culturally-sanctioned” way. Italian-American people have been flattened into caricature, and we’ve been made into a meme: loud, tacky, tan, vaguely criminal. No one was ever accused of cultural appropriation for dressing like someone in the background of the Copacabana in Goodfellas, despite a long and storied history of Italian-American discrimination in America. The joke wears thin, particularly when it starts to creep inward. I’ve preempted the derision by distancing myself from anything too try-hard, too gaudy, too “Jersey.” Even when I’ve borrowed from my own culture, I’ve dulled it down: a minimalist Italian leather bag that’s more of a subtle flex than Fendi Zucca canvas, a tiny gold cross on a micro chain, slightly-fluffed curtain bangs, understated cleavage. I’ve all but wrapped myself in tasteful beige to avoid being seen as one of “those” Italian-Americans.
Before I learned to edit myself into tastefulness, I had already inherited a very different kind of femininity. Growing up, the women in my life didn’t do “effortless.” Their beauty was effortful, and painstakingly so: defiantly rouged cheeks and hair stiff with Aqua Net, the beauty equivalent of a plastic slipcover on a delicately-constructed fainting couch. They rarely left the house without being entirely dolled up: Sunday Mass, a family softball game, a trip to the grocery store—all clad in some variation of capris, leopard print, and leather. Layered gold jewelry, hair teased to the heavens. In a sense, they weren’t high-maintenance, they were devotional. (This is the Italian-American way.)
My cheeks were always stained with deep-red lipstick from the kisses they gave me at the beginning and end of each gathering. I remember how it would smudge on my hand when I tried to wipe it off. I remember being nearly suffocated in their ample bosoms, and the perfume lingering in the air long after they’d moved into another room. For me, it was all too much. I was always a bit of a black sheep: bookish, anxious, forever trying to tone myself down into something tasteful and inoffensive. With age, however, I’ve realized that I cannot outrun my destiny. Now, with a family of my own, in the absence of my dearly departed and the distance between me and the still-living, expatriated to the lush, natural greens of Appalachia, I find myself missing the unnatural—the over-the-top beauty rituals—as a way to set myself apart. It is, in a sense, akin to a certain kind of holiness.
Whether a blood memory begging to be recalled, a contrarian streak needing to be recognized, or a rebellion against modern “disaffected carelessness,” my instinct to “get done” before leaving the house is something I am increasingly quick to indulge. A birthright I once rejected out of shame, I now feel drawn to it with an uncanny reverence. I used to think the women in my life were over the top, but now I think they may have been on to something. Beauty is becoming a lost art, and I feel that I am duty-bound to honor their ways and carry on this cultural phenomenon so that it may outlast me when I’m gone.
The tanning salon feels like a continuation of this tradition exemplified to its highest degree: it’s a beauty intervention that’s so maligned, it’s almost vulgar. The very prospect of frying one’s skin for a sun-kissed glow makes the South Philly-shaped hairspray hole in the Ozone layer seem tame by comparison. In this way, the tanning bed is a modern shrine to the kind of beauty that requires time, intention, and a willingness to be a little ridiculous. It's not streamlined or minimalist or self-effacing. It’s fluorescent, it’s coconut-scented, it’s unabashedly extra.
The naughty truth is that this is how most beauty is: if you scroll TikTok, you’ll see countless videos of “no-makeup-look-makeup-looks” requiring several products and no less than twenty minutes of time just to look “natural.” The clean girl, the French girl, the “just-woke-up-like-this” girl—this effortlessness is a farce and it always has been. Even the most understated looks take effort, money, and a hell of a lot of maintenance. We cling to the performance of ease, often gatekept by wealth or youth. It’s only ever “effortless” once the work is invisible—when the fillers have settled, the brows are microbladed, the stylist is on retainer. It’s a lie we’re meant to aspire to, but never speak aloud. I was once able to wake up after a night of heavy drinking, slather on some Futuredew and a flick of mascara, and be ready to face the day. No longer. After almost 11 months of sleepless nights, I now require all sorts of peptides and collagen boosts to delay the inevitable—getting some “tasteful work” done, which I will invariably deny when the time comes. (So don’t bother asking me about it.)
This illusion of effortlessness hasn’t always been the goal—in fact, it’s a relatively new aesthetic mandate. There was a time when being high-maintenance was aspirational. To spend hours at the salon, to have standing appointments, to make beauty a project—these were markers of status. To simply care, and to show that you cared, meant that you had the time, money, and social permission to do so. Now, we’ve entered an era where it is considered low-status to care. The new “high status” is to act like you barely tried. It’s the entire idea behind Phoebe Philo and The Row, and the crux of their successes, no doubt. The cultural pendulum has swung, and somewhere along the way, caring too much started to look like trying too hard—and trying too hard is embarrassing. It’s… Italian-American-coded.
Though I tend to select the most low-traffic times at the salon and slip into my Ergoline 1600 Prestige (with red light therapy) relatively unseen, I accidentally booked at a busy time over the weekend. I was struck by the variety of women sitting in the waiting area with me: a hot mom, svelte in athleisure, who rolled up in a murdered out Land Rover was flipping through her phone next to a woman in a Panera uniform, who sat next to a former-trailer-park-princess with tattooed eyeliner and angel wings inked above her ankle, who sat next to a woman in rhinestone-studded denim and a hot pink Harley headband who had just climbed off the back of her husband’s motorcycle. The only guidette in sight, or at least the only thing close to it—was me.
If wanting to be beautiful is “all vanity,” it’s something we’re all guilty of. So why did I let the desire embarrass me for so long?
Despite a myriad of social ops to make us all think that “beauty” doesn’t matter, that we shouldn’t care about it, that it’s only skin-deep, a look around that waiting area told me that women just don’t give a fuck. We want to be beautiful and bronzed, if for no other reason than to feel our best. In a world that encourages us to transcend the body, to opt out of the mirror, to flatten our desires in the name of utility or equity or vague “empowerment,” it felt radical to be surrounded by women who were all unapologetically trying.
Beautymaxxing is not delusion, not desperation, but devotion. A small, daily revolt against the modern world’s war on effort, glamour, and standards. Not because those standards were always fair, but because they were at least aspirational.
The modern aesthetic ideal tells us not to try. We’re told ad nauseam to reject “the tyranny of the male gaze,” and replace it with the tyranny of efficiency, forgetting that there is ritual meaning in preparing oneself. We’re encouraged to unburden ourselves from the beauty industrial complex, but still spend $400 a month on facials and laser hair removal—with the caveat that we must never admit that’s why we look good.
Beautymaxxing—or simply, “caring”—rejects that bargain. It says: I’m not here to trick you into thinking I look this way by accident, I deigned enough to try.
There’s something sacred in that.
It’s glorious to revel in fake sunlight for the sake of vanity. Laying in the glow of UV (and red) light is a motion that’s helped me to not just emerge just a little closer to the version of myself that I would like to see, but also one that brings me closer to my ancestors, both near and far. I’ve realized that what they’d been doing right was that they were setting themselves apart from a world increasingly disinterested in the very human desire to look one’s best. And do you know who’s always been best at “revolting against the modern world?” That’s right—the Italians.
Loved this, “It says: I’m not here to trick you into thinking I look this way by accident, I deigned enough to try.”
I live in Paris , which is known for “effortless” beauty.
I don’t care if I “look American” with eyeliner and blush. I cared enough to try. 🤷🏻♀️🇺🇸