The tanning turn: how pale and brown changed places

For a very long stretch of European history the logic was simple and material. Outdoor work produced a tanned skin. Indoor life produced a pale one. Pallor therefore signalled that you did not labour outdoors, and it was cultivated with parasols, gloves, veils, hats and, as described in the essay on ceruse, with paint. Preparations for removing tan and freckles are among the most common cosmetic recipes in surviving receipt books.

Then, over about three decades, it reversed. A tan came to signal leisure, health, travel and money. The pale skin that had signalled rank came to signal confinement, illness and factory work. That is one of the largest and fastest inversions of a beauty standard for which we have good documentation, and it is worth understanding properly, because the popular explanation is a single anecdote.

Cause one: sunlight became medicine

This is the most underrated factor and probably the largest. In the decades around 1900, light acquired serious clinical prestige.

Niels Ryberg Finsen received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1903 for treating disease with concentrated light. Heliotherapy, systematic exposure to sunlight, became a mainstream treatment for tuberculosis, most famously in Alpine sanatoria associated with Auguste Rollier at Leysin, where patients were exposed on terraces in graduated regimes. Ultraviolet treatment of rickets was demonstrated in the years around the First World War, and the link between sunlight, vitamin D and bone development became a major public health finding.

The consequence was that a tanned body stopped reading as a labouring body and started reading as a treated body. Sun exposure was prescribed. Municipal authorities built open air schools and solaria. Advertising for lamps and for sun exposure equipment addressed parents about their children's health. By the time tanning became fashionable it had a decade or more of medical endorsement behind it.

Cause two: the work moved indoors

The status logic of pallor depends on outdoor labour being the common condition. Industrialisation moved enormous numbers of people into factories, mills, mines and offices, and the characteristic appearance of the industrial working class was pale, not tanned. Once pallor is the mark of the mill and the office, it stops functioning as a marker of rank, and the signal has to relocate.

That relocation is the mechanism, and it is a general one. Status markers migrate to whatever the majority cannot obtain. When food was scarce, weight signalled wealth. When food became cheap and abundant, thinness did. When sun exposure was compulsory, pallor signalled leisure. When most people worked indoors, a tan did.

Status markers always migrate to whatever most people cannot get. Nothing else about them is stable.

Cause three: paid holidays and the seaside

A tan requires time outdoors in a sunny place, which requires leisure and, usually, travel. The expansion of paid holiday entitlement across the early twentieth century, and the growth of seaside and Mediterranean tourism, put both within reach of far more people. In Britain, holiday with pay legislation of the late 1930s and the growth of the holiday resort put a summer break within reach of the industrial working class for the first time.

The Mediterranean season also inverted. The Riviera had been a winter destination for northern Europeans seeking a mild climate; the summer season is a twentieth century development, and it is inseparable from the new appetite for sun.

Cause four: the clothes changed

You cannot acquire a tan through the dress of 1890. The reduction in the amount of the body covered by ordinary and sporting dress between the 1900s and the 1930s is dramatic, and it is both a cause and an effect of the tanning turn. Swimming costumes in particular changed beyond recognition, and beach dress developed as a distinct category.

And then it turned again

The second reversal is medical and it is comparatively recent. Evidence accumulated through the second half of the twentieth century linking ultraviolet exposure to skin cancer, and by the 1980s public health campaigning had shifted decisively. The Australian sun protection campaigns from the early 1980s are the best known and among the most sustained public health interventions of the period, and their slogan entered the language.

The evidentiary position is now firm. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified ultraviolet emitting tanning devices in its highest category of carcinogenicity in 2009. In the United Kingdom, the Sunbeds Regulation Act 2010 prohibited the use of sunbeds by under eighteens in England and Wales, with comparable provisions elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

What is interesting for this magazine is that the medical reversal did not produce an aesthetic reversal. The tan retained its associations with health and leisure even after the health claim was withdrawn, and the market response was not a return to pallor but the invention of a substitute.

The substitute

Self tanning preparations work through dihydroxyacetone, a simple sugar that reacts with amino acids in the outermost layer of the skin to produce brown pigments. The effect is confined to the dead surface layer, and it fades as that layer sheds. The reaction was characterised in the mid twentieth century and commercial products appeared from around 1960, initially with a reputation for orange results that took decades of formulation work to shake off.

It is a genuinely elegant solution to a cultural problem: it delivers the signal without the exposure. Whether that is a triumph of formulation or a demonstration that the signal was never really about health is a question this magazine leaves open.

The other half of the story

Any account of tanning that stops at European and North American fashion is incomplete to the point of distortion, because the global picture runs in the other direction as well.

Markets for skin lightening preparations are very large across parts of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East, and the preference for lighter skin in many of those contexts has roots in indigenous class hierarchies, in colonial history, and in contemporary media, in proportions that vary by place and are argued about seriously.

The public health dimension is unambiguous. Unregulated lightening products have repeatedly been found to contain mercury compounds or high concentrations of restricted substances, and regulators including in the United Kingdom have issued warnings and taken enforcement action. Mercury and hydroquinone are subject to prohibition or restriction in regulated markets under the frameworks described in the colour regulation essay, and the persistent problem is supply outside those frameworks.

Set the two halves side by side and the underlying pattern is the same one the tanning turn demonstrates: the desirable skin colour is the one associated with the life most people cannot have, and it moves when the associations move. That is not a comfortable conclusion, and it is not offered as a judgement about anybody's choices. It is offered because the alternative explanation, that one particular colour is intrinsically more beautiful, does not survive five minutes of comparative history.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The International Agency for Research on Cancer and the legislation.gov.uk both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.