Stick Me Full Of Needles

“Hold up your arms,” the woman tells me. I’m naked, freezing, cornered in a tile booth, no escape. So I do what I’m told. She lifts a gun the size and shape of a vintage dust-buster, fires a stream of ice-cold sludge at my body and layers me in a brown bronzer that stinks, for some mysterious reason, of tomato soup.

I’m getting a spray tan. It’s high summer in Southern California, and I — the kind of pale that only ever burns — want to cosplay Baywatch at the beach, embody everything Baywatch connotes. Beauty, yes; a sort of pornographic hotness, yes. Also: leisure, fitness, a life lived outdoors in endless balmy weather. I grew up in the 1990s, a time when Pam Anderson tan was The Look, and girls scurried in droves to UV booths wearing thongs and Playboy bunny stickers (tan lines were also hot). In those days, I often felt left out, ugly, a failure; my inability to tan felt like a character flaw, the tip of the proverbial iceberg of insecurity. So now, like many women, I’m in the habit of attempting to correct that narrative, even if in the process, I’m buying into it — literally and figuratively — just the same. Coveting beauty is my deepest-seeded vice. I crave and find comfort in beauty, pursue and study it, love and hate it. I would hazard a guess that many women feel this way, beauty being a female-coded indulgence in a world where the most well-trodden vices — drinking, gambling, sex — are the opposite, and carry with them the negative associations of self-harming behavior. The feminine quest for conventional beauty, on the other hand, is often framed as self-optimizing. Some even argue that beauty can bond women. That when confessed to in TikToks and Reels, the effort we put into how we look offers radical honesty, empowerment, choice, a “safe space” for shame-free navigation of beauty standards and the promise that, while you may feel isolated in the tanning booth, you are not alone. (No doubt this is true, but women bonding over how to best navigate the standards that oppress us will never negate said oppression.)

Today’s spray-down isn’t my first rodeo, not by a long shot. I’ve been spray tanning steadily for five summers, my $49 monthly membership to the chain tanning center but one drop in the bucket of time and money I’ve poured into being beautiful. Balayage, Botox, bikini waxes, laser facials, false lashes, dermal filler — this is a partial tally of my vanity-centric pursuits, past and present. Of course, the treatments that offer the most drastic change — and often require the most investment, both in terms of pain and cash — always prove the hardest to give up. As soon as I entered adulthood, I traded the subtle hopes of serums and creams for the drama of injectables, the rush I got when the needle hit, delivering instant, momentous transformation. I was fundamentally lacking, I believed, and required drastic change to be fixed. Pain is beauty and vice-versa, right? Or so we’ve been told by the suits who’ve long sold women on the myth of our inadequacy. Since I can remember, I’ve been a mark.

The perks of conventional attractiveness — “pretty privilege,” in common parlance — is a social phenomenon that loosely can be defined as the privilege of the benefit of the doubt. Research shows that attractive individuals are more likely to be hired and promoted, and more likely to be associated with moral goodness, by simple virtue of the way they look. No wonder Americans pour billions into their appearances every year. For me, pursuing aesthetic treatments also grants me a sense of control over time, as well as a sense of ownership over my body, which for me, as for many women, has rarely felt quite my own.

Coveting beauty is my deepest-seeded vice. I crave and find comfort in beauty, pursue and study it, love and hate it.

Back in the Baywatch era, the prevailing wisdom was that women should have a specific sort of body, one that is white and thin and manicured, waxed and dyed and compliant — all without trying. It was the effort that was the vice, or so the story went, and every tabloid was riddled with celebrities “exposed” for having had plastic surgery or socialites berated for being dangerously thin (after having been called fat six months prior in the same publication). Beauty ideals are, by design, impossible to reach without expending effort — but also impossible to reach with effort, because beauty should be effortless. It takes but a quick glance at the comments section of any public-facing woman’s social media to see how this persists today. She needs a facelift or shouldn’t have had one. She’s had too much Botox or too little. She looked better blonde. Or brunette. The internet teems with hate for vapid, vain women (much of which, it must be said, comes from other women). Yes, keeping women hating on, judging, and policing each other is among the primary objectives of those responsible for setting the beauty standards in the first place. A house divided cannot stand.

And yet, here I am, standing in the booth. The spray tan technician guides me through a series of ridiculous poses — squatting, saluting, swiveling my hips, pointing my toes — hosing me idly. Once my tan is finished, she exits and I stand, still naked, in front of a giant whirring fan, ruing the inconvenience of having to wait, covered in tacky tanner, for hours before I can shower. My body feels like a walking strip of fly paper, tacky and toxic. Already I need to pee, and doing so while the tan is setting presents its own sort of challenge, as even one drop of wetness risks streaks.

I dress gingerly and drive home sitting on a towel, smelling myself — my body odor somehow amplified by tanner-clogged pores — and hovering ever so slightly, trying to avoid creases. I still have to pee. Beauty can be an inconvenience and a pain. And yet, when three hours later I finally rinse off the top layer of bronzer and face myself in the mirror, it’s with the grim acceptance of what now seems inevitable: The tan is perfect, golden, entirely fake, as much a fantasy as the TV show that inspired it. I wanted to cosplay Baywatch and now I can; I am C.J. Parker.

But in an existential sense, the tan fixed nothing. I’m still me: a woman in a body trying to move peacefully through a world of contradictions. Intellectually I knew something as banal as a spray tan wouldn’t change all that. But for the duration of the procedure, that slim, transformative window of time before the final result, I got close to believing that it could. I take out my phone and book my next appointment.