Young Brunette Girl Shows Off Her Tanned Body In The Studio

Throughout history, tanning has gone in and out of fashion. In many early civilizations, tanned skin was thought to be a matter of social class. Those whose skin was tan often spent long hours working in the sun, and were often grouped together as lower class. Women even went as far as to put lead-based cosmetics on their skin to artificially augment their appearance. However, these cosmetics slowly caused their death through lead poisoning. Achieving this light-skinned appearance was brought about in many other ways, including the use of arsenic to whiten skin, on to more modern methods such as full length clothes, powders, and parasols. This fair-skinned trend continued up until the end of the Victorian era. Niels Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1903 for his “Finsen Light Therapy”. This therapy was to cure infectious diseases such as lupus vulgaris and rickets. Vitamin D deficiency was found to be a cause of rickets disease, and exposure to the sun would allow Vitamin D to be produced in a person. Therefore, sun exposure was a remedy to curing several diseases, especially rickets. Shortly thereafter, in the 1920s, Coco Chanel accidentally got sunburnt while visiting the French Riviera. Her fans apparently liked the look and started to adopt darker skin tones themselves. Tanned skin became a trend partly because of Coco’s status and the longing for her lifestyle by other members of society. In addition, Parisians fell in love with Josephine Baker, a “caramel-skinned” singer in Paris. Those who liked and idolized her wanted darker skin so they could be more like her. These two French women were two trendsetters of the transformation of tanned skin being viewed as fashionable, healthy, and luxurious.
In the 1940s, women’s magazines started using advertisements that encouraged sun bathing. At this time, swimsuits' skin coverage began decreasing and tanning oil came out. The bikini, introduced by the French designer Louis Reard, made its appearance in 1946. In the 1950s, many people used baby oil as a method to tan more quickly. The first self-tanner came about in the same decade and was known as “Man-Tan,” and often led to undesirable orange skin. Coppertone, in 1953, brought out the little blond girl and her cocker spaniel tugging on her bathing suit bottoms on the cover of their sunscreen bottles; this is still the same advertisement they use today on their bottles of sunscreen. In the latter part of the 1950s, silver metallic UV reflectors were common to enhance one’s tan. In 1971, Mattel introduced Malibu Barbie, which had tanned skin, sunglasses, and her very own bottle of sun tanning lotion. The same decade, specifically 1978, gave rise to tanning beds and sunscreen with SPF 15. Today there are an estimated 50,000 outlets for tanning, whereas in the 1990s there were only around 10,000. The tanning business is a five-billion dollar industry.
In some other parts of the world, fair skin remains the standard of beauty. The geisha of Japan were well-known for their white painted faces, and the appeal of the bihaku (美白), or "beautiful white", ideal leads many Japanese women to avoid any form of tanning. There are exceptions to this, of course, with Japanese fashion trends such as ganguro emphasizing almost black skin. The color white is associated with purity and divinity in many Eastern religions. In India, dark skin is heavily associated with a lower class status, and some people resort to skin bleaching to achieve a skin color they view as more socially acceptable.