Worshipping the sun

Has tan skin always been fashionable?

Quite the opposite. From the time of ancient Greece to the antebellum South to Elizabethan England, a tan marked a person as a member of the working classes. It was white skin that people in Western culture sought, as proof they led a life of leisure. Affluent women in many cultures lightened their skin with substances such as starch, chalk, and even white lead, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing lead poisoning. If women did venture outdoors, they shielded their porcelain complexions with robes, parasols, and floppy hats.

When did this change?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The popularity of tanning can be traced to a single moment in 1923. After cruising from Paris to Cannes, designer Coco Chanel stepped off the Duke of Wellington’s yacht with a startling suntan. Chanel had apparently gotten too much sun by accident, but the press and fashion world assumed the immensely influential Frenchwoman was making a fashion statement. “I think she may have invented sunbathing,” Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucigne said. “At that time, she invented everything.” Soon daring women in Europe and America were baring their skin to the sun.

Did they know the sun damages skin?

They had no idea. In fact, health officials actually endorsed the new fad, calling sunshine “the greatest bottle of medicine in the universe.” For decades, people sunbathed without any protection from the harmful rays. But in World War II, GI’s serving under the South Pacific’s tropical sun began suffering disabling sunburns. An Army chemist, Benjamin Green, helped develop a thick petroleum jelly with red dye that absorbed some of the sun’s rays. When he went home, Green set up a pharmacy in Miami and began experimenting with other lotions to block out the sun, using his own bald head to test them. He created a creamy formula that quickly caught on. Green called it Coppertone. Other lotions soon reached the market, and the golden age of tanning had begun.

Did these early lotions work?

They let people stay in the sun longer, but didn’t provide much protection. The first generation of sun lotions and oils only blocked a portion of one kind of solar radiation—UVB rays. These products were transparent to UVA radiation, which scientists once thought to be harmless. Partially protected, sunbathers didn’t burn as quickly, and they went for the deep, dark tan. At the same time, the popularity of commercial aviation gave rise to the winter vacation, making the February tan the ultimate sign of affluence, status, and sex appeal. It would be decades before health officials sounded the alarm.

What’s wrong with a little sun?

The sun is essentially an ongoing nuclear explosion, and the high-energy radiation it sends streaming into our atmosphere penetrates deeply into human skin. The skin reacts by pumping out a pigment called melanin to darken the skin and absorb some of the solar rays. Other changes in the cells are less benign. Prolonged exposure to UVA and UVB breaks down the collagen under the skin that gives our faces plumpness and elasticity, leading to wrinkles. Solar radiation can also damage the DNA in our cells; if these damaged cells are not repaired or eliminated, they can become cancerous. And it doesn’t take a lot of overexposure to trigger cancer: Just one blistering sunburn increases the lifetime risk of developing melanoma by 50 percent.

How common is skin cancer?

Today, more than 1.3 million cases are diagnosed in the U.S. every year. That’s up from 500,000 just 13 years ago. About 50,000 of the cancer cases are of the most dangerous kind, melanoma, which can be fatal if not caught early. Melanoma rates have soared more than 1,000 percent since 1930, when it was an extremely rare disease. Cancer rates keep growing, despite the popularity of suntan lotions with very high sun-protection factors.

Why is that?

Even lotions with SPFs of 30 or 45 do not screen out 100 percent of the sun’s damaging rays. Some do little to block out UVA rays, and even those that provide “broad spectrum” protection let from 3 percent to 5 percent of solar radiation through. Scientists say these “sunblocks” give beachgoers the illusion they are completely shielded from the sun, so they spend three, four, or even six hours a day in fierce, direct sunlight. “People think this little bit of cream can block the big ball of fire in the sky,” says Dr. Kathy Fields, a San Francisco dermatologist. “No way.” The other problem is that 70 percent of the American public only uses sunscreen sporadically, or not at all.

How can that be?

Eighty years after Chanel stepped off the Duke of Westminster’s yacht, Western culture is now of two minds on the subject of tanned skin. Aging baby boomers now have visible proof of what too much sun can do, and most now slather themselves and their children in sunblock rather assiduously. But teens continue to defy health warnings about sun exposure. A recent survey found that only 34 percent of teenagers use sunscreen. More than four out of five teens admitted to a bad burn in the past year. Today, Britney Spears and Jennifer Aniston have picked up Chanel’s torch, and young people—for whom there is no tomorrow—still believe they’ll look hipper and sexier with a tan. “Right now,” says Atoosa Rubenstein, editor in chief of CosmoGIRL magazine, “we’re at the apex of the bronze goddess era.”

The skin cancer capital