As 'tanning addicts' are publicly shamed and belittled, the real villains appear untouchable

In popular culture, sunbed consumers are portrayed as stereotypical baddies: tanorexic chavs and neds (Benidorm), evil gold-diggers and bimbos (Cinderella Story), murderous psychopaths (American Psycho) – and even zombies (Z Nation). We need look no further than the peculiar hue of the 45th and 47th United States President, Donald Trump, for a topical example.

The moral message is clear: sunbed use is ‘vain’ and ‘stupid’, and such grotesque consumers will experience fatal consequences for their wicked habits. Whilst white working-class people, young women, mothers, and both metrosexual and gay men are blamed for this reckless consumption, scientists and businesses continue to develop new tanning technologies.

As with the tobacco, nicotine, alcohol, fast food and gambling industries, the onus is on the consumer to act responsibly and moderately. Yet, these industries, including sunbed companies, put immense pressure on people to buy and consume their products via aggressive marketing, social media and digital tracking – they have embedded visible prompts into many public spaces to tempt people to consume. This includes strategically setting up shops across towns and cities, alongside incessant pop-ups on apps and the internet.

People who seek artificial sun tans are shamed and stereotyped, while the industry tries to stay one-step ahead of health concerns (Picture: Donald Miralle) | Getty Images

Long fascination with tanned skin

Understandably, some white people have become fixated on trying to darken their skin, which often results in being shamed as a ‘tanning addict’. In 1991, a senior consultant psychiatrist in Glasgow, Dr Prem Misra, coined the term ‘tanorexia’ in Britain – he was the first medical authority to formally do so.

The term was said to describe an obsessive desire to develop and maintain a permanent tan through ultraviolet (UV) tanning machines and other tanning methods. Individuals with this ‘psychological disorder’ perceive themselves as pale, regardless of how much darker their skin becomes. However, in Western culture, white people’s fascination with tanning their skin has a much longer history.

In the 1800s, industrialisation and urbanisation moved working-class farmers to indoor factory work, and anaemic white skin became associated with economic inferiority. In contrast, the mark of a tan started to indicate an affluent and moral life of outdoor leisure, especially for men who were upheld as worldly adventurers and explorers.

The tales of Dorian Gray and Dracula at the end of the century similarly exposed how the artificial white code of aristocratic beauty now symbolised ill health and debauchery. In the 1930s, both nudists and sun cults across Europe, notably Germany, used their naked, tanned and muscular bodies to promote the belief that ‘sunbathing therapy’ and a bronzed, white complexion resulted in health, happiness and beauty.

Accidental discovery of fake tan

During the following decade, renowned international companies started to sell small facial tanning devices and sun lamps for everyday home use. However, the novelty was relatively short-lived, following concerns that the machines could be domestic hazards and cause serious burns.

Across the pond, in the mid-1950s, the American scientist Eva Wittgenstein accidentally discovered dihydroxyacetone fake tan. Yet, no matter how often leading companies revised the solutions in the 1960s and 1970s, the serums still smelt awful, irritated some people’s skin, stained men’s beards, and caused orange, yellow and red streaks on both skin and clothing.

This helped the sunbed industry become the preferred tanning method shortly after its invention in 1978. According to most upmarket health, beauty and fitness businesses – especially beauty salons and gyms – sunbeds provided a “protective shield against sun-induced skin cancer”; and they were also said to melt fat, cure depression, and alleviate muscle tension.

Two decades later, cancer specialists instead exposed how sunbed use, even after one session, drastically increased the risk of developing skin cancers, including malignant melanoma, which remains the deadliest.

Dangers posed by melanotan

Yet, by the 1990s, everyone could access cheap sunbeds. In a backlash against consumerism, medically supported media framed working-class users as immoral and excessive over-consumers. The 1991 medical coining of ‘tanorexia’ in Britain further stigmatised the stereotyped ‘sunbed addicts’. In newspapers, magazines and on TV, these ‘beauty slaves’ were depicted as young, white, working-class women and mothers, or homosexual and metrosexual men.

In response, scientists developed more tanning technologies to stop sunbed use and sunbathing in general. In Australia, some of this research was government funded. Melanotan – a tanning injection and, more recently, a nasal spray – was ‘medically’ trialled with the aim to, again, protect people from skin cancer, while providing a cure for hypersensitivity, albinism and vitiligo.

Despite being linked to renal failure, it illegally appeared on the internet in the 2000s. Melanotan is still promoted on social media and sold under-the-counter at salons and bodybuilding gyms in Europe, Australia and the United States. Yet, in most media and popular culture, the consumers remain to blame.

The history of tanning technologies encourages us to critique our reliance on new ‘beauty, fitness and health’ technologies, and how they are sold to prevent or rectify the harms of preceding products. It also shows how the eventual health messages against using these technologies typically arrive with gender, class, race, age and sexuality-bound judgment.

Culturally embedded

And yet, the actual companies selling the products remain untouchable – they strategise several steps ahead by developing, unsurprisingly, new products that are supposedly ‘healthier’ than the ones before. Similar to tobacco and nicotine products, Western governments only challenge suppliers after the technology is culturally embedded within society.

In Britain, this is because our public health system is more reactive than proactive in preventing harm. By the time restrictions and bans are implemented, masses of people, especially teenagers, are already the next addicted generation.

So the blaming and shaming continues, whilst people still risk their health for the next ‘health-enhancing’ tanning technology.

Dr Fabiola Creed is a research associate at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear