If further proof were needed that sunbathing is now strictly for the C1s and lower, you only have to look at the current crop of magazines (the September issues are now upon us). In Vogue, InStyle and Harpers & Queen, the girls who are modelling the late summer clothes have skin the colour of slightly dirty snow. Whereas in Heat and its fellow celebrity titles, the likes of Jordan, Abi Titmuss and someone who was on Big Brother two years ago look like they've been basted in Tango.

So downmarket has tanning become that admitting to doing it, even when incongruously slathered in sun protection factor 30 (a bit like trying to speed with the handbrake on), is rather like 'fessing up to having smoked the occasional cigarette while pregnant. And if active tanning doesn't mark you out as downmarket, then it certainly labels you as middle-aged. Anyone who is old enough to remember Farrah Fawcett Majors, as she was then known, will have participated in that summer ritual of comparing wristwatch marks with friends. The greater the contrast between your tanned and untanned skin, the more you were to be congratulated and asked for the name of your oil. Usually, this smelled unconvincingly of coconut: the range of signifiers available in 1976 to express simultaneously "exotic" and "sunshine" was woefully small.

I only finally realised just how old-fashioned it was to compliment someone on their holiday tan when, a couple of weeks ago, I oohed and aahed over a much younger colleague's nut-brown skin. She looked awkward, shifty, unable quite to meet my gaze. "We went out one day in the mountains and I'd forgotten to bring any block," she explained, as if defending herself against the charge of accidentally being drunk in charge of a vehicle.

There are, of course, several layers of messaging to consider before you decide whether or not to tan. Remaining pale says you're clever enough to have read and understood all the evidence about the link between exposure to ultraviolet light and deadly skin melanoma. Turning orange suggests either that you can't read or that you've decided to live for today, since by the time you're 40 you'll be a grandmother and no one will care whether your skin resembles a prune.

Staying pale demonstrates that you're perfectly well aware that the link Coco Chanel made between being brown and being rich enough to travel to the Med no longer has any purchase in a world where you can get a week in Spain for £150. Going orange says that your familial and cultural memory reaches back far enough to know that a pasty complexion signifies too many night shifts at the factory and a hereditary tendency to TB.

To all these tangles about social class we need to add an extra complicating layer about race. For, surely, the whole point about repeatedly dragging your whitey-pink face into the sun is the vague hope that, at the end of a couple of weeks, someone might wonder if your mother was Italian. It is almost certainly not designed to try to kid people that you come originally from the Caribbean. When, in 1970s Birmingham, my deeply tanned Welsh uncle was mistaken for "a Paki", it was the cause not of congratulation, or even amusement, but of deep and awkward offence.

So the question becomes, how dark does your skin have to be before it starts to work against you, placing you in an ethnic category whose status is currently lower than your own? This, perhaps, is a question that the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian shot in the head on suspicion of being a terrorist two weeks ago, might like to ask. One of the reasons the police gave for their deadly confusion was that his "exceptionally dark" complexion made him look Asian rather than South American, thus placing him at a single glance into a far more problematic category than the one that he actually inhabited.

With all this cultural baggage attached to turning your skin slightly browner than it usually is, it might seem easiest to opt for a fake tan, especially now that the new generation of products no longer carry the whiff of burnt toast. The question remains, though, what kind of effect are you going for? Does turning yourself bright orange with one of the brasher products signal your tacit desire to be seen as a chav even though you've quite consciously bypassed the self-harming stage?

Giving yourself a "natural" look with the occasional coating of St Tropez might seem a good idea, apart from the fact that there is nothing very natural about sitting on the side of the bath while trying to extend your arms halfway down your back. Of course, you could just let nature take its course, going about your everyday business in the sun, happy that your right forearm is turning deep brown through your open car window, while your legs are half white, thanks to your enthusiastic endorsement of this summer's penchant for city shorts.

In this case, though, you do need to accept that the end result will be strangely piebald, and that by the end of the summer you will resemble someone who has been assembled from a random selection of spare body parts.