ONCE again, there's Taylor Swift to thank. Actually, I'm just being polite.

I think this is the first time I've ever thanked Taylor Swift, pictured, though I did really enjoy We Are Never Getting Back Together.

The American magazine The Atlantic asks this week if we face

The End of Tanning, with Swift, and the actress Emma Stone, cited as bellwethers of a change in fashion. About time.

Pallor used to be popular with the upper classes. It spoke to a life of leisure, lived nobly indoors, away from the toil of the fields. Skin lighteners and whiteners have been used throughout history from the Greek to the Elizabethan eras.

The fashion for tanning, apparently, began in 1929 when Coco Chanel decreed: "A girl simply has to be tanned," and no-one since has thought to ask "why?"

I read recently that we're now into the season of the au-tan (autumn tan). It's too much.

Just as there are dozens of shades of tan, so there is a spectrum of pale. There is the luscious cream of Christina Hendricks and the alabaster of Nicole Kidman. Redheads give the best white. For the rest of us, there is peely-wally, mottled and deathly.

Being pale is the sort of thing you come to be apologetic for, as a defence mechanism. If you insult yourself there's no target left for the opposing party's slings and arrows.

"Look at me," you chirp, in the summer, "I'm so white, I'm reflective." You do a sad face and explain you're allergic to fake tan. Smug browns smirk and wear something sleeveless, all the better to show off what big colour they have.

The pale and the sunkissed

are a little bit like dogs meeting:

the weaker dog will prostrate in

front of the more powerful dog

just as the paler-skinned woman will hold out her forearm for her tanned sister to measure her mahogany success against.

What she is doing, in essence, is pitying a fellow adult for not frying herself to disease, death, or at the very least wrinkles. She's a little sad for her fellow woman because she's been brainwashed into a beauty myth that the skin's gasping attempt to protect itself from certain harm is beautiful. And in a way, that physiological response is beautiful in that it's remarkable. But it is not aesthetically beautiful.

It's stupid to force your body into defensive mode when you can avoid it quite simply. Slip, slap, slop.

Sunkissed is a fallacy. The sun does not kiss you, it chews you up.