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. And the desire for it generates billions of dollars.
We’re talking about the tan, of course, which continues to persist as a beauty ideal and is even seeing something of a resurgence.
At the Oscars on Sunday night, Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper sported sun-baked hues reminiscent of cattle ranchers and professional surfers, while Jennifer Lawrence’s tan evoked the gold statuette being awarded. On TikTok, the ascending popularity of tanning beds has sparked backlash (some blame Gen Z, others proto-influencers such as Kim Kardashian, who recently showed off one in her office). On the platform, 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. An online shopper searching for “tanning” can find about 200 different tanning products on both Sephora’s and Ulta’s websites.
End of carousel“Year after year, we continue to see so much innovation in self-tanning and bronzing products,” said Penny Coy, an executive at Ulta Beauty who oversees merchandising. This includes new products that “address the pain points of self-tanning,” Coy added, including buff and blending brushes, back tan applicators, removal and exfoliating mitts, express formulas and those with “clean” and “conscious” ingredients.
And, on the fringes of the beauty world, new, disorienting technologies are vying to make it into our medicine cabinets: pills that dye your skin from the inside out; nasal sprays that spur your body’s ability to produce melanin.
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Influencers say the proliferation of tanned complexions and tanning products on social media has become impossible to ignore in the past few years.
Sara Shammout, a 23-year-old fashion student, recently started her own tanning brand, Bronzed by Carrot, a tanning-accelerating cream that promises a “bronzed, sun-kissed tan” in 30 minutes.
Shammout, who is Lebanese American, has long been a tanning enthusiast, and Bronzed by Carrot ties into her heritage, she says. Tanning reminds her of summers in Lebanon with her family, where the mornings began with a breakfast of flatbreads, ful medames and cheese, and the afternoons would be spent on the beach, swimming in the sea and soaking up the sun. Shammout’s father would smear his skin in olive oil; her mom, sunscreen and a carrot-based tanning oil.
She noticed how popular the tanning aesthetic — and tanning products — had gotten online, especially among Americans. Shammout even tried a few self-tanners but was disappointed in the color — too orangy.
The tanning brand initially began as a hobby, then became a full-time job because of the demand, Shammout said.
Like most young people, Shammout knows the risks of tanning, which include skin cancer. And she tries to mitigate those risks, she says: tanning in moderation and always using sunscreen. Still, she is drawn to the sun and the deep, caramelized glow that comes from being in it.
“I feel like I look healthier, so that makes me happier,” Shammout said. “I definitely feel like my best self, every single time.”
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.
For Western women, a goddess-like glow wasn’t a bronze sheen. Greek goddesses “shone — but it was whiteness that shone,” Stewart said. For many millennia, to be pale was to be ethereal, pure. It was also a consequence of the amount of clothing women were expected to wear: “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 grueling, physical labor moved inside to factories and warehouses. The rich, meanwhile, descended upon sun-rich 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 aesthetic to the masses after photographs were taken of her fresh off a Mediterranean cruise in the 1920s. (“You could describe her as an early influencer,” said Stewart.)
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That bronzed look became more popular in the ’60s, when air travel became more accessible for Americans and Europeans. For more people, being tan was now associated with vacations to distant locales: the pristine pools of Los Angeles, maybe, or the sun-soaked shores of Puerto Vallarta. “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, when the fascination with tans even spawned a short-lived E! reality show: “Sunset Tan.”
The pilot episode, broadcast in May 2007, is a time capsule of the era: the first client is none other than Britney Spears. But the big eyebrow-raising moment comes when a woman walks into the shop with her daughter — wearing a plaid dress, clearly a school uniform, the girl appears no older than 12. The mother says her daughter “needs a tan” for her school pictures. With the encouragement of an employee, they land on the “Lindsey Lohan special” — a combo of tanning bed and spray tan.
Share this articleShare“This is L.A., you have to be the tannest kid in class,” the employee quips to the camera.
The cautionary tales of tanning run amok are a sign of its cultural ubiquity: the infamous “Tan Mom” accused of bringing her 5-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.
Holly Reardon, a 26-year-old who works in marketing, says she didn’t think much about tanning until a few years ago, when her social media accounts began attracting a bigger audience. Her TikToks consist of documenting her routines, the products she purchases and uses, the meals she cooks and the workouts she does. Reardon thinks what makes her content so appealing is their relatability.
But scrolling through her timeline, Reardon became inundated with images of tanned influencers and the products they were hawking, she said. Seeing images of herself all the time made Reardon hyper-aware of how pale she looked in the glow of her own ring light.
Reardon started buying tanning oils and self-tanning mousses; she developed a tanning routine she shared with her audience last year. Despite being more than six months old, that video has been doing numbers lately, Reardon said; people must be searching for tanning content and finding her, she guesses.
Being tan makes Reardon feel more confident. She feels her muscles are more defined. She believes she looks prettier and skinnier. But she also doesn’t think she’d be quite so invested if she weren’t online.
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“If I didn’t have social media, I really wouldn’t care,” Reardon said.
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 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 actually means to be healthy, and are instead choosing potential skin damage. At Planet Fitness, there’s even a membership tier that includes unlimited access to tanning booths and beds.
Health as an aesthetic, 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. There’s the fetishistic (Ed Hardy makes a “Baby got black” tanning oil) and the bizarre (Rachel Dolezal used tanning to masquerade as a Black woman). But there’s also the disturbing, notes DeFino: 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.
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It’s hard to see how tanning harms the greater good when viewed as a matter of personal choice (could a bit of bronzer really be so bad?). And yet, beauty ideals are a collective experience, one made up by the sum of all our personal choices, DeFino argues. And with more tools to become “beautiful,” the stakes to acquire and maintain that beauty have increased, as has the price tag: 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 color 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.”
correction
In a previous version of this article, the headline omitted the word "live." The correct quote is, "I'd rather die hot than live ugly." The headline has been corrected.
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