Esther Walker: It's too cruel to deny a girl her fake tan

What an unspeakable meanie. Carol Robinson, the acting headteacher of the Baines School in Lancashire, has written to all parents ahead of the new term, asking them not to send their daughters to school wearing too much "false tan" so that they are "varying shades of orange". The school, she goes on, wants to promote "natural beauty and contentment with one's own looks".

What. Ever.

Decent fake tan – note please, Miss, that the correct term is fake tan, not false tan – is one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century. To deny people the right to smother themselves in it, however inexpertly (how else are you to learn, after all?) is just unkind.

More than once, I have lamented the fact that neither fake tan nor that other modern miracle, hair straighteners, existed when I was at school; had they, my own ghastly teen years would have been improved beyond recognition. Being a redhead, I cannot go brown – well, not easily, anyway. As Billy Connolly once said: "It takes me three weeks of tanning just to get white."

But you don't need to be a redhead not to go brown. There are fair-skinned people of all hair colours who, no matter how doggedly they lie prostrate in the garden on a sunny day, will stay mushroom-white, if they don't go raw pink. This is bad enough when you are a grown-up, going about your business in a grown-up fashion, with sensible, adult opinions about vanity and self-worth.

I wager that a bottle of Johnson's Holiday Skin lotion can be found in the bathroom cabinets of serious, high-minded lawyers and academics up and down the country. Just look at Nancy Dell'Olio. She's a lawyer and that colour can't be real. Or what about Emily Maitlis? A Cambridge degree, fluent in four languages and a Newsnight presenter and bright orange, at all times, in all weathers.

So just imagine how bad it is when you are a teenager. The argument that the Baines School girls ought to love the way they are naturally is not only unbelievably babyish, it misunderstands teenagers so grossly that it is a wonder that this Ms Robinson woman is allowed to teach.

Between the ages of 12 and 19, you have no sense of yourself or of what you are worth. No clue who you are, or what you should be. Other girls at school go an effortless nut-brown during the summer, depart in July to spend six weeks in the Devon sunshine, and then come back looking like someone out of an advert for Australia. On TV, all you see are thin, brown, fashionable girls. And their characteristic most easy to imitate is their tan – by getting it out of a bottle.

Obviously, schoolgirls are going to get straight down to Boots and buy the cheapest skin dye available. Obviously, they are going to spend years turning themselves a variety of hideous colours and stinking of digestive biscuits, in just the same way that they will spend years straightening their hair and fussing over the exact length of their skirt.

There are those, of course, who can go brown in the sunshine and on sunbeds but choose, instead, to use fake tan. With all the scientific evidence that shows that lying in the sun first wrinkles you up like a prune and then kills you, that anyone should choose to fake it over basting themselves in UV rays ought to be celebrated and encouraged, pointed out in assembly as exemplary, health-conscious students and rewarded with a Topshop voucher.

Just because girls wish to spend their school years making themselves look as different from their natural state as possible – be it with fake tan, hair dye, jewellery or make-up – it doesn't mean they're suffering from body dysmorphia or are unnaturally insecure. It just means that they are normal teenagers who hate themselves with a passion but who will grow out of it. And the complaint that they overdo it and come to school with streaky legs is staggeringly unforgiving. What modern woman hasn't, from time to time, made the mistake of slopping the stuff on too quickly, too heavily, too near finger and toe-nails, turning her cuticles brown for a week?

If Ms Robinson, or anyone else, really wants schoolgirls to love themselves, they could take them aside and give them a few pointers on good fake tan application. Unless you're going to do that, give them a damned break.

Of course, there is more at work here than Ms Robinson genuinely thinking that, on its own aesthetic terms, fake tan doesn't look nice, or altruistically wanting her girls to love themselves just as they are. To object to fake tan is snobbery, it is to sneer at the people who use it most: footballers' wives; Kerry Katona; Britney Spears; and Jordan. If Princess Anne and Tessa Jowell were serial fake tan abusers, would Ms Robinson think it such a bad thing?

e.walker@independent.co.uk

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