The rise and rise of the year-round tan (and whether or not UV exposure is ever actually good for your health)

The actor George Hamilton lived large. A paid-up member of the Hollywood school of high glamour, he had the Rolls-Royces, the Beverly Hills mansion and the debonair wardrobe. And yet he became best known for his permanent tan — so much so that the cartoonist Garry Trudeau concocted the ‘George Hamilton Pro-Am Celebrity Cocoa Butter Open’. Hamilton even launched a chain of tanning salons.

But then this was when a deep sun-tan spoke of success. It was a visual short-hand for expensive vacations in sunny climes, for rude health and, in a way, for money itself. Yet this favour towards what is, in effect, skin damage was, in the 1960s and 70s, still a relatively new idea. As late as the 1920s tans were considered decidedly unwelcome by the well-to-do, since having one suggested one worked outside. Pale skin — protected with hats, parasols and staying inside — suggested leisure.

Arguably we’re now more than ever back in the bronze age. There are now almost 5,000 tanning salons in the UK (most of them seemingly in Blackpool, according to a 2024 study) with some 10% of the population regulars. The winter top-up/year-round glow has become a grooming standard. According to Dr. Fabiola Creed, health historian at the University of Glasgow and author of The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain, we’re seeing perfect storm of persuasive forces.

“There’s the beautifying of dark skin in culture now, because it’s slimming, because it gives better muscle definition,” she explains.

“We see tans in popular culture, in pornography, in its close association with heath and fitness. And while everyone knows the connection between tanning [under the sun or UV light] and skin cancer there’s an element of denial. It doesn’t help that the tanning industry still pushes the supposed positive health effects of tanning. I still hear people even claim that tanning creates a barrier that protects you from skin cancer”.

From sallow to suntanned

In a neat flip-side to today’s self-tanning products, for centuries people forced to face the sun’s rays took some drastic steps to whiten their skin.

Blanc de Ceruse did the job. It was also lead-based, so you likely died as pale as you lived. It was only quacks, out for a fast buck, who at the turn of the 20th century started touting the very opposite: John Harvey Kellogg, of Cornflakes fame, argued, without evidence, that sunlight was therapeutic.

In a way he was right. In 1928 the Nobel prize for chemistry went to Adolf Windaus for his work on vitamin D — essential for healthy bones because it allows the body to absorb calcium from our diet. It was soon widely understood that the best way to get this vitamin is through sunlight exposure. Indeed, we get most of our body’s annual requirement between late spring and early autumn. In other words, you really do need to get outside when the weather is nice. And so the temptation may be to top up artificially when it isn’t as bright out.

Ultraviolet dangers

It was one Auguste Rollier, a Swiss physician, who built solaria in which people could maximise their exposure, a spin-off of the use of medical UV lamps in the 1890s to treat conditions like rickets. As Creed stresses, ever since then it’s proven impossible to separate the positive medical uses of UV and the not-so-positive commercial ones. To put it bluntly, the tanning bed industry deliberately obfuscates — governments are constantly catching up to crack down on the latest usually effective but harmful method of darkening our skin, from nasal sprays to melanoma injections. She reckons we’re even on the path to the development of cosmetic surgery/pharmaceutical interventions to give those who want it a permanent darkening of their skin.

But you can get vitamin D from oily fish, meat, eggs and some dairy products, too. And even if you get yours from summer sunlight alone, you only need to expose your hands, forearms or lower legs to soak up all you need.

Rather, the tan became an early example of an aspect of the body’s presentation coming to attain the desirability and show-offiness of, say, a hard-to-get accessory, much as perfect white teeth or a six pack later did. Coco Chanel, after a spell in the Med over 1923, is reputed to have first made the tan fashionable. “I can’t see that changing back to pale either, at least not over the next few decades,” reckons Creed.

Within a decade, exotic travel and sun lamps were giving movie stars the likes of Cary Grant or Errol Flynn a decided glow, if not the full satsuma. Peaky was more for seven stone weaklings. The tan, in contrast — strong contrast — was macho.

A tan came to be seen as “exotic and so more attractive,” as Creed notes.

“I went to the beach and, although I was a gangly guy, all of a sudden girls started to hit on me and after that I thought it must have been the tan,” as Hamilton himself noted.

Every class under the sun

There’s also a social code to tanning. There’s no getting around it but, as Creed points out, tanning, and attitudes to tanning, are class-oriented. Middle-class people will claim their tan is down to having gone abroad, when actually they’re embarrassed to say they’ve gone to a salon. Certainly the use of fake tan, she argues, is explicitly working class: that’s the Love Island/Towie Effect.

But they’re onto something. Fashion, after all, can’t change the facts: ultraviolet radiation is carcinogenic. There are no safe levels of UV tanning. And tanning beds, according to various studies, not only age their users’ skin even faster than exposure to sunlight, but, depending on age in particular, also make for between a 29 and 75 percent increase in the likelihood that they will get one or other type of skin cancer. The fake tan — however excessively or messily applied, however unconvincing — is, at least, the safe tan. Self-tan products are, in fact, the fastest growing area in cosmetics, according to one study.

“It’s hard to escape the idea that a tan gives you what is perceived as being a ‘healthy’ look but we’re also more health-conscious, and that’s why more people are looking to avoid tanning beds in favour of self-tan products,” argues Steven O’Neill, founder of The Grooming Clinic.

“And so much has changed to improve them over recent years. There are none of those strange, biscuity smells and — with everything from products that allow a tan to be buildable drop by drop, to glow pads — they’re much easier to use without ending up orange”.

And O’Neill acts on that finding: he even uses fake tanning products over the summer. Why? Precisely because even then he still wants to avoid the sun.

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