For thousands of years, pale skin was the currency of beauty and status. A tan meant you labored outdoors for a living. Then, in 1923, French fashion designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel returned from a cruise to Cannes with darkened skin, and everything flipped.
Photographs of her sun-kissed arrival sparked a cultural pivot. Within years, tanned skin signaled something entirely new: wealth, leisure, the ability to vacation in sunny destinations. By 1929, Harper's Bazaar was declaring that without a tan, you simply weren't fashionable. "If you haven't a tanned look about you, you aren't part of the rage of the moment," the magazine declared.
What followed was the industrialization of that desire. When German scientist Friedrich Wolff refined tanning bed technology in the 1970s, the machines arrived with a clear target in mind: women. Magazine advertisements from that era flooded pages with images of bronzed, toned female bodies. Men barely appeared. When they did, they were shown as active and athletic, not passively lying under ultraviolet lights.
Today, the math hasn't changed much. A 2022 Greek study found women in Europe were two to three times more likely than men to use indoor tanning beds across all age groups. In the US, approximately 7.8 million women use tanning beds compared to 1.9 million men, according to research published in JAMA Dermatology.
The language around tanning reinforces this gendered divide. Advertisements pitch "skin-tightening" and "rejuvenating" properties, echoing the skincare industry's fixation on anti-aging products marketed primarily to women. A 2008 study found that only male respondents viewed heavily tanned women as more attractive than lightly tanned women. Another study linked tanned skin in men's eyes with perceived thinness, another beauty standard disproportionately imposed on women.
Modern social media has turbocharged the trend. TikTok videos with billions of views glamorize bronzed skin with captions like "Girls look the hottest with a nice tan" and "Proof being tan boosts your confidence and makes u feel 10x prettier." Young women internalize these messages: research on women aged 18 to 25 found that indoor tanning users believe tanning enhances physical attractiveness and increases confidence.
The tanning industry has capitalized on this. The global self-tanning product market is estimated at $1.1 billion. Despite documented risks including melanoma, the indoor tanning beds market is projected to exceed $7.4 million by 2027. The US has 57,283 tanning salons; the UK has between 3,000 and 5,000.
But the obsession with tanned skin obscures a darker dynamic. While white women are celebrated for tans, Black and brown women with similar skin tones are marginalized by the beauty industry. Worse, influencers have been accused of "blackfishing," using tanned skin to appear racially ambiguous and gain engagement while maintaining white privilege. "Women of color are not a trend," says London-based esthetician Alicia Lartey.
The health stakes are severe. The World Health Organization classified indoor tanning as a human carcinogen in 2009, placing it in the same category as smoking and asbestos. Both melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers result from indoor tanning exposure. Additional risks include eye damage, skin burns, and premature aging such as fine lines, wrinkles, and pigmentation spots.
Yet dermatologists report that despite these warnings, women continue to pursue tans at higher rates than men. The gap suggests that the sexist marketing apparatus built over the past century remains powerfully intact, even as scientific evidence mounts about the genuine dangers lurking beneath the bronzed surface.
Author Jessica Williams: "A century of marketing has convinced women that a tan makes them prettier and healthier, when the opposite is medically true, and the entire system is designed to make them feel deficient without one."
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