Kealey’s campus confessions – 24/08/12

Naturally, I look like a duck egg. My skin is so white that in winter I am an attractive translucent blue, interrupted only by the erratic freckles God dribbled over me in a fit of madness. Mine is the complexion that keeps me walking quickly through the Tate Modern in case someone confuses me for a bad monochromatic Jackson Pollock. My life with a ginger complexion is a daily, bloody all out war against my colouring. Battle casualties include the large number of bathtubs and showers I’ve used since I was fourteen which all have jarring orange scars ripped around their rims and drain plugs from years of fake tan abuse.

This summer, however, I have had a revelation. I here by promise that NEVER AGAIN will I spend June waddling around with my legs stretched far apart to help encourage a drying draft, or care when it runs off me in sheets destroying my shoes and leaving me white enough for strangers to stop me and ask if I was raised as veal. I have found the light.

As I write, I’m sitting in a sweaty room in the middle of Shanghai, China. Everyone around me has the most beautiful toasty golden skin, the type that I have pleaded desperately with mine to go whilst sobbing bitterly on sunbeds. It’s the kind of conversation that leaves me telling myself if I burn some more, my freckles will eventually get dense enough to look like a tan, (thank heavens for my freckles after all). As I look around, full of envious loathing and self pity, I notice a small white bottle and ask my friend what it is, and he explains. Is this a nation that can happily wander about its streets without feeling the urge to spend half its student loan on grimy orange skin paint that smells out seminar rooms? No it isn’t. Billions of Chinese people, instead, spend half their student loan equivalent, on whitening cream.

There can only be one conclusion: beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, and that beholder is psychotic moron. He needs to be put in a home with all the fake tan, whitening cream and lunatics who think that for me to be beautiful I need to be as toasty as an Asian lady, and for her to look beautiful, she needs to be as translucent as me. Good bye fake tan. It won’t be long until someone somewhere says that blue skin and freckles are the hight of beauty. If I’m still bothered, I’ll move there.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

After having written the above, I had the most telling experience. When walking around a pharmacy yesterday and happily looking at some pickled ginger and a bottle of sheep placenta pills, the lady behind the counter started hailing me in the most desperate manner. I move over to her, worrying that to have caused such a reaction I must be developing the first visible stages of yellow fever or be bleeding from the ears. The lady grabs me and then a box from the shelf behind me, and then starts making a familiar gesture; running two fingers from each hand across her nose and down her cheeks. I look down at the box, where miraculously there is an English translation. “This whitening cream is for removing the unsightly presence of melanin from the face”, it reads. Freckle removal cream.
“Not good” the woman behind the counter says, pointing at my face, “you need to be white. This not good.”
“How interesting,” I reply whilst imagining the damage I could do to this lady with that large pickled ginger, “in England I am too white, at home the freckles are pretty, and golden skin is what is considered beautiful.”
“No, not good. Ugly face.” Said the lady. At this point, my friend comes over to me and asks to leave. Some old bat has been chasing her around the shop with breast enlargement pills.