TriumphAnt

Why am I not re-assured?
 
Recently, on what clearly was a slow news day, CBC-TV ran a story about the latest trend in tanning for those who didn’t want to expose themselves to the open-air wasteland of melanoma-forming nuclear toxicity we so carelessly refer to as “a warm sunny day”. Although the CBC rationalized what they presented by having the segment flagged as “health”, I noticed that it also offered them the opportunity for using lots and lots of shots of  tanned, shapely and barely covered anatomy on beaches ranging from Vancouver BC to… West Vancouver, BC. (The rest of the country is still rather desperately searching for summer among the raging floodwaters of torrential downpours, it seems.)
 
Apparently, you can now get a tan by being hosed from forehead to feet by someone wielding an artist’s airbrush connected to a reservoir filled with a substance that goes by the warmly re-assuring label of dihydroxylacetone (DHA, for convenience’s sake). And they’ve even named the colours you can go for, with monikers like “Glamour Gold”, “Amber Mist”, “Bronzing Mist” and so on… although one product line rather disconcertingly also offers a 5-pack of “Corrector” applications. (“Oh, you didn’t want the ‘Shaka Zulu’ finish. No problem. Just bathe five times in our special ‘dip and strip’ formula…”)
 
“And it’s completely natural!” chirped a “consultant beautician”, whose plucked and pencilled eyebrows made it wincingly clear that she and “natural” had parted company somewhere back about the time John and Arlyn Phoenix were naming their kids River and Leaf.
 
So just for fun, I did some quick online hunts. Apparently DHA has cleared the US Food and Drug Administration’s testing processes. In fact, DHA is just about the only active ingredient they’ve officially approved for artificial tanning. Despite its relative newness in the vanity industry, its medical background has a significantly longer pedigree. According to the FAQ-finders on a website called “Sunless.com: Your sunless tanning guide”, DHA was observed to “turn the skin brown” by “some apparently sloppy German scientists in the 1920s”. The immediately beggared questions, (a) what were they actually looking for? and (b) what happened that led to their being labelled “sloppy”? sadly go unanswered.
 
(“Und zo, Hans, iff you vill vatch carefully, you vill zee how chust a small application uff a minute amount uff zis miracle ingredient on ze left front paw uff Heidi, ze laboratory schnauzer, vill… oops. Ach, mein gott in himmel!!!” And the very next morning a headline in the Dusseldorf Rheinische Post screamed: “Residents of Unteralpenshutzenfrieburgstrassesschnitzelhaven terrorized by gigantic but beautifully tanned dog!!!”)
 
After WWII, the substance was used to treat a condition called vitiligo, which apparently is sufficiently well-known that it merits its own foundation, called The National Vitiligo Foundation, oddly enough. Vitiligo is defined as “spontaneous irregular depigmentation of skin which can occur at any stage in life”.
 
(It strikes me here that this offers real potential for a major PR boost of ear-friendly nomenclature by someone who can make a lasting contribution to the future fight to find a cure for vitiligo – just like Lou Gehrig did for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Try them out – Vitiligo, or… Michael Jackson’s Disease? But I digress.)
 
And even more surprising, DHA itself can probably claim a legitimate connection to the “natural” label. It’s derived from a vegetable source -- “most likely sugar beets”, according to sunless.com; a “colourless 3-carbon sugar”, according to the New Zealand Dermatological Society. DermNet NZ, however, is not as unconditionally optimistic as sunless.com. The New Zealand derms note that DHA has “rarely” resulted in contact dermatitis.
 
But come on people, you’re spray-painting yourselves for heaven’s sake!
 
I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that someone once died from being spray-painted from head to toe. That’s true, right?
 
Oh, no, wait a minute… now I remember!
 
Actually, this whole stupid story made me realize just how right Carol Pope had it when she sang, “I’m a victim of fashion.”
 
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And finally, file this under “messing with your mind”:
 
My morning walk to work always takes me through a church parking lot where, during the week, several people park who work at the nearby Ottawa General Hospital. Friday morning, as I crossed the paved surface, I heard an appalling sound coming from the peak of the church roof – a sound that seemed to marry gagging on a partially swallowed chunk of chicken with the sound of someone breathing his last as the choking hands of a Ninja assassin complete their throttling. (To tell the truth, I’ve only ever really heard one of these sounds; the other – well, I confess I actually have to imagine how someone would sound if he was choking on a bite of chicken.)
 
Looking up, I saw an adult crow being chased along the church’s roofline by two juvenile crows. The sound came from the kids, who even though big enough to chase down their own food, clearly still had not let go of the concept of parental feeding and were demanding breakfast as only crows can.
 
Meanwhile, one of the hospital workers had just exited her car and was crossing the parking lot when the young birds’ strangled cries got her attention as well. She looked up as I got close enough to her to say, “It’s a good thing crows are such huge birds because they sure can’t sing worth a damn!”
 
She replied “That’s… uh, right,” and my last view of her was one of a somewhat perplexed expression as she started pondering what possible impact either a reduction in size or an improved song voice would make on enhancing the position of the lowly crow in the bird world’s… well, (*ahem*) pecking order.
 
When I got to work I had coffee.