On a recent trip to the beach, my friend asked me if he could compliment my tan. It took me a minute to realize what he meant. My family is Indian, my parents moved to the States several years before I was born, so my skin is always naturally some shade of brown. My buddy said he'd never presume to casually turn to a person of color and exclaim, "Nice tan!" Point taken. But in my case, I told him to fire away. My beach game has been strong this year, and as summer winds to a close, I’ll be doing everything I can to keep my skin looking golden-brown well into fall. I realize this runs contrary to how some people with my skin tone approach the end of another season in the sun. Beauty headlines about treating sunspots, exfoliating for skin renewal, and even applying flat-out skin-lightening products speak to certain ethnicities of women for whom fair skin is the ideal, my mother among them. Full disclosure: I’m a guy, and the most elaborate product I use on my face is mustache wax. So I am not the target audience for these products. But as a second-generation immigrant, I also grew up with a very different attitude toward my skin tone than my parents did. When we were kids, my folks made every effort to assimilate my brother and me. So much so that I rarely thought about having a different skin color than my mostly white peers. Perhaps my point of view would have developed differently had I grown up around more Indian kids, or other children of color. But as it happened, I adopted a similar attitude toward melanin as my white friends. At my private school, having a tan was a sign of status; it meant tropical vacations with a family who had money and time to spare on leisure. But when I started purposely wanting to tan my skin, my parents thought I was nuts. Firstly, they’re doctors, so they were sure to inform me at a young age about the dangers of sun damage. Though my skin’s melanin protects me from getting sunburned as quickly as my paler friends, it doesn’t make me immune — neither from painful burns nor from skin cancer.