TANNING MANIA RETURNS: ‘I’D RATHER DIE HOT THAN LIVE UGLY’
APPEARANCE OF HEALTH IS BECOMING AN ESTHETIC THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING HEALTHY
PROJECTING THE RIGHT IMAGE IS MORE IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE THAN LIVING THE TYPE OF THE LIFE THAT THAT IMAGE SUGGESTS. — JESSICA DEFINO, BEAUTY WRITER AND CRITIC
It’s a symbol of health — and wreaks havoc on your body. It yields a youthful glow — and wrinkles. It’s a marker of status — and also the subject of mockery. It covers flaws — and exacerbates them. We’re talking about the tan, which continues to persist as a beauty ideal.
At the recent Oscars, Matthew Mcconaughey and Bradley Cooper sported sunbaked hues reminiscent of cattle ranchers and professional surfers, while Jennifer Lawrence’s tan evoked the gold statuette being awarded. On Tiktok, now the social media ground zero of beauty trends, #tanning has generated 4.1 billion views. This includes videos from young women who describe themselves as tanning “addicts.” (The caption of one such post: “It’s a problem but I’d rather die hot than live ugly I guess #yolo #lol #sun bed.”)
Browse the beauty aisles and you can quantify how accessible and complex tanning has become: bronzing powders and creams; mitts and towels; lotions and serums promising a gradual, “natural” look.
Even though women now make up the majority of the market for tanning beds and self-tanning products, for much of Western history, tanned skin was a beauty ideal for men, notes Susan Stewart, author of Painted Faces: A Colourful History of Cosmetics. This dates back to antiquity: For Roman men, strength and virility meant being outside, wearing little to no clothing.
Greek goddesses “shone — but it was whiteness that shone,” Stewart said. For many millennia, to be pale was to be ethereal, pure.
“Very little of a woman’s skin would have been exposed up until the 20th century.”
Tanned skin came into vogue after the Industrial Revolution, when gruelling physical labour moved inside factories and warehouses. The rich, meanwhile, descended upon sundrenched locales like the French Riviera: for them, being tan was a natural consequence of days of leisure. No one embodied that privilege more than Coco Chanel, who is credited with bringing the tanned esthetic to the masses in the 1920s.
That bronzed look became more popular in the ’60s, when air travel became more accessible.
“Again, it’s all about status and wealth,” said Stewart. “‘Look what I can afford.’”
Then, in the late 1970s, tanning salons made their debut, their popularity exploding amid the maximalism of the 1980s. They appeared to have reached their peak in the early aughts.
The cautionary tales of tanning run amok are a sign of its cultural ubiquity: the infamous “Tan Mom” accused of bringing her five-year-old to the tanning bed; the gauche “Gym, Tan, Laundry” aspirations of the cast of Jersey Shore; the tangerine glow of George Hamilton, John A. Boehner and, of course, Donald. For a while, the tan as we had come to know it — bold, audacious and unashamed — seemed to fade out of fashion, replaced with SPF and 10-step skin care routines.
Then, Instagram and Tiktok gave the tan new life.
Some of the appeal of a tan is its ability to mask perceived flaws. Tanning enthusiasts say it evens out their complexion, clears acne and can treat psoriasis — though these claims are only partially true. Darkening one’s skin can temporarily camouflage blemishes, but once those effects wear off, tanning can actually cause more breakouts.
And while phototherapy, which uses UVB light, can treat psoriasis, standard sun beds mostly emit UVA light, which does not offer the same benefits. Excessive use of tanning beds doesn’t just heighten one’s risk of cancer, either — tan addiction and tan dysphoria are real phenomena that can eat away at a person’s confidence and self-worth, as well as their physical health.
As a matter of personal choice, some have likened tanning to drinking or smoking — activities that we know are not good for us, but we still enjoy (and that still carry a whiff of glamour). But unlike smoking and drinking, being tan is tightly knotted to our ideas of what “health” looks like. We may have become so used to performing health that we’ve lost sight of what it means to be healthy, and are instead choosing potential skin damage.
Health as an esthetic, not a state of being, is a growing problem in the world of beauty, argues beauty writer and critic Jessica Defino.
This tension is particularly apparent with the surging popularity of sunless tanners, said Defino. The latest products promise more natural results with easier application. They can certainly feel healthy: no UV rays, no skin damage. But obsessing over the look may mean we’re paying less attention to the very activities that do boost our health: fresh air, sunlight, nature.
“Projecting the right image is more important to people than living the type of the life that that image suggests,” she said.
Racism and classism have long been tangled up in tanning, too, even if the market for tanning products has become more diverse. While Americans with fairer skin can pop a pill to enhance their beauty and appear “healthier,” those who naturally produce more melanin — that is, Black and Brown people — must confront real health, social and economic costs tied to their skin tone.
Beauty ideals are a collective experience, one made up by the sum of all our personal choices, Defino argues. The contoured look of the 2010s, achieved by using makeup to highlight and darken one’s facial features, begot the desire for fillers to achieve that look more permanently, which begot the obsession with surgically removing one’s buccal fat.
As such, Defino believes we’re marching toward a kind of beauty that demands we damage ourselves, whether it’s through tanning or “fat-sculpting” or adding to the growing library of dysmorphias. Consider that in non-western countries, such as India, Nigeria and the Philippines, it’s not skin darkening, but skin-bleaching, that’s become a public health issue.
When the colour of our skin becomes a canvas for an ever-narrower, ever-unattainable idea of beauty, what are we actually articulating to ourselves? For Defino, it’s this: “No matter where you are, no matter what your skin tone is, it could be different and should be different.”