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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 warnedthat “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 derrieres 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.
Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that teen girls are embracing a renewed obsession with tanning, driven heavily by social media trends such as “UV index tanning,” in which adolescents check the UV index not to avoid peak radiation but to seek out the strongest sun in order to tan faster.[2][5][8][11][14] It portrays this as a misuse of a tool designed as a “sunburn meter” and emphasizes that a UV index of 6 or higher can damage skin in minutes, especially for fairer tones.[5][11][14][18]
Building on this, the column contends that Gen Z is largely ignoring decades of public‑health messaging about skin cancer, premature aging and wrinkles, and instead prioritizing the immediate aesthetic payoff of a tan over long‑term health, echoing survey data showing many young adults feel “it’s worth looking great now even if it means looking worse later.”[2][4][7][10]
The piece situates today’s tanning craze in a broader historical narrative, describing how Western beauty standards evolved from associating tans with outdoor labor to linking bronzed skin with affluence and leisure after Coco Chanel’s influence, the postwar rise of bikinis, jet travel, surf culture and heavily marketed tanning oils and lotions.[1][3][5][6][12][16] It suggests that this long-standing cultural ideal makes it particularly hard for public‑health messages about sun avoidance and sunscreen to gain traction with image‑conscious teens.
The article underscores the medical consensus that there is no such thing as a safe tan, recalling early FDA warnings and tying them to modern evidence that both outdoor and indoor tanning dramatically raise the risk of melanoma, especially when started young.[2][4][8][11][12][14][15] It notes that tanning beds, once sold as a “safer” alternative, are now categorized as cancer‑causing devices and that using them before age 35 can increase melanoma risk by 75% or more, with recent research finding indoor tanners are several times more likely to develop melanoma, often in less sun‑exposed areas of the body.[4][12][15]
In policy terms, the column highlights California’s pioneering 2012 law banning tanning bed use by minors and cites the U.S. surgeon general’s declaration of skin cancer as a major public‑health problem as evidence that the dangers are well recognized by experts, even as indoor tanning shows signs of a Gen Z resurgence.[4][15][19] It implies that regulatory efforts can be effective, pointing to research that youth indoor‑tanning prohibitions explain a significant share of the decline in indoor tanning among white high schoolers.[19]
The piece also stresses the paradox of teenagers obsessively tracking the UV index for tanning, while public‑health campaigns and dermatologists urge people to use the index to avoid high‑radiation periods, wear broad‑spectrum SPF 30 or higher, and seek shade during peak midday hours.[5][11][14][18][20] By showing the niece carefully enforcing sunscreen rules for younger campers while chasing deep tan lines for herself, it illustrates how knowledge of risk does not necessarily translate into self‑protective behavior in adolescence.[1][2][4][5][11]
Beyond health, the article foregrounds the racial and privilege dimensions of tanning, arguing that white people’s voluntary darkening of their skin for fashion highlights a “privilege paradox” when compared with the discrimination faced by people whose skin is naturally dark.[3][6][16] In discussing “blackfishing” and figures like the Kardashians, the piece suggests that some white influencers selectively adopt aesthetics associated with Black women—cornrows, fuller lips, exaggerated curves and darker skin—without bearing the systemic burdens of Blackness, echoing critiques in cultural commentary and media analysis.[3][6][16]
Finally, the column portrays teen tanning as a mix of developmental shortsightedness, social media pressure and stubborn beauty ideals: it recalls older generations’ own risky habits (such as baby oil sunbathing) to show continuity, yet concludes that, in the era of high melanoma rates and abundant sunscreen options, intentionally tanning in very high UV conditions—“that’s the whole point,” as the niece puts it—feels especially reckless.[1][2][4][7][10][11][13]
Different views on the topic
In contrast to the article’s alarm, many young people and tanning bed users describe tanning as a positive, confidence‑boosting practice, telling researchers they “just feel better” and “look well” with a tan and often feel slimmer and more attractive when their skin is darker.[9][12] These interviews, along with surveys showing outdoor tanning remains more common than indoor tanning among U.S. adolescents, suggest that for many, tanning is perceived as an integral part of contemporary beauty standards and social life rather than an obviously dangerous behavior.[1][9][12]
Additionally, sociocultural studies find that appearance‑based pressures and peer comments about being “too pale” or not fitting the “tan ideal” strongly shape young women’s intentions to tan, with some respondents emphasizing that looking bronzed is associated with having money, vacation time and an active outdoor lifestyle.[9][12] From this perspective, tanning is framed as a rational response to social rewards and status symbols promoted by celebrities and influencers, even when health warnings are well known.[7][10][12]
At the same time, widely circulating narratives on TikTok and Instagram push back against dermatologists’ insistence that “there is no safe tan,” promoting instead the belief that tanning is acceptable as long as one does not burn, or that a “base tan” provides protection from future sun damage.[2][4][8][11][20] Some influencers also repeat claims that sunscreen is toxic or that avoiding certain foods or “seed oils” makes the skin more resilient, messages that encourage intentional tanning and skepticism toward routine SPF use in ways that diverge sharply from the column’s pro‑sunscreen stance.[4][8][11][20]
Some health communicators and clinicians stress a more nuanced view of sun exposure than the article’s focus on risk, arguing that moderate time in the sun is important for vitamin D synthesis, mental health and physical activity, and that the goal should be “smart” rather than minimal exposure.[11][18] These voices still endorse sunscreen and UV‑index awareness but caution that overly fear‑based messaging about sunlight can create confusion, and instead recommend short, controlled periods of sun alongside protective clothing and regular SPF use, rather than total avoidance of midday rays.[11][18][20]
Moreover, while the column highlights California’s strict approach and rising medical concern, some policymakers and industry advocates resist sweeping federal restrictions on tanning devices, arguing that regulation should remain at the state level and that adults and older teens should retain freedom of choice.[17][19] The recent decision by federal regulators to pull back from a nationwide ban on teen tanning beds, leaving policy to states despite documented melanoma risks, reflects a viewpoint that prioritizes local control and personal responsibility over uniform national health mandates.[17][19]
In academic and cultural discussions of tanning, some scholars and commentators present a more complicated picture of race and skin color than the article’s focus on “blackfishing” alone, noting that tanning practices intersect with long histories of colorism, class and gender in ways that cannot be reduced to a single narrative of appropriation.[6][16] These analyses emphasize that both the pursuit of darker skin by some white consumers and the pursuit of lighter skin among some people of color emerge from the same global hierarchy that privileges certain shades, suggesting that the core problem is systemic bias rather than individual desires for a tan, even if those desires carry very different social consequences.[3][6][16]
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