SUNNY SIDE UP
Charting the history of tanning from its Coco Chanel kickoff to the 21stcentury’s bestselling bronzer, reformed golden girl Viia Beaumanis aims for sun-kissed without sun damage
UNLIKE MOST WOMEN, I religiously did not use sunscreen until my mid40s. I hated the goopy texture and, anyway, unless I really pushed it – lying out in the tropics for hours across high noon – I was blessed with the sort of skin that never burned. I’d spend weeks traipsing across Africa, Asia or South America, only a silk tunic or string bikini between me and a blazing equatorial sun, occasionally coppering myself to Jade Jagger-on-Ibiza levels. When I came across an article in Allure in my 30s, linking the oxybenzone used in sunscreen to skin-aging free radicals, I triumphantly forwarded it to all the friends who pestered me about refusing to use SPF.
Despite the sunshine (and the cigarettes …), my skin looks great for a woman who just turned 45. I like to put this down to good genes, enough sleep and being generally joyful (no frown lines!) but I’ve also spent as much time at the dermo as most women de- vote to raising children. Last year, lamenting some enduring under-eye crepiness that even my industrious regimen of lasering, acid peels and infrared tightening wasn’t combatting, I gave in and began slapping on the SPF 60. Given the blanching effect, I added bronzers to my cosmetic bag. In hindsight, I wish I’d made this shift a decade earlier. Trouble was, I loved how I looked with a tan: gilded by the sunshine of my splendid travels, just back from somewhere …
That’s a relatively modern take. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, tawny skin signified that you toiled outdoors, a peasant in the fields. Posh women shrouding themselves under parasols and wide-brimmed hats, the wisteria-laced gazebo, protected the milky pallor that underscored their affluent sheltered lifestyle. When turn-of-the-century urbanization forced the working class into factories and mines, the chicness of a tan rose over the 20th century. The once elegantly pallid visage was re-
placed by a soleil- kissed glow as privileged leisure time moved outdoors, a trend that officially took off in the 1920s when a glamorously bronzed Coco Chanel was photographed disembarking a yacht on the French Riviera. “She may have invented sunbathing,” mused her pal, Prince JeanLouis de Faucigny-Lucinge. “At that time, she invented everything …”
With swimsuits making their scandalous debut and the era’s new leggy shorter hemlines all the rage, Jean Patou launched the first suntan oil in 1927 with the amber-scented Huile de Chaldée while less-moneyed women navigated Great Depression austerity by staining their skin with Bovril. Over the next two decades, with the advent of elite air travel dovetailing with the arrival of colour cinema, the tan took hold as the look of the smart set. Starlets posed by the pool as the new iconic Hollywood image while airline posters boasted By Air to South Africa or India in Less than a Week! Movie star or housewife, everyone wanted a tan. Don’t be a Paleface! read the famous slogan for Coppertone, launched as a tan-enhancing lotion in 1944 with a logo that profiled an Indian chief.
The thought of 18th-century women bleeding themselves for a paler complexion, Renaissance ladies coating themselves in lead and arsenic lotions (proven effects: fair skin, toxic poisoning, paralysis, death) or antebellum girls chewing on newspaper (convinced the ink was whitening) may seem crazy to us now. Though one might see the same reckless vanity in modern girls who braise themselves in tanning beds (aware this is linked to cancer) or slather on mercurybased lightening creams (despite severe rashes and random permanent depigmentation).
In 2012, 258 tons of bleaching cream was sold in India alone, a culture that so finely grades the tonal scale it has come up with innumerable categories: very fair, pale fair, doodhe-aalta (a rosy hue), wheatish, bright glowing fairness, dusky, ujjwal shyambarna (dark with bluish-grey undertones) and koochkooche kaalo (coal-dark). In China, full nylon ski masks are popular beachwear. “I’m afraid of getting dark,” said retired bus driver Yao Wenhua to The New York Times in 2012. “People will think you’re a peasant.”
With darker women lightening their skin for a paler, more “refined” hue - politically incorrect as this may seem, depending on the culture - while lighter ones assume a “jet set” bronze, the calibration seems increasingly to run both ways: everyone keening toward some sort of idealized, honey-hued middle. Today’s café au lait celebrities – Beyoncé, Halle Berry, Eva Mendes, Kim Kardashian, Aishwarya Rai, Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek, Penélope Cruz, Zoe Saldana, Jennifer Lopez, Sofia Vergara among them – are at the forefront of our modern, more worldly concept of beauty.
Nonetheless, with women across the globe instilled with what “higher class” looks like on their cultural colour wheel, skin tone remains a complex subject, one more loaded for those turning the dial to Light than the reverse. Travelling in Brazil a few years ago, I mentioned to a local how funny I found it that, even on the most soignée beaches, women refused to go topless yet were comfortable in bikini bottoms fashioned from such scarcely discernable string they appeared naked from behind. I was taken aback when she replied that this was less about modesty than a yen for visible tan lines. Paler Brazilian women happily working on a deep Bain de Soleil-style bronze – so long as it was plain that this wasn’t their natural colour. Descendants of European colonizers, she said, not wishing to be confused with those who traced their lineage back to the darker native Amerindian tribes or the African slave trade. This view may not be true of all Brazilians, but she seemed to believe it was, and her remarks spoke to the prickly politics of skin tone – even when it’s affected.
With a cavalcade of sun-drenched celebrities – George Hamilton, Raquel Welch, Bo Derek in 10, a feline Verushka strutting across the African delta for Vogue – tanning
hit its stylish zenith in the ’70s and ’80s, decades that produced the tanthrough bathing suit, indoor sunbed, Malibu Barbie, a BMW convertible advertised as the ultimate tanning machine – and skyrocketing skin cancer rates.
A Mayo Clinic study cited in the institution’s January 2014 periodical Proceedings revealed that skin cancer rates increased nearly eightfold between 1970 and 2009 for men and women aged 40 to 60 in the U.S., where the disease is now more common than all other cancers combined. Here in Canada, we pour a half billion dollars annually into melanoma-related medical costs, and it’s the second leading cancer among people 15 to 29, with fatalities poised to double by 2031. Linking tanning beds with a 75 per cent greater melanoma risk for those who use them before age 35, the World Health Organization pronounced them carcinogenic in 2003, and in 2009 Britain banned them for anyone under 18.
Overall, it’s those over 60 – men in particular – who are most likely to develop melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer that accounts for four per cent of skin cancer diagnoses but 80 per cent of deaths. Why? From 2010, Cancer Research UK found people in this age bracket five to seven times more vulnerable than their parents, thanks to spending their youth in a carefree era when sunburns were common and sunbeds were cool.
Facing that sort of grim news, tan fans have switched gears. While the tan was put on the back burner during the wan, grunge-y chic of the ’90s, the noughties brought a wave of beach-bronzed Brazilian models who, ruling catwalks and print ads for a decade, set off a fresh craze for sun-kissed beauty. Only this time the look was achieved via “sunless” options: professional spray tans were introduced, and vastly improved self-tanner formulations (transformed from streaky orange to golden-brown) flew off the shelves.
From a pure vanity point of view, more than 90 per cent of visible skin damage is attributed to sun exposure, and women who use daily sunscreen show 24 per cent less aging than those who do not. For anyone aiming for sun-kissed without the sun damage, spray tans or artful applications of self-tanner (me), this brings us back to bronzers.
I’m pretty egalitarian about cosmetics. Not snobby where it doesn’t matter (eyeliner, lip balm) but selective with items where fine texture and pigment are crucial. With foundation, concealer, powder and, lately, bronzer, I opt for better brands. Unlike the natural caught-the-sun look I’m aiming for, cheap bronzer can look heavy and dirty.
Any search for the perfect powder tan will inevitably lead you to Guerlain’s Terracotta. Widely considered the Queen of Bronzers and a perennial staple of annual Best of Beauty lists, it enjoys a rabid cult following for good reason. Naturally glowy with a hint of shimmer and none of the orange, it layers beautifully for more depth without the dreaded, grubby ochre tinge that bargain pigment imparts. Available in a vast range of complexion-com-
plementing shades – 00 for pale blonds, 2 for brunettes, all the way to 08 for darker skin – this is the cosmetic that Guerlain is most famous for (its bestseller and the world’s No. 1 bronzer), and it relaunches annually with an updated collection.
Introduced in 1984, the line celebrates its third decade this year and, with a woman snapping a Terracotta powder up every 20 seconds somewhere on the planet, Guerlain has a lot to celebrate. Paired with pink and coral blushes and embossed with some highlighting gold shimmer, the Guerlain Paris Terracotta Sun Celebration Bronzing Powder and Blush 30th Anniversary Edition Compact comes out with a tribute fragrance created especially for its birthday. Tallying Addict (Dior) and Hypnôse (Lancôme) among his greatest hits, Thierry Wasser – inhouse perfumer for Guerlain’s venerable near-century old fragrance wing since 2008 – has concocted a suitably sultry scent for Terracotta’s perfume debut. Blending citrusy bergamot with lush tropical notes of jasmine, ylang-ylang, Tiare and the Tahitian gardenia that brings out its warm heart of vanilla with a hint of coconut, it goes beautifully with a tan.