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Abstract Over the years, the perception of health, beauty and status has been associated with skin colour. Influential figures over the ages, from Queen Elizabeth I to Kim Kardashian, have dictated social standards of beauty including the ‘ideal’ skin colour. In parallel, advancements in medicine and science have led to the use of light therapy as a treatment for many medical conditions. The history of tanning and the basis for society’s obsession are important to understand. During the Elizabethan era, Queen Elizabeth I used heavy layers of ‘Venetian ceruse’, a deadly concoction of white lead and vinegar, to achieve the porcelain skin that was desirable at the time. Members of high society followed suit, as tanned skin was associated with outdoor manual labour. During the Industrial Revolution, social perception turned on its head as the rural poor moved to work in mills and factories in the 18th century. Working in sunlight-depleted environments resulted in pallor being associated with low social status. In the 1920s, the French designer and fashion icon Coco Chanel famously returned from the French Riviera with a suntan and announced in Vogue magazine that, ‘the 1929 girl must be tanned…a golden tan is the index of chic’, leading to her accreditation for beginning the fashionable trend of a suntan in modern history and the present day. From ‘Malibu Barbie’ dolls in the 1970s to Kim Kardashian showing off her office sunbed in 2024, the Western beauty ideal of tanned skin is continually perpetuated. Parallel to the beauty world, the novel idea of phototherapy and its successful treatment of lupus vulgaris resulted in Niels Finsen receiving the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1903. Further development of indoor tanning devices in the 1920s led to their promotion as treatment for diverse conditions from rickets to pneumonia. In the 1970s, the first commercial sunbed was invented by European scientist Friedrich Wolff, culminating in 1977 with the world’s first tanning salon in Berlin. By the 1980s the association of sunbed use and skin cancer was observed. As a result, nonultraviolet tanning methods were popularized, from teabags in the 1950s to the revolutionary discovery of dihydroxyacetone in the 1960s, resulting in ‘fake tan’ as we know it today and allowing for safer methods of attaining the desired glow. Ultimately, tanned skin rose from a hallmark of low socioeconomic status in history, to now reflect the opposite: wealth, health and beauty.
Ashraf et al. (Fri,) studied this question.