Although paler skin is edging back into fashion – the natural look is synonymous with fashion editorial and runways – there’s no denying that ‘tanned’ and ‘healthy’ go hand in hand. Being tanned is often linked to self-esteem, with many women saying they feel more confident, slimmer and healthier when they’ve ‘had a tan’. (Indeed, the paler members of the Stylist team still speak of negative remarks when summer comes around.)

Thankfully, this season the overriding trend is not about matching your own skin colour to what you see on the catwalks – instead, it’s about simply enhancing your natural colour. Products such as intelligent highlighters packed with micro-fine reflective pigments boost skins natural luminosity, while glow-giving face masks infused with anti-ageing skincare ingredients work as you sleep so you wake up to naturally sheened and rested-looking skin.

Here, two women with very different approaches to tanning, The Guardian columnist Hannah Betts and Stylist’s deputy beauty editor Samantha Flowers take a fresh look at the idea of feeling comfortable in your own skin.

Hannah Betts explains why, despite the pressure of others, she fully accepts her pale hue

I am ashen, bright white, anaemic looking, always the palest foundation in a range, invariably the pastiest person in any room. A make-up artist once described my skin colour as “ethnic”, and it is: my subgroup being wan white woman in a culture obsessed with tanning its hide. I am entirely content with this and would no more expect to darken my skin than I would a black friend to lighten hers. Instead, I advocate valuing what nature gave us – black, white or, in my own case, a sort of pale green.

Yet others find my pallor somehow offensive. There is a multi-million pound global industry backing tanning – real or otherwise – and, lemming like, the Western world has embraced it. Those who refuse to conform face censure or, at least, satire of their skin shade in a way people would (hopefully) be too politically correct to resort to in other cases.

I have been derided as ‘moon face’, ‘goth girl’, ‘the Wicked Lady’. I have been trailed about by British schoolboys clicking The Addams Family theme, and Italian youths chanting ‘White’. Before I discovered rouge, people would ask whether I was consumptive or leukemic. When I appeared on radio to discuss tanning and skin cancer – shamefully, a more fatal condition here than it is Down Under – listeners called in screaming that I was just jealous because I could not acquire this coveted leatheriness.

Life in the bronze age: the great tanning debate