![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1783259652_361_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
The columnist\u2019s then-10 year old niece after a bad sunburn at a beach volleyball camp in 2020.<\/p>\n
(Robin Abcarian \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
There is only one explanation: Like babies, teenagers live in the moment. Or, less kindly, teenagers can be really dumb. <\/p>\n
I was a really dumb teenager myself, \u201claying out\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cblackfishing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the long ago past, suntans were a signifier of the working class. However, in 1923, the fashion designer Coco Chanel<\/a> was photographed stepping off a yacht in Cannes, with an accidental tan. I don\u2019t know if this widely repeated story is apocryphal, but considering Chanel\u2019s impact on fashion, it strikes me as quite probable. In this telling, Western beauty standards were transformed overnight.<\/p>\n In the postwar years, a bunch of things contributed to white people\u2019s desire for a deep tan: Swimsuits shrank (the bikini debuted in 1946),<\/a> increasing the amount of skin exposed to the sun and irresistibly scented tanning lotions such as Coppertone<\/a>, Hawaiian Tropic<\/a> and Bain de Soleil <\/a>(\u201cfor the St. Tropez tan\u201d) 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,<\/a> sun-bleached hair<\/a> and a bronzed outdoorsy look. <\/p>\n As early as 1968, however, the Food and Drug Administration warned<\/a>that \u201cthere is no such thing as a safe tan.\u201d It was a scream into the void.<\/p>\n By the 1970s, as tanning became more and more popular \u2014 a symbol of leisure and affluence rather than outdoor labor \u2014 experts were becoming alarmed by a steep increase in the incidence of melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer that can be fatal.<\/p>\n This awareness coincided with the invention and popularity of the whole-body tanning bed, which was touted \u2014 wrongly, as it happens \u2014 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 \u201chealthy glow.\u201d Tanning beds hit their peak right around 2009,<\/a> when roughly 25% to 30% of all young women ages 18 to 21 frequented indoor tanning salons. And they are, unfortunately, making a comeback.<\/a> <\/p>\n In 2012, thanks to legislation<\/a> 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.<\/a> It still is.<\/a> <\/p>\n As for the racial implications of tanning, they are unavoidable. It\u2019s 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 \u201cblackfishing,<\/a>\u201d a twist on the online phenomenon of \u201ccatfishing,\u201d or portraying yourself as someone you aren\u2019t. <\/p>\n \u201cCan we start a thread and discuss all of the white girls cosplaying as black women on Instagram?\u201d tweeted Thompson. (Her thread has since disappeared.) The Kardashians, with their corn rows, plumped lips, enlarged derrieres and sometimes darkened skin, exemplify the trend.<\/a> <\/p>\n \u201cThese women have the luxury of selecting which aspects they want to emulate without fully dealing with the consequences of Blackness,\u201d Johnson wrote in 2018<\/a> in Paper, the same publication that published the famous 2014 photo<\/a> of Kim Kardashian cosplaying a Black woman, balancing a champagne glass on her backside, which generated considerable backlash.<\/a> <\/p>\n These discussions about the history and implications of suntanning, I\u2019m afraid, are of little interest to my niece and her friends.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAuntie,\u201d she replied, \u201cthat\u2019s the whole point.\u201d <\/p>\n Sigh.<\/p>\n Bluesky: @rabcarian<\/a>
Threads: @rabcarian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What in the actual Stage 4 melanoma is going on around here? \u201cAuntie, look at my tan lines!\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[155952,99284,30367,48,52,51,47,50,49,155948,25117,155949,5931,99858,155947,22586,3898,155951,3396,155950,72],"class_list":["post-386956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-16-year-old-niece","tag-black-woman","tag-index","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-other-day","tag-skin","tag-skin-cancer","tag-summer","tag-sunscreen","tag-tanning","tag-teenager","tag-thank","tag-unfortunate-comeback","tag-warning","tag-whole-body-tanning-bed","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}