As a blonde-haired, blue-eyed melanoma magnet, the sun has always scared me. If your skin only comes in two shades – snow and tomato – there isn’t much of a chance to experiment with the sun’s natural shading feature.

However, even if I could sit in the sun for hours and come out with a nice leathery-brown hue, I’d still be afraid of all the effects it would have on my skin.

Yes, this fear does beget the standard Edward Cullen comparisons, and albino has become the adjective of choice for describing my skin color, but as a kid I had never been particularly embarrassed about my skin color.

Then came Snooki.

“The Jersey Shore” revealed to me that skin color does not come in just black and white, but rather it is like an infinite color swatch, ranging in hues that I had never even seen on skin before.

But when albino started being pejoratively thrown around in my middle school hallways or at pool parties, and it became synonymous with “loser” and “nerd,” my skin color soon became one of my biggest insecurities.

Then I became a lifeguard. In hindsight, choosing a job in which being tan is one of the premier symbols of that job (right behind zinc on the nose) was not the wisest decision of my life, but I needed the money and I knew how to swim.

On the first truly hot day of that summer, the first day when you start question if God truly loves us, I was at a crossroad: do I listen to the fears running through my head about skin cancer and sunburns, or do I put on some tanning lotion and bake in the sun?

I chose to bake, and bake I sure did.

About 12 hours later I found myself with a severe headache, nausea, and the worst pain I had ever felt in my life – I had sun poisoning.

To this day, I regret the decision to bake in the sun. Not because of the traumatizing pain I was in, but because I know that it can hurt me later in life in the form of melanoma.

Natural tanning, spray tanning, and the idiotic, borderline-suicidal tanning beds are all lies that try to cover up the problem that “The Jersey Shore” introduced me to as an insecure middle schooler: the dangers of seeking darker skin.

But tanning is a dangerous game, and in the end, it’s what happens after you get burned that can come back to haunt you.
Billy Jump is an In-Depth Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.