I’ve just returned from a semi-holiday with a light tan the colour of a doormat. The weather was mixed and windy but there was apparently enough sun to convert my skin into a public event. Friends expressed shock at how I look. Not because the tan was achieved here, but because I dared to get one.
I grew up in south Somerset, not far from the Jurassic coast, proud heart of the UK’s southern tanning belt. My sister hated the sun, wearing large straw hats like sandwich boards foretelling the apocalypse, but my mother and I loved it. Perhaps because of her Assamese ancestry, it took her eight minutes to resemble a grand oak. I took longer, but soon it became our shared pastime. Having internalised tanning as good, I went on the occasional sunbed at university, and at a fashion magazine in my 20s became very into “au-tans”, a dialled-down but-still-existent fake tan for winter. My main goal was aesthetic but I pretended it was also about vitamin D and regulating my sleep cycle.
This love of the tan has since cooled, partly from having children, which seems to trigger a deep-rooted fear of the sun – and partly because I’m olive-ish anyway. It’s also because I’m getting older and those rays have a way of wearing the skin out. This is one of the competing forces present in the conversation about tanning. On the one hand, exposure to the sun can lead to skin cancer and other afflictions; on the other, some people still love the look.
So while we now know much more about the risks that come with tanning, many of us do it anyway. In 2020, the global value of suncare products hit $10.7bn (£8.5bn). It’s expected to grow by 4% every year until 2028. Meanwhile the number of sunbeds – which do not reduce the risk of skin disease – in Britain almost doubled between 2012 and 2022 to 2,171. The tan is dead, long live the tan.
Yet heightened awareness of the dangers of sun exposure – as well as aesthetic concerns about its impact on the skin in the age of social media – mean we have returned to a position when a tan was seen as unbecoming by the fashionable elite because it was a sign that you laboured outdoors.
In the mid to late 20th century, perceptions evolved to reflect the opposite: wealth and health. Blame Coco Chanel, who made a tan as desirable as her Breton tops, or the move from outdoor work to indoor. Then the growth in package holidays that allowed all classes to go to southern Europe. I still routinely hear the word “tan” preceded by “healthy” by people of the boomer generation.
These core beliefs regarding the joys of tanning will always be tricky to change. Despite sustained efforts by the public health community, a third of Brits (33%) admitted to deliberately trying to tan through sun exposure in 2022. Yet the only thing that can truly rival a glowing complexion is, ironically, a wrinkle-free face. Perhaps it is now less about whether or not to tan and more about where you tan (your body, not your face) and how. That would mirror the growing army of very good fake tan products, not to mention why tweakments and Botox are also so prevalent among young people. The no-makeup look, which involves wearing minimal makeup to appear as natural as you can, is a lot easier to pull off when you’re as bronzed as a turkey.
Still, the idea that we can change the paradigm by marching a few alabaster celebrities across a red carpet is missing the point. Beauty ideals are subjective, just as they can be regressive, distorted and dangerous. For all the talk of body positivity, parts of the western world are currently gripped by Ozempic mania. Take any beauty ideal and you’ll usually find a paradox buried within it – and so if you’re tanned and young, then all the better.
Tempting as it is to blame fashion in shaping current opinion, it’s worth interrogating money and climate change, too. According to Dazed, almost half of gen Z have used a sunbed with such regularity that they are sometimes referred to as sunny Bs. Fold in the cost of living crisis (no holidays), soaring European temperatures (no holidays) along with a bit of napkin maths (sunbeds are cheap), and what do we expect?
The biggest change I’ve made is wearing proper sun cream. I still prefer a hot holiday to a cold one, but when it comes to being outdoors I prefer to see myself more as Levin in Anna Karenina than anything more hippy adjacent. I’d like to think it wasn’t vanity that created my now relatively superior attitude to sun protection – SPF50 on my face most of the year, lunch in the shade, occasionally a hat – but it is. Still, worrying about the wrinkles only leads to more of them.