What in the actual Stage 4 melanoma is going on around here?
“Auntie, look at my tan lines!” my 16-year-old niece commanded after spending a few hours at the beach the other day. Every day this summer, like a weather reporter, she announces the “UV index.”
Initially, I assumed she was trying to avoid the worst part of the day for sun exposure. After all, in July 2020, when she was 10, she came home from Sinjin Smith’s Beach Volleyball Camp in Santa Monica with a face so burned and blistered, she was in bed for two days. None of the counselors had reminded her to reapply her sunscreen.
She and her friends are now obsessed with the index, which they learned about on TikTok (where else?) because they want to get very tan, very fast.
This, in fact, is an egregious perversion of the index’s purpose, which is an open-ended numerical scale, ranging from zero to 11 and up. The index does not measure heat. It measures radiation, and the intensity of skin-damaging ultraviolet rays. It is, basically, a sunburn meter. The higher it goes, the worse it is for your skin. An index number of 6 or higher is considered unsafe without protection, as it can cause skin damage and sunburn in less than 20 minutes. My niece gets excited when it’s an 8, 9 or 10.
How is it that all the years of warnings about the dangers of sunlight, skin cancer and wrinkles are being shunned by this generation of teenagers, who were surely slathered with sunscreen by their parents when they were little?
There is only one explanation: Like babies, teenagers live in the moment. Or, less kindly, teenagers can be really dumb.
I was a really dumb teenager myself, “laying out” each summer at Malibu Lagoon for a maximum tan, using baby oil to broil my skin. Surfers sometimes wore stripes of white zinc under their eyes, but there was no real sunscreen industry then, and no advertising campaigns blaring grave warnings about the perils of catching too many rays.
Reading up on the history of tanning led me down a very weird rabbit hole, involving Coco Chanel, post-World War II affluence, white privilege, racial hypocrisy and a concept called “blackfishing.”
In the long ago past, suntans were a signifier of the working class. However, in 1923, the fashion designer Coco Chanel was photographed stepping off a yacht in Cannes, with an accidental tan. I don’t know if this widely repeated story is apocryphal, but considering Chanel’s impact on fashion, it strikes me as quite probable. In this telling, Western beauty standards were transformed overnight.
In the postwar years, a bunch of things contributed to white people’s desire for a deep tan: Swimsuits shrank (the bikini debuted in 1946), increasing the amount of skin exposed to the sun and irresistibly scented tanning lotions such as Coppertone, Hawaiian Tropic and Bain de Soleil (“for the St. Tropez tan”) sold the sun-kissed ideal. Meanwhile, jet travel became affordable to the middle class and popular culture was awash in Beach Boys-style surf-rock anthems, beach-blanket movies and celebrations of endless summers, sun-bleached hair and a bronzed outdoorsy look.
As early as 1968, however, the Food and Drug Administration warned that “there is no such thing as a safe tan.” It was a scream into the void.
By the 1970s, as tanning became more and more popular — a symbol of leisure and affluence rather than outdoor labor — experts were becoming alarmed by a steep increase in the incidence of melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer that can be fatal.
This awareness coincided with the invention and popularity of the whole-body tanning bed, which was touted — wrongly, as it happens — as a safer alternative to natural sunlight. The primary customers were young white women, who continued to conflate the damage wrought by UV rays with a “healthy glow.” Tanning beds hit their peak right around 2009, when roughly 25% to 30% of all young women ages 18 to 21 frequented indoor tanning salons. And they are, unfortunately, making a comeback.
In 2012, thanks to legislation pushed by then-state Sen. Ted Lieu, California became the first state to ban tanning beds for minors. Two years later, the U.S. surgeon general declared skin cancer a major health problem. It still is.
As for the racial implications of tanning, they are unavoidable. It’s a privilege paradox; white people temporarily darken their skin for aesthetic reasons, while other people are penalized in infinite ways for their dark skin. In a 2018 Twitter thread that went viral, the Canadian journalist Wanna Thompson coined the term “blackfishing,” a twist on the online phenomenon of “catfishing,” or portraying yourself as someone you aren’t.
“Can we start a thread and discuss all of the white girls cosplaying as black women on Instagram?” tweeted Thompson. (Her thread has since disappeared.) The Kardashians, with their corn rows, plumped lips, enlarged derrières and sometimes darkened skin, exemplify the trend.
“These women have the luxury of selecting which aspects they want to emulate without fully dealing with the consequences of Blackness,” Johnson wrote in 2018 in Paper, the same publication that published the famous 2014 photo of Kim Kardashian cosplaying a Black woman, balancing a champagne glass on her backside, which generated considerable backlash.
These discussions about the history and implications of suntanning, I’m afraid, are of little interest to my niece and her friends.
The other day as she was getting ready for her job as a counselor at a summer day camp (where she reminds her young campers to reapply their sunscreen every hour or so), I asked her if she realizes that suntanning when the UV Index is high is a terrible idea because the rays are so strong.
“Auntie,” she replied, “that’s the whole point.”
Sigh.
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