BRONZE Is The New Black !!!

It's NOT RIGHT

... But it's OK !!!

    Throughout history, tanning has gone in and out of fashion. In Western countries before about the 1920s, tanned skin was associated with the lower classes, because they worked outdoors and were exposed to the sun. Women went to great lengths to preserve pallid skin, as a sign of their "refinement".
Women's outdoor clothing styles were tailored to protect against sun exposure, with full length sleeves, and sunbonnets and other large hats, headscarves, and parasol shielding the head. Women even went as far as to put lead-based cosmetics on their skin to artificially whiten their skin tone. However, when not strictly monitored these cosmetics caused lead poisoning. Achieving a light-skinned appearance was achieved in other ways, including the use of arsenic to whiten skin, and lightening powders. The preference for fair-skin continued until the end of the Victorian era.
By the early 20th century the therapeutic benefits of sunlight began to be recognised. In 1903, Niels Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his “Finsen Light Therapy”. The therapy was a cure for diseases such as lupus vulgaris and rickets. Vitamin D deficiency was found to be a cause of rickets disease, and exposure to the sun would allow vitamin D to be produced in a person. Therefore, sun exposure was a remedy to curing several diseases, especially rickets. In 1910 a scientific expedition went to the island of Tenerife to test the wider health benefits of 'heliotherapy’, and by 1913 'sunbathing' was referred to as a desirable activity for the leisured class.
Shortly thereafter, in the 1920s, fashion-designer Coco Chanel accidentally got sunburnt while visiting the French Riviera. When she arrived home, she arrived with a suntan and her fans apparently liked the look and started to adopt darker skin tones themselves. Tanned skin became a trend partly because of Coco’s status and the longing for her lifestyle by other members of society. In addition, Parisians fell in love with Josephine Baker, a “caramel-skinned” singer in Paris, and idolised her dark skin. These two women were leading figures of the transformation tanned skin underwent, in which it became perceived as fashionable, healthy, and luxurious. Jean Patou capitalised on the new tanning fad launching the first suntan oil "Huile de Chaldee" in 1927
Just before the 1930's Sun therapy became a very popular subscribed cure for almost everything from simple fatigue to tuberculosis.
In the 1940s, advertisements started appearing in women’s magazines which encouraged sun bathing. At the same time, swimsuits' skin coverage began decreasing, with the bikini radically changing swimsuit style after it made its appearance in 1946. In the 1950s, many people used baby oil as a method to increase tanning. The first self-tanner came about in the same decade and was known as “Man-Tan,” although it often led to undesirable orange skin. Coppertone, in 1953, marketed their sunscreen by placing a little blond girl and her cocker spaniel tugging on her bathing suit bottoms on the cover of their bottles; this is still the same advertisement used today. In the latter part of the 1950s, silver metallic UV reflectors were common to enhance one’s tan.
In 1962, sunscreen commenced to be SPF rated, although in the US SPF labeling was not standardised by the FDA until 1978. In 1971, Mattel introduced Malibu Barbie, which had tanned skin, sunglasses, and her very own bottle of sun tanning lotion. In 1978, both sunscreen with an SPF 15 rating as well as tanning beds first appeared. Today there are an estimated 50,000 outlets for tanning, whereas in the 1990s there were only around 10,000. The tanning business is a five-billion dollar industry in the United States.
In China, darker skin is still considered by many to be the mark of the lower classes. As recently as 2012, in some parts of China, ski masks were becoming popular items to wear at the beach in order to protect the wearer's face from the effects of the sun.