Sprayed-on: dabbling in Level 3

Monday, July 28, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.- From where, exactly, is a willfully bad idea born?

 That is something I wondered to myself recently as I stood  - nearly naked and giggling nervously - prepared to have my entire body sprayed with a mist of artificial bronzing spray.

 After a long day of production last week, I sauntered into Celebrity Tanning, located in the Smith’s Plaza. That marked the fulfillment of an idea - a joke, really - proposed to me at a barbeque a few weeks earlier.

 “You should come get a level three spray-on tan,” suggested Jess McMillan, a valley native and Kelly resident, who currently works part-time at Celebrity Tanning. “Nobody ever gets the level three.”

Perhaps they fear the resulting shade of bronze or tan or some other skin hue will be too severe or unnatural looking in a valley where many residents by mid-summer sport healthy patinas earned from hours of ‘sending it’ in the outdoors.

Feeling that I, too, had acquired a respectable summer tan after spending my share of shirtless days biking around, throwing the Frisbee and floating down rivers, I was a bit dismayed when the ladies at Celebrity Tanning remarked how pasty I actually was.

 “Yeah, you’re white alright,” said owner Lisa McMillan, who is married to Jess’s dad. “You’ll be a good guinea pig.”

I had inquired earlier about the chemicals involved with spray-on bronzing, to which Jess assured me I would be doused with not much more than beet juice. At Celebrity Tanning, though, Lisa suggested I first spend some time in a ultra-violet bed to help build a base tan and also to “open the pores” of my skin before the spray-on treatment. Though talk of women “frying” their ovaries came to mind, I figured I might as well pull out all the stops and ‘drop in,’ as the kids are saying these days.

After the bed, while my skin still felt warm to the touch, I debated whether or not to don the disposable underwear offered in the spray-on chamber. The spray-on machine looks like a glass shower stall within a small private closet. I cannot describe the space to you much beyond that, as I was preoccupied at the thought that I was, in fact, about to be doused.

Erring on the side of caution, I slipped on the disposable paper underwear, a decision to protect my undercarriage from foreign, transformative substances.

The spray-on machine itself is fully automated. A hanging diagram instructs the sprayee how to pose and revolve in a number of positions to get the full bronzing effect. One push of a button prompts a voice that walks you through the steps of a process that lasts less than a minute. A light mist sprays first at the feet and then up and over the body, like a gentle carwash.

I stepped out, dabbed off and removed the dolphin and Playboy bunny stickers I had placed on either side of my abdomen. I would not see results until hours later, because the treatment takes time to set in. Heavy sweating and showering is to be avoided, lest you end up with a mottled cosmetic tan.

 As I write this, the sallow silhouettes of a dolphin and bunny (and the palm tree on my shoulder blade) have faded back into my pallid mid-summer’s complexion, erased forever to time like feathers blown from an alabaster vase. To be honest, I secretly hoped to turn some unnatural tone of orange, like a buff So-Cal car salesman with capped teeth. I looked good, though, and natural – or so people told me. But if, in the future, you tell anyone you saw me walking out of a tanning salon you can tell them I sent it, with a Level Three.

Photo by SPENCER SIMENSEN
The author, taking one for the team. Note: tanline from disposable underwear.

PERMALINK:
Sprayed-on: dabbling in Level 3 | Planet JH News Article: General News

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