But Not Too White

But for fish, being sun bleached is considered the "ultimate tan".

"Gotta keep the tan up. It's not a skin color, it's a lifestyle, Brian. You wouldn't know that because you're white as a ghost. You're haunting this house with your whiteness, Brian."

— Stewie Griffin, Family Guy

Though fair ('white') skin has historically been — and in many places still is — sought after, Europe and its offshoots have gone off it lately. This has been due to the increasing popularity of long-distance 'holidays', typically to warm and sunny places.

Throughout the pre-1950s world, fair and un-calloused skin was a sign of being high-class and not needing to perform manual labor to survive. Great lengths were taken to maintain pale and dainty skin, including using lead and arsenic-based makeup and, during certain fashion cycles, ladies carrying parasols whenever going outside. There's a reason that in pre-modern times the word "fair" came to be a synonym of "beautiful."

Tanned skin was one of the new "beauty standards" promoted by Coco Chanel in the early 20th century, but it didn't quite take off until the '50s and '60s when people actually had the money and the means to do this kind of thing. Tanned skin was a sign that you had both the money and the free time to visit nice places with fresh air and sun, something just not possible for Europe's middle classes in the twenties and thirties.

Tanning reached an apex in The '70s, and again in The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, when every actress and model had to have a dark orange tan in order to be considered attractive. Tan Lines from swimsuits were not considered unattractive, but a "farmer's tan" — the kind you get by actually working outdoors — is still considered a sign of low social class. This has also led to the rise of tanning salons, sunbeds, and hours of sun exposure without any form of UV protection, which consequently led to a rise in skin cancer, particularly in young people.

Today, the extent of this trope varies from country to country. In most of Asia paler is better, but in the general western world, a light tan is a sign of healthy physical activity. Pale skin is often associated with being a nerds, goths, shut-ins, or invalids. People who rarely venture into the sun will often be unwilling to wear shorts or take off their shirts or shoes in public for fear of revealing a "pasty" complexion beneath their standard clothing. Even people who lack the ability to tan (like most gingers) will often be self-conscious of their white skin tone.

Also see Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette, Undeathly Pallor. Contrast But Not Too Black, where a character faces colorism, or discrimination for the darkness of their skin. Compare But Not Too Foreign. May be considered a reason why Albinos Are Freaks.

Not to be confused with Dark Is Not Evil.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The famous (and somewhat sleazy) ad for Coppertone sun lotion features a nicely tanned little blonde girl having her swim trunks pulled down by a dog, exposing her pasty white buttocks. The ad's slogan? "Don't Be a Paleface!"

Film

• Possibly lampshaded in The A-Team:
  Hannibal: (to Face, who has just stepped out of a tanning booth) You are really, really tan.
• Bromley from Daybreakers mentions that Edward looks good with a tan after he turned back into a human.
• In Final Destination 3, two of the would-be roller coaster victims are a couple of shallow blondes who decide that the best way to prepare for their graduation is to go to the tanning salon, just like when they tanned to get ready for the funeral of their classmates who died in the coaster crash. This being a Final Destination movie, this ends really badly for both of them.
• In an inversion, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart from the Twilight movies have been praised for their pale looks and many hope they can lower the skin cancer rates for teens due to excessive tanning.

Literature

• In The Irregular at Magic High School, friends of Miyuki once compared her to a ghost. They didn't mean it as an insult- she's always been considered very beautiful- but she didn't like it because it reminded her that she looks different from the rest of her family (all of whom tan). This is Foreshadowing that she was genetically modified away from being consanguineous with them.
• Martine from Legend of the Animal Healer is half-African, but feels completely British and has difficulty fitting in to the culture her mother came from — especially because bullies at her new school insult her for being too white.
• Diana Wynne Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland warns to look at the tan — the more tanned the more Good.

Live Action Television

• Burn Notice features Gabrielle Anwar playing a tanned, sun-worshipping Irishwoman living in Miami. The odds are pretty good that any real Irishwoman living in sun-soaked Miami and wearing the clothes she wears would look like an overgrown lobster.
• Cheers. Carla used to mock Diane Chambers for being whitebread, and mocked her as "whitey". Diane would defend her pale skin as "alabaster". Then came Lilith (played by Bebe Neuwirth, whose real skin tone was very pale.)
• A big part of Conan O'Brien's self-deprecating humor is the act of mocking his porcelain skin. In the Pale Force cartoons shown in Late Night with Conan O'Brien, O'Brien and comic Jim Gaffigan are superheroes whose powers derive from their blinding pastiness.
• On Degrassi: The Next Generation, Paige and her boyfriend (who is also her teacher) are in the park enjoying themselves and they ridicule a guy's pale white legs — and then they later find out it's her other teacher Mr. Simpson.
• Dexter: More as a way of venting her disgust, Deb uses Lilah's paleness as one way of insulting her, asking Dexter what kind of person is pale in Miami. "A pale, English, titty vampire." Dexter, however, responds, "You just described my ideal woman." Batista also comments favourably on her porcelain, china doll complexion.
• Frasier. Lilith's paleness was often mocked, and even lampshaded by Lilith herself late in the series in the episode "Lilith Needs a Favor".
  Albert (played by the ultra-pale Brent Spiner, aka Data): No, actually, I'm always this pale. My ex-wife used to say she could tell when I was embarrassed because I'd turn off-white.
  Lilith: I can empathize. Sometimes after a late night, I cover my under-eye circles with Liquid Paper.
• Glee frequently draws attention to Kurt's fair skin. Not only does he have a mildly obsessive skincare routine, but when he asks Coach Sylvester to stop calling him 'Lady,' his new nickname becomes 'Porcelain.' Emma also called him "an eleven-year-old milkmaid" a few times.
• The BBC comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me had a sketch which poked fun at the Indian idealisation of pale skin, with a deathly pale but quite obviously Indian shop assistant touting cosmetics to make skin look paler. When the customer asked what she used she indignantly insisted she was that pale naturally. Like several other sketches on the show, it was poking fun at Indians who basically didn't want to be Indian, but wanted to be white (see also the Kapoors, sorry, Coopers).
• In an episode of Happy Endings, when Brad hears that Dave's new girlfriend wants to make a sex-tape, he warns Dave that he's very white, "like the ghost of Tilda Swinton."
• Mohawk Girls:
  • Anna, angry at being mistreated for being half white and acting differently from what's expected among most Mohawks, says she's more Mohawk than most of them due to many looking much more white. Bailey (who could pass for white herself), rebukes her for this, retorting that Mohawks come in all shapes and sizes. Anna had also earlier mistakenly thought that white people were in the bar, noting happily they got along with the Mohawks there... until she's hotly told all of them are Mohawk. Later on, she learns the band citizenship is determined through blood quantum, which means members have to be 50% Mohawk at least through ancestry, which Anna isn't (she has a white mother, and her dad has a non-native ancestor as well, thus she can't be a tribal member, which devastates her).
  • Zoe's own mother laments (to her face) that she has more white looks than she expected, as Zoe's father has some white ancestry.
• One Day at a Time (2017): The fair-skinned Elena despairs when she realizes her skin tone doesn't make her look as Latino as her darker family members.
  Penelope: You and your brother are of different shades.
  Lydia: Yes, Papito is a beautiful caramel, and you are… Wonder Bread.
• Joked with in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati when Venus, Andy and Andy's visiting sister get to talking about skin color:
  Venus: You know, I'm not really black, I'm sort of cocoa brown. [points to Andy] And you're beige. [points to Johnny Fever] But that dude is white.

Music

• Nicola Roberts of the British pop group Girls Aloud was often derided as "the ugly one" in the press because her extremely pale skin and bright red hair made her stand out in stark contrast◊ to her bandmates' tanner complexions. It's mostly abated by now as she has used her paleness as the basis for starting and marketing a successful makeup range for pale women.
• Madonna:
  • When her debut single "Everybody" was released in 1982, she actually had to fight the record execs to be featured in her own music video. The song was heavily influenced by early 80's R&B, and the execs thought viewers wouldn't take Madonna seriously if they knew she was white. For this same reason, she doesn't appear in the single's cover art.
  • Both averted and played straight by in her video for "Express Yourself", where Madonna herself is lit brightly enough that her super-pale skin seems whiter than the bedsheets she clings to (only the vital parts of) herself, while her lover has darkly tan skin by contrast.
• Red Rodney (born Robert Roland Chudnick), an American jazz trumpeter, played in a quintet with Charlie Parker from 1949 to 1951. He was the only white member of the group; at the time, prejudices in the South ran high against mixed-race musical acts. To get around this problem, Parker billed Rodney as "Albino Red" and passed him off as a black man with very light skin.

Professional Wrestling

• It's a staple of Pro Wrestling that many wrestlers will have to tan when competing on shows as the lights in the arenas will make them appear paler than they actually are, as Sheamus demonstrates. This is especially glaring (no pun intended) in larger arenas where high-intensity lights are needed and are thus not flattering to those with pale skin. According to Maria Kanellis, the wrestlers in WWE previously just used fake tan but when they switched to HD they had to start tanning naturally. Randy Orton mocked Christian for continuing to use fake tanner in the HD era, as it makes his skin appear yellow.
• Subverted with Aksana who is a pale skinned Lithuanian. Old photos from her Fitness competition days show her tanned and looking rather unnatural compared to how she looks now. Next to all the other girls on the roster, she's quite pale but the announcers don't acknowledge this and talk up how attractive she is. Photos from her fitness competition days will make her look unnatural. Because of the incredibly harsh lighting (and the fact that darker skin highlights muscle tone better), most fitness athletes use several layers of a very dark sunless tanner (like Pro-Tan or Dream-Tan) to darken their skin to bizarre levels. They'll look normal on stage but backstage will look like they're covered in rust. Look up photos of any fitness model or bodybuilder, and there will be a mix of onstage, backstage, and off-season photos that will show this. There are pictures of her from her modeling days as a blonde, though.
• Bryan Danielson has taken a lot of heat for his paleness over the years and addressed the issue in a promo during his ROH World Heavyweight Title reign. As usual for Bryan, he turned a trait perceived as unmanly into Testosterone Poisoning in this video:
  "I'm getting sick and tired of all these people giving me crap about what color my skin is. Do you know what? Yeah, I'm pale — what's the big deal? Samoa Joe made a big deal about it in Connecticut, Christian made a big deal about it in Long Island, but you know what? It doesn't matter what color my skin is, because I'm the best wrestler in the world! I beat Homicide, I beat everybody that Ring of Honor has put in front of me! And d'you know what? THAT is what makes me a MAN! And do you know what's unmanly? All these idiots talking about my skin color, going and sitting in front of a bunch of fluorescent lights with goggles and a Speedo!"
• Eighties wrestler King Kong Bundy also had particularly pale skin, which he accentuated by wearing a black one-piece wrestling costume. Legend has it that one commentator, seeing this over 400-pound, milky-white monstrosity dressed in black, promptly dubbed him "Shamu."
• MsChif was still getting jeered for her pale complexion even in 2002 after she had been with Gateway Championship Wrestling for a year. It appears wrestling fans did get used to it eventually though, as she was voted "sexiest" at Missouri Wrestling Revival in 2012. Sean Vincent and Ryan Ash never seemed to get past it though, while Billy McNeil seemed to get a free pass for being redheaded and Irish.
• Nicole Matthews has been affectionately dubbed "The Woman The Sun Forgot" on The World Famous Flea Market (and she's one of the wrestlers they like)
• FCW's Paige (also known as Brittani Knight from Pro Wrestling EVE) has opted for the no tan look as well which fits her Anti-Diva character. She previously tanned normally in EVE and SHIMMER.
• Sheamus plays up his Irish heritage with his pale skin. This makes him stand out amongst almost every other Caucasian WWE wrestler, most of whom have tanned skin. Of course, Sheamus's skin is often poked fun at on wrestling online forums. Sheamus has said in interviews that he actually tried to get a tan early in his pre-WWE career, but would just turn red then back to white. Realizing that his pale skin and red hair gave him a unique look, however, he decided to just go with that. On an episode of Raw, John Cena referred to him as a big tub of mayonnaise. Also mentioned in NXT. Edge has also gotten a chance to poke fun at Sheamus's paleness, remarking that Raw had apparently "been taken over by an evil Ronald McDonald!" As has Santino Marella in a few hilarious segments, joking about Sheamus's "lack of skin pigmentation.
  • He's nicknamed "The Great White". Not the great white anything, just the Great White. Although a fan once held up a poster with Sheamus' name and a drawing of a shark fin.
• When he first debuted, The Undertaker was very pale as well; combined with his dyed black hair, dark clothes, and mannerisms, it made him very creepy. Being a natural redhead, he was probably also naturally that pale.
• Winter from TNA is a pale-skinned German-raised English-born woman who frequently gets "get a tan" chanted at her from crowds. However many fans do find her attractive so she might count as a subversion.

Sports

• Mixed Martial Arts featherweight Erik Koch had noticeably pale skin for a fighter before getting a sponsorship deal with a tanning company. Since then, he's sported an unnatural orange complexion.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Bill Hicks had a bit where him going to the beach would be accompanied by shouts of "Bill put your shirt back on! We can't find our towels!" He also comments that "There are all these beautiful people with tan skin and white teeth. I have white skin and tan teeth."
• A major portion of Jim Gaffigan's act is him making fun of his own paleness.
• Irish-American comedian George Carlin once joked, "I don't try to tan. I just try to neutralize the blue."

Video Games

• In King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, the Mockingbird can tell Valanice, "Only your varicose veins save you from being completely colourless".
• Subverted in Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA. Vocaloid character Len Kagamine appears in swim shorts on the beach, and he is quite pale.
• WWE Day of Reckoning has created wrestlers lose the most of red component in their skin tone (and all of the blue) the lighter you try to go, so that pale skin always looks jaundiced and sallow. Caucasian skin tones are perfectly natural with any level of a tan, but trying to make, say, Sheamus will have him turn out looking like he's doing a guest spot on The Simpsons.
• The 8th-gen WWE Video Games have a tendency to make caucasian superstars a lot more tanned than their real-life counterparts usually are. Most wrestlers who are on the pale side in reality have a noticeably darker skintone in-game, and wrestlers who are normally well-tanned make George Hamilton look like Tim Burton, with the aforementioned Sheamus being one of the very few who's accurately represented in all his pasty glory.

Web Animation

• In The Grossery Gang webseries arc "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous", Meathead, while coaching the newly rich Ricardo on how to look the part, says he's too pale and needs a tan, because "rich people love their fake tans", though it ends up a real tan in Ricardo's case...and a very streaky one at that.
• In one Teen Girl Squad comic in the Homestar Runner universe, when Cheerleader complains that she wanted to go to "Coach Conrad's Sit-Up Camp For Shirtless Boys" instead of ending up at "Cosplayover Camp," Science Fiction Greg says, "Oh, I can take my shirt off!" Cheerleader is instantly charred in the "Blinding Voip" that reflects off Sci-Fi Greg's pasty white skin. Which is an Informed Deformity of course, since the whole cartoon looks like uncolored stick figures on white paper.

Web Original

• "Irish girl sunbathing. No, not her... the other one." An old meme of two women on the beach, but only one is immediately visible because her friend blends in with the white sand.

Webcomics

• Ctrl+Alt+Del also has a strip where Ethan is so white he goes red from massive sunburn from a few seconds of exposure to beach daylight.
• In El Goonish Shive, Tedd drinks some magical tea that turns him into a Surfer Dude complete with a tan. Dan notes in The Rant that Tedd would pretty much never get a tan unless magic was involved.
• When Francis of PvP takes off his shirt to attach mechanical arms to his back, his pale complexion becomes a point of mockery and amusement for those observing.

Western Animation

• The South Park episode "Ginger Kids" revolves around the premise that Cartman believes all children who look like this to be soulless vampires who want to kill non-"ginger" children. Angered that pale-skinned kids at the school start to get bullied because of this bigotry, Kyle and Stan decide to teach Cartman a lesson by dyeing his hair red and painting his face with pale makeup and fake freckles while he sleeps. When Cartman wakes up, he believes himself to be actually "ginger" and mounts a supremacist crusade for "Red Power." Hilarity Ensues.
• Metalocalypse: Even when not wearing their onstage corpse makeup, the members of Dethklok are implied to be pale-skinned, as two of them are Scandinavians, the red-headed drummer is "very Irish…American", and they rarely step outside their poorly lit castle. This trope is averted in the "Bluesklok" episode, where they all burn to a bright pink because blues is about suffering. Except for Toki. He tans quite nicely, which compliments the fact that he's the only member of the band who's in shape.
• Page image comes from an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, where Craig Mammalton (a hilariously overtanned seal) comes to town and everyone is in a tanning frenzy in order to be popular enough to get into his party. SpongeBob ends up tanning too much and becoming "sun bleached", and the episode is about his efforts to hide this fact until his secret is revealed at the party and Craig, recognizing his pale state for what it is, worships the ground upon which SpongeBob walks for his devotion to tanning.

Real Life

• Back in the day, after the circulation of media footage of Bill Clinton jogging, David Letterman for a while poked fun at Bill's "pasty white thighs", and even tried to foster its Memetic Mutation. Luciano Pavarotti declined to sing the words on the show.
• Several Western celebrities nowadays are rumored to practice excessive tanning, hair treatments, altering makeup and even plastic surgery to copy features from more fashionable black, latin or Asian women. Foremost among those accused of it are notably the Kardashian-Jenner sisters and Ariana Grande.
• Japanese cross-country runner Yuji "Gump" Suzuki became quite dark during his run across the United States. One of the images he posted to his social media was of the pale "wings" he now had on his back from the tank top he usually wore.

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