It’s April 2000. I’m 14 years old, lying on a beach in the Bahamas, a bottle of SPF 20 at my side. I periodically check to see how my suntan is developing, watching with fascination as my pale white skin turns a deep, chestnut brown. Through the headphones of my Discman, Baz Luhrmann is telling the class of ’99 to “trust me on the sunscreen.” I nod along to the beat, oblivious to the irony. Luhrmann’s caution is ahead of the curve.

Looking back, 14 seems very young to have been chasing a tan: a remnant of 1970s and ’80s childhoods where we didn’t blink twice at Sun Lovin’ Malibu Barbie featuring “peek-a-boo tan lines”—pale bikini strap-marks painted onto her bronzed body—and Suntan Tuesday Taylor, a plastic doll that developed a “tan” when she got enough natural light.

Nowadays, children and adults alike know the dangers of suntanning and the importance of taking preventive actions, like staying in the shade when the sun is strongest, covering up with clothing and hats, and reapplying a high-factor sunscreen to exposed skin regularly. But when did we start using sunscreen, and why? What does this history tell us about how we use it today, and how we might work toward a more sun-safe future?

In my home country of Britain, sun products in their earliest forms were intended to treat a sunburn after it had occurred. Handwritten recipes of such remedies date back to at least the 18th century. Many of these balms included household ingredients such as milk, lemon juice, and eggs, along with items from the kitchen garden, like strawberries, sage, and cucumber. Lemon juice’s citric acid would reduce pigmentation, although with quite a sting and the risk of serious irritation. Sage (steeped in water as a wash for the face) and cucumber would be soothing and cooling. Strawberry extract has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties and vitamin C content; recipes instructed people to crush the fruit directly onto their face before bedtime to give their skin “the most beautiful tint” in the morning. Among the historical ingredients, bullock’s gall (cow bile) stands out as particularly unappetizing; why it was used we can’t be sure, but research has shown that it may have unexpected medical benefits.

By the early 1900s, British seaside vacationers were able to pick up a bottle of “sunburn lotion” from the pharmacy. Formulas varied, but typically they included zinc as the key ingredient, which dermatology books also recommended. Zinc would continue to appear in sunburn remedies—today in the form of calamine lotion for sunburn relief.

Remedying the effects of sun exposure was all very well and good, but even better was preventing sunburn in the first place. Before we got to full sunblock (which zinc oxide would also come to feature in), for much of the 20^th-century suntan creams had a different primary goal: averting an “unsightly” sunburn while encouraging a “glamorous” suntan.

The “cult of sunbathing” began in the late 1920s and took off in the 1930s, aided in Britain by the growth of continental European tourism. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D. H. Lawrence describes the “acres of sun-pinked” bodies sunbathing on the Venice Lido as not just burnt but “sun-cooked.” An array of suntan creams, lotions, and oils rapidly entered the market around this time, billing themselves on the promise of “suntan without sunburn.” A tan, wisdom went, was not only aesthetically appealing but also safe and healthy.

Early 20th-century scientists thought that the increased pigmentation of the suntan would protect the skin against what was believed to be the more damaging sunburn. So, if you gradually built up a suntan, you were supposedly increasing your skin’s natural “protection.” This misguided idea perpetuated for decades—exemplified in the United States by the famous “tan don’t burn” slogan that long accompanied the Coppertone girl. We now know that there is no such thing as a safe tan: the increased pigmentation of a suntan offers minimal protection, and moreover shows that the damage has already occurred. Instead, those early “suntan without sunburn” creams would have been allowing then-unknown long-term damage to take place. We also now know that while the early focus was on increasing pigmentation to protect pale, white skin from sunburn, sun protection is important for all skin tones.

But to get where we are today, some big changes had to happen. Already in the early decades of the 20th century, ingredients like quinine and aesculin (a chestnut extract) were showing some sun-screening efficacy. Then, in the 1930s, rapid advances in this technology began to proliferate. In 1935, chemist Eugène Schueller, who later founded L’Oreal, added benzyl salicylate to a tanning oil, marking the way for chemical UV radiation absorbers.

The first modern commercial sunscreen—chemist Franz Greiter’s Glacier Cream—arrived on the market in 1946. Greiter later developed and popularized the sun protection factor (SPF) rating, and his early cream is estimated to be around SPF 2. At around the same time, during World War II, pharmacist and airman Benjamin Green discovered “red vet pet,” a petroleum jelly substance that served as an effective sunblock for soldiers. It would later be developed into a more consumer-friendly formula sold as the famous Coppertone suntan lotion.

Our understanding of the dangers of UV radiation has been advancing ever since. Now, the key focus of SPF development is on higher-efficacy formulas, and public health messaging has turned to the promotion of sun safety.

Despite what we now know about the health effects of UV exposure, the appeal of the glamorous tan persists. For those who want to safely achieve the look of Sun Lovin’ Malibu Barbie today, the 1930s tanning craze actually gave us one solution: “artificial bronzing” lotions. Marketed as offering “suntan without sunshine,” these fake tanning products were a welcome addition to the British market, especially, given our unpredictable summer weather. Early iterations were fairly simple formulas that used vegetable extracts to temporarily stain the skin, an effect that could be easily removed with soap and water. By the 1960s, more sophisticated fake-tanning chemical DHA was discovered: rather than staining, it interacts with the skin to create a more lasting effect. A boom of ’60s products followed suit, with catchy names like Easi-Tan, Turn Tan, My Tan, Man Tan, and She Tan. With today’s knowledge about the dangers of tanning from ultraviolet radiation, fake tan has an evident advantage as the only safe tan.

In 2019, my teenage beach days came flooding back to me as I sat in the doctor’s office, getting a mole checked out in a spot below my neck, where I’d had a deep, searing sunburn all those years ago.

It was reassuringly fine, but brought home the importance of continuing to keep an eye on skin changes while taking every precaution in the sun. Today if I’m on a beach it’s under a sun shade, with a T-shirt for extra cover, and the bottle of sunscreen by my side with an SPF 50 and a high UVA star rating.

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“Isn’t that something?” Morty says. “Middle of a drought and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”

Not just in L.A., of course. All of California has a talent for catastrophic paradox—as this winter is reminding us.

Even as we suffer under a dangerous drought and tough water restrictions, atmospheric rivers flood our communities, force neighborhoods to evacuate, and contribute to dozens of deaths.

We are a state with surpassing wealth, and one of the nation’s highest poverty rates. We are packed with people—nearly 40 million—and yet we battle an epidemic of loneliness. We all but invented the suburban ideal of the American home, and yet we can’t house our people.

Our sunny weather—gorgeous—makes us feel alive, but ultimately delivers darkness. It overheats and burns, and with our winds, destroys our precious landscapes, our homes, and our dreams.

The greatest paradox of all, in fact, lies in California’s beauty. One of the world’s most breathtaking places also produces extreme ugliness.

The latest storms and floods targeted our most stunning sites. Overflowing rivers turned the Monterey Peninsula into an island. Lightning struck the Golden Gate Bridge. Santa Barbara County ordered Harry and Meg and Oprah and all the beautiful people in Montecito to evacuate, before their magazine-beautiful homes could slide down toward the sea.

The logic of this place is hard to accept. But here it is:

There is nothing so dangerous as beauty.

And there is nothing so beautiful as California.

This might be the most dangerous place on earth.

Show me something beautiful in California, and I’ll show you a killer. Those coastal waves you can surf for hours? They’ll swallow you whole. The cliffs from which you watch the waves? They are collapsing. The forest-carpeted mountains we love to explore? Just so much fuel for the next firestorm.

Southern Californians love to brag that they can surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon. That’s true, but they also can flee the floods of the morning tide in Newport Beach at breakfast, and escape fires on the hiking trails of the San Bernardino mountains by lunch.

The reality is that the beauty that makes it great to live here also makes it hard to live here. And this is a human condition, not just a California one. “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming—that is the whole tragedy,” Albert Camus observed. “Without beauty, love or danger it would almost be easy to live.”

The greatest wisdom Californians might acquire is a distrust of beauty. The wisest among us don’t marry actors. They don’t buy houses on hillsides.

And they learn not to trust their eyes. Because beauty attracts us to dangers, and also distracts us from them, it makes us miss big problems. In my reporting across California, I’ve developed a trick when I’m in an interesting place, which (more likely than not) is also beautiful. I close my eyes, and just try to listen—to nature, or to what people are saying. You end up learning more that way.

In a time of deadly tragedy in California—and when is it not such a time?—it can be considered insensitive to think about all the risks we take by living here. It can sound as though as you are forgetting, or even blaming, the human victims of our floods, our fires, our quakes, and, yes, our beauty.

But those offended by such talk are as much at risk as the rest of us, and need the warning.  Perhaps there should be some sort of disclosure form that you sign, upon entering California. “I hereby acknowledge,” the form might say, “that I am living in a film noir. I will not trust that glorious mountain peak I want to scale, the waves crashing on the beach, or the alluring blonde.”

Of course, acknowledging dangers can’t protect us from all of them. And behind the carnage of our catastrophes is a real and enduring California question: Should we be here at all?

It’s worth remembering that Robinson Jeffers, perhaps the emblematic 20^th century poet of California, lived amidst Carmel’s splendor—and concluded that the presence of humans here (and throughout the planet) was the real problem. He advised us all, his fellow Californians included, “not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.”

“The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself,” Jeffers also wrote. “The heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”

You may love California and all its rocks and valleys and waterways and gorgeousness. But the beauty won’t love you back, much less offer you any sympathies.

Not even over your dead body.

The post California’s Beauty Doesn’t Love You Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But since October 2015, when the Wall Street Journal first showed that her company’s technology might not work and federal authorities began investigating Theranos, Holmes has looked perfectly beastly in the images illustrating savage media profiles.

In my analysis of Holmes’ declining pulchritude in the media, I find myself engaged in a squirm-inducing labor that picks apart another woman’s appearance. In her excellent book The Argonauts, memoirist and critic Maggie Nelson warns us that even while we challenge the social categories that oppress us, we may simply wind up reinforcing those oppressions; that even while we think that we are wielding crowbars that will let us out of our social and political prisons, we actually just hold keys that open into other kinds of jails. I am going to proceed, nevertheless, because Holmes’ photographic debasement is interesting, wrong, and diverts us from real issues. Even if I am looking out of my sanitarium window, I like the view.

According to my studies, Elizabeth Holmes suffers the tragedy shared by most humans over the age of 12: She must be very carefully posed in order to look pretty in photographs. Photographers have a 367 percent chance of making Elizabeth Holmes look supremely attractive if they shoot her straight on or at a slight angle. She should be shot smiling, but only slightly, and with a closed mouth. Black and white portraits, which make people appear more glamorous and younger, are preferable to color. Holmes must be heavily contoured and shot from way on high and straight on, so her cheekbones will appear. If she is not shot from a good angle, or is lit badly, or has teeth, or is in color that is not retouched, she will look ungainly, maybe slightly pudgy, jowly, or even frightened or insane.

Elizabeth Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was a 19-year-old Stanford University chemical engineering major. She had the idea that a wide variety of medical tests, for everything from Herpes to cholesterol, could be accomplished using an infinitesimal amount of blood and what she calls an “Edison machine.” She sold this idea to Walgreens, which began building Theranos Wellness Centers. This new model for blood tests would liberate the consumer from having to go through a physician to get a blood test approved.

Many people loved the idea. Henry Kissinger thought Holmes was onto something. George P. Shultz concurred. Oracle’s Larry Ellison glommed onto her. So did former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. So many formerly incredible men who were not life scientists thought that Elizabeth Holmes was smart that they dog-piled onto her board of directors and gave her money. In 2005, Theranos was worth $16 million, and then in 2010, it was worth $1 billion.

Everybody loved Theranos, except for intelligent people in Silicon Valley who just murmured warily and didn’t invest. In September 2015, Holmes was still on her upswing, and Forbes shot her in black and white, with her hair up, for its “400” issue ranking the richest people in America. She looks matte and resplendent with heavy lipstick on her Mona Lisa smile and a lot of mascara. She’s contoured so that she has deep cheekbones, and she’s also wearing the black turtleneck favored by Steve Jobs.

In October 2015, her troubles began: The Wall Street Journal published its first denunciation of Holmes, “Hot Start-Up Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology.” Here, reporter John Carreyrou noted that Theranos was now valued at $9 billion, but that an insider admitted that some employees were “leery about the [Edison] machine’s accuracy.” Also, according to an insider, the company had only done a paltry 15 tests using the Edison in December of 2014. But the flow of attractive Holmes covers kept multiplying on newsstands. The same month that the Journal drew its first Theranos blood, Holmes appeared on the cover of Inc. wearing the black turtleneck, smiling with Mona Lisa flair, alongside the banner, “The Next Steve Jobs.” She is shot straight on but is not short-lit, though she is contoured and wearing lipstick. That same month, Holmes appeared on a cover of T, The New York Times Style Magazine. Her three-quarters profile shot might have been ungorgeous except that her hair, which is tied back, has tendrils that sweep elegantly over the lower part of her face. Holmes is sort of squinting adventurously and appears to be standing in the Wonder Woman position, which Harvard Business School Professor Amy Cuddy has famously said can improve your confidence.

But evidence piled up in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation that Theranos testing is prone to false positives (though, blood testing technology in general seems teeth-gratingly inaccurate if you look too deeply at the statistics).

Now the knives were out, and other media gleefully began using the worst Holmes photos they could find. Business Insider illustrated one article with two images: One showed her naturally lit, wearing a turtleneck, not-smiling, scared-looking, shiny, uncontoured, and looking down in a manner that maximizes the jowls. This picture could be justified as an action shot; it’s a still frame from a disastrous interview the article dissects, where Holmes began to see her future and bright dreams slip away. However, the other image has no apparent utility except to illustrate that Holmes is not attractive or prepossessing, even when she tries to be. In this picture, she stands in a black formal gown with her hair down, but she’s stooped and tensely smiling as if she is apologizing.

This spring, the unflattering photos continued to proliferate in both the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair.

But the worst photographs came after federal authorities confirmed in March that they are investigating Theranos and Holmes for misleading investors and federal officials. New York magazine ornamented its April 2016 article on the criminal probe with a low-angled, top-lit shot of Holmes looking crazy-eyed and open-mouthed and as if she is just about to start laughing hysterically or maybe begin screaming. When you click on the magnify button helpfully placed on the photograph, you can see very clearly that Holmes is wearing heavy foundation, has moles on her cheeks and bags beneath her eyes, and is drained of all human color.

We have seen this story-told-in-pictures before, but usually it is in fairy tales involving the demonic daughters of Salem, who begin apple-cheeked and smiling but then turn froggy and old as soon as the baby-eating allegations get out. It may be true that Holmes is a masterful con artist who swindled a host of investors. But what’s more fascinating is the art of the photographer and editor who play an equally clever game by staging this circus of hate.

At first, they depict Holmes as a paragon of white female exceptionalism, a myth she doesn’t necessarily live up to. Then, she is deeply deprived of that form of affirmative action when she is revealed as more human, and portrayed as unrealistically hideous. The public appetite for beautiful white female billionaires is ravenous for about two minutes, after which it devolves quickly into a blood tide of anti-feminist jealousy and lulz. It is unclear how to divvy up Holmes’s assigned guilt: A look at the Dorian Gray-like fable told in the nation’s magazines and newspaper teach us that while we may harbor reasonable anger against Holmes for her possible negligence or deceit, we reserve the rest of our ire for her sliding cheeks and bug eyes, which I predict will get ever sweatier and more dewlap-focused as her dog days drag on.

The post Is the Media Going Too Far in Exposing the Theranos Founder’s Ugly Side? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a high school student in the 1970s, I reveled in being the first girl to wear blue nail polish. Amidst the pervasive beige and orange hues of the era, my “unnatural” nails provoked comments from classmates and strangers, not least because they matched the hip-hugging bell-bottoms I made to complete the ensemble. By then, my mother had learned not to criticize my style: As long as I wore a bra, things were OK.

These days, I get regular manicures and pedicures but rarely have color applied to my fingernails. The solvents and pigments I use in my art studio would mar the smooth surfaces and clean lines of the meticulously applied hues. Then there’s the time I spend in the classroom. Plain nails go along with the image of the serious, scholarly professor.

Though I have set aside the reds and blues of my youth, I’m interested—as an artist and an anthropologist—in the trend of making one’s nails into exhibition spaces. At the Riverside salon that I frequent, I like to listen to discussions between manicurists and their clients: Will the green checkerboard pattern clash or complement the pink dress? Is deep brown or amber a good choice for a job interview? Holidays make choices easier: Even women my mother’s age sport skulls with rhinestone eyes at Halloween and ask for reindeer to match their holiday sweaters at Christmas. My friend described her elaborate manicures to me as “fun,” like a game. Nail art enables anyone to participate in the craze for body art and modification in a more playful spirit than permanent tattoos or plastic surgery.

But even as it grows more and more complex, one of the most peculiar aspects of this art form is that its base (a fingernail) is a growing part of a living organism—one that will eventually be cut off. Aside from the impermanence of nails, their surface offers an excellent base that is naturally rigid and slightly curved. Unlike canvas, paper, or wood panels, the unadorned nail is transparent with clear markings. Nail artists use the nail’s moon shape as a design element, or borrow from the traditional “French” manicure with its whitened tips.

Because so many nail styles and designs involve the ability to reproduce motifs with great consistency, nail artists must be nimble-fingered and detail-oriented. They use tiny brushes and air brushes that blow paint for shading. Ball-point pens are used to make polka dots, checkerboards, or lines. When I watch a nail artist inscribe a drawing on a pinky, it makes me think of masters of the art of miniature, from the great painters of Persia to Bruegel.

But unlike watercolor, tempera, or some acrylic painting techniques, nail artists never apply color to an unprimed surface. They paint a base coat, a background of “primer” that makes hard, strong, rigid nails the foundation of the art. This is what allows these artworks to be exhibited: to shine at the dinner table they must be strong enough to get through shopping, food preparation and, later, dishwashing.

The necessary utility of the “gallery” also results in conservatism with regard to form. Nails may be molded in various ways and objects attached to extend them or alter their shape. But while unusually long, pointed, or otherwise complexly shaped nails are more common today then in the past, they are still often seen as outrageous. Perhaps this is a way for the person wearing those nails to flaunt that she doesn’t do menial tasks. Upper-class ladies often rely on others to clean their homes, and keep their own nails “tastefully” demure.

Nails are unique in body art for their rigidity, which enables painters to develop hard-edged, fixed images that are difficult to achieve on softer materials like skin. Lines stay in place; decals stay put. It also makes them an ideal base for building up interesting textures: beads and jewels have become popular additions in recent years. This is a current trend among young fashionistas but must also be related to the burgeoning popularity of bead crafts in recent years.

Another new trend in nail design is to use distinct patterns or colors on certain fingers or toes to turn them into punctuation marks. It’s common to paint the nail of the ring finger with a design that complements or clashes with the colors and images on the other fingers. This style has become so ubiquitous that it’s hardly a personal statement any longer.

One key feature of the nail painter’s canvas: hands are always moving and cannot shape a still image. So tiny nail pictures evolve, transported in multiple directions like a moving mosaic. As a hand reaches for an object, it brings swirls of color into contact. The percussive sound of nails on typewriters is one I recall from disco days. Now, computer keyboards provide a softer background sound for an evolving exhibition: Today my office at UC Riverside featured hands with Mick Jagger’s lips, the letters of a boyfriend’s name, and 10 different musical notes, all in constant motion.

But as keyboards give way to touch screens and perhaps eventually even voice-activated devices, and as hand-driven machines are replaced by remotely operated systems, ever more creative nail sculptures may become more practical. Couples could have their nails fashioned to entangle and intertwine in elaborate courtship rituals. Nails could expand their musical range: not only as the percussion instruments they already are, but also as whistles, flutes, or new kinds of personal string instruments. And of course, nails may become convenient places to store ever-smaller bits of information. The rhinestones we see on nails today may end up housing tiny computer chips that emit sounds, images, scents, or subliminal messages.

In our ephemeral, minimalist age, the nail might be the perfect canvas for telling the world who we are and what we want to be. Its impermanence makes it easy to take on and shed personas from day to day or week to week. And as we store more and more information in ever-tinier vessels, the ideal modicum of self-expression shouldn’t be any bigger than a fingertip.

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