Here is a fun party fact that will ruin poolside small talk forever: the reason you feel vaguely better about yourself with a tan has very little to do with aesthetics, and a whole lot to do with decades of deeply questionable cultural programming. Refinery29's Sun Blocked series is pulling back the curtain on the tanning obsession, and honestly? It's a lot.
We romanticize this, and that's the problem
Think about the language we use. "Sun-kissed." "Healthy glow." "Golden hour skin." These are not neutral descriptors - they are tiny little marketing poems designed to make baking yourself in UV radiation sound like a personality trait worth having. Luxury fashion ads, influencers draped across yachts, every single summer campaign ever made: they all quietly reinforce the message that tan skin equals aspirational living.
And that framing? It has a history. A sexist one.
A beauty standard built on who gets to relax
The tanning trend is relatively modern, historically speaking. For centuries, pale skin was the status symbol because it signaled that you did not have to work outdoors. Then, as industrial labor moved inside factories, the script flipped. Suddenly, a tan meant you had the leisure time and money to lounge around in the sun doing absolutely nothing productive. Coco Chanel famously helped popularize the look in the 1920s, and the rest, as they say, is expensive SPF history.
But here is the kicker: women have consistently been the primary targets of this shifting standard. The goalposts move, the pressure stays. Too pale, too dark, not the right kind of tan - the beauty industry has always found a way to make sure someone is selling you a solution to a problem they invented.
So what do we actually do with this information?
The good news, if you can call it that, is that awareness is genuinely useful here. Refinery29's Sun Blocked series is not here to shame anyone for loving the beach or wanting to look a certain way. The goal is to arm people with real information, because - and this is the part the ads definitely leave out - there is no such thing as a safe tan. The damage is happening whether you feel it or not.
Understanding that your desire for bronzed skin was partly engineered by a century of gendered marketing does not make it disappear overnight. But it does make it a lot easier to slap on the SPF 50 and feel genuinely good about that decision.
Romanticizing sun damage was always a strange hill to die on. Literally.
