How real suntans lost their glow
For generations, a tan has said "health," "beauty," the good life. All you need is a little sunscreen for some fun in the sun. And the forecast is sunny: By 2013, we'll spend $6.6 billion on suncare products.
But these days you don't really need the sun: 30 million Americans use tanning beds, and as for faux tans, celebrity spray tanner Jimmy Coco earns up to $350 dollars a spray.
"People call me up and they ask, 'Will I be orange?' And I just wanna say, 'Excuse me, this is Jimmy Coco, you're not gonna be orange.' No, no, no, no, no," Coco told Faith Salie.
But it wasn't always like this.
"Tanning used to be very unpopular. My grandma, who was a farmer's wife, would wear long-sleeved shirts and would wear those big sunhats to protect herself because for her the ideal beauty was ivory skin. Why is that? Because ivory skin represented having wealth. You didn't have to work in the fields," Joel Hillhouse, professor of Public Health at East Tennessee State University, explained.
According to Hillhouse, the history of tanning in America is more than a little colorful: "As we began to move into a more industrial society, then ivory skin represented being a factory worker and the tanned skin represented having the leisure to lay out in the sun or even to travel to sunny places."
Legend has it Coco Chanel supposedly started the tanning trend when she got burned on the Riviera. But flappers were already catching some rays at the shore. After World War II, the tanning craze really started to sizzle when babes met the bikini. Beach blanket bingo, anyone?
"And then, all the good tans, the kids would go get tans. And they'd come in and all the girls would go ooh-ah, and we'd go ooh-ah over the girls," Ron Rice remembered, who was a lifeguard during those days.
"And that was just a fun time to live. But nobody thought about sun damage at the time," he added.
They were thinking about a deep dark tan. So in 1967, when he was a high school chemistry teacher in Daytona Beach, Fla., Rice created what would become Hawaiian Tropic Tanning Oil in his garage.
"I bought a garbage can for $4.00, 20 gallons, I bought a broom, I cut off the handle and from the top and I stirred it up like a witch's brew and had two 11-year-old kids I hired. They poured it into the bottles, and away we went," Rice remembered.
The blend of aloe, coconut, and other oils became synonymous with a sexy lifestyle.
"I had a little dream. I had a little idea. You know, women used French perfume, they paid big money for French perfume, but they never get to go to France. Same thing with Hawaii. Nobody gets to travel to Hawaii unless you got a lot of money. So I dreamed up the idea of we'll call it Hawaiian," Rice told Salie.
Suntan oils and lotions promised to tan "safely," but by the 1980s, suntan oils started to be replaced by sunscreens. In 1981,sunscreens made up only a third of suncare products; 15 years later, sunscreens dominated with 96 percent of the market.
"Suntans as we know it today is sun damage. And so while it seems nice and it feels good and it maybe looks good, what we know is that it's actually sun damaged skin," Consumer's Reports' Urvashi Rangan explained.
Rangan like all experts under the sun, says that today's tan can be tomorrow's problem. Which is why you now find sunscreen in everything - from makeup to hair conditioners. You'll even find sunscreen on George Hamilton. So we should be "in the pink" when it comes to sun protection, right?
"Not so, says Dr. Eleni Linos, a resident in dermatology at Stanford University.
"What we found in our study is that people who say they use sunscreen frequently don't necessarily get fewer sunburns," Dr. Linos said.
Asked if they get more sunburns, Linos said, "In this study they did report more sunburns. And that was surprising."
Also surprising, though Americans are using more sunscreen than ever, skin cancer rates continue to rise.
"Do sunscreens give people a false sense of security? We wonder about that. Do people just sort of slather their sunscreen on and feel like once they've done it once, they're set for the whole day?" Rangan asked.
Still, staying out of the sun does not mean tanning beds are the golden ticket. The World Health Organization lists them as a carcinogen alongside cigarettes.
And tanning can be kind of addictive. "People that indoor tan typically and outdoor tan, report that it helps them feel relaxed. We know the UV radiation, when it's hit our skin, will release endorphins, the opiates that we have inside of us, the kind of thing that gives somebody a runner's high," Professor Hillhouse explained.
Hillhouse studies why millions of young people lie down in tanning beds, even though studies show it increases their chances of developing skin cancer by 75 percent. "I always like to tell the story of a young student of mine who was involved in one of my early studies. And she came up to me and she said, 'Dr. Hillhouse, I tan three or four times a week. My mom had skin cancer, I'll probably get skin cancer, butn that's gonna happen when I'm old, like in my 40s.' And that's a very typical attitude among young people," he said.
So what's a pale face to do? Well, you could make an appointment with Jimmy Coco, spray tanner to stars like Eva Longoria.
Asked what's wrong with being pale and why tans are so great, Coco told Salie, "Well, especially in Hollywood, you know what they say, white is not a camera color. The thing about being tan is there's the allure of being tan is that you're accomplished, you're successful, you're able to have gone off to an exotic island and vacation and come back again."
"So, do you think everyone looks better with a tan?" Salie asked.
"Everyone looks better with a tan, absolutely," Coco said.
A rich bronze tan - the only way to glow. But if the dark side of tanning has you thinking twice, you can always look back and remember your golden years.