Don't blame Cheryl Cole and co for our suntan obsession
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Version 0 of 1. The skies clear. The temperatures rise. For a few days it looks and feels like summer. And right on cue, along with the packed parks and pink skins, come the acres of stories about the big yellow thing appearing to make everyone happy. Last week a new Cancer Research study revealed that even factor 50 suncream cannot guarantee protection against malignant melanoma. And on Tuesday, the Daily Mail reported that "image-conscious" children as young as nine would go to any length to copy perma-tan celebrities such as Cheryl Cole. Half of the 1,000 under-16s polled in the Superdrug-conducted survey confessed to "lying to their parents about [wearing] sunscreen". While "other tricks included rolling up the arms and legs of their school uniform, and wearing as few clothes as possible". Unshocked to learn that the young fib to their folks, or flout uniform regulations, I discern a more urgent and revealing tendency. The recurrent and growing depiction of the sun as Public Health Enemy No 1. As the author of the Cancer Research study put it, the findings reveal "how dangerous this cancer-causing agent is". And while we can't turn off the sun, or call it to account, someone surely must be blamed. The Mail piece clearly reveals who. For although 64% said they wanted a tan because they "just felt healthier", it is the image-conscious 31% copying the B-list bronzers who grab the headline and cause such concern. From Coco Chanel to Katie Price, it is the fashionable and glamorous who have taken the rap for inventing and encouraging this dangerous pursuit. "Cover up" is the advice of the health authorities. And "cover up" is the very phrase I'd hurl accusatively back. For the true history of sunbathing reveals just how ironic that advice is. The fashionable did not invent the craze for sunbathing, as we've been encouraged to believe. In truth, they adopted tanning relatively late. English Vogue did not feature tanned models until July 1927, nearly 50 years after sunbathing started being practised in the most unlikely quarters. No, the history of sunbathing starts not with the rich and glamorous, but the poor and desperate. And it was actively promoted, not in the pages of the fashion press, but in medical journals and public health pamphlets – by the very counterparts of those who condemn the practice today. Medicine created our sun addiction – a monster that refuses to go back into the lab. I'll briefly sketch in the history, and debunk some of the persistent myths. Sunbathing as a conscious activity emerged towards the end of the 19th century principally as a cure for tuberculosis of the skin (lupus vulgaris). In 1903 one of the pioneers of this practice, the Danish physician Niels R Finsen, won the Nobel prize for medicine for his surgical use of ultra violet light. But he was not alone in extolling the sun's curative or nutritional qualities. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of Corn Flakes, also invented the sunbed, patenting his first device in 1896 – by royal appointment no less, as Edward VII apparently kept one at Windsor Castle for his gout. In the 1920s, sunbathing first became a public health crusade (this time promoting it). The discovery of Vitamin D through UV light in 1922 triggered the lobbying for sunbaths and sunbeds to help prevent rickets in urban populations. Public lidos were established specifically to provide city dwellers with a place to sunbathe. And finally, irony of ironies, special sunbathing clinics were set up for children to have winter sunlamp treatments. If the young are now considered particularly vulnerable to the fashionable allure of the suntan, history gives this tendency a whole different complexion. The jet set caught the craze very late, and only because health and physical culture came into vogue in the late 1920s. Before the bright young things sported tans, they were the preserve of consumptives, the malnourished, health obsessives and nudists. The first nudist clubs were called Sun Clubs, dedicated to the great and healthy outdoors. Opinion has come full circle. The experts changed their minds, and changed their message, without once acknowledging their contribution. Fashion continues to carry the can. The sun, meanwhile, continues to shine down, indifferently. Quietly sustaining life on the planet. |