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I've been marvelling at a recent Instagram shot of Cindy Crawford lounging on her Muskoka cottage dock – not because the supermodel cuts an enviable figure in her aqua bikini, but because she is unabashedly sunbathing. It's a bold photo. These days, working on one's tan usually means getting it from a bottle or spray booth; sporting a natural tan is like smoking a cigarette at a juice bar.

Broad spectrum protection from harmful ray exposure has been ingrained in us over the last decade, and rightly so. The medical dangers of sunbathing are real. Skin cancer and melanoma are ever more prevalent but also, thankfully, more commonly discussed. Earlier this year, actor Hugh Jackman was public about his fifth bout with skin cancer. Even the vocabulary has shifted: What was once called suntan lotion is now called sunscreen.

I'm a reformed heliophile myself. I love being in the sun and tanning at the merest hint of sunshine but take the dangers to heart. For years I've slathered my olive skin in SPF50 before getting dressed in the morning and hidden in the shade when outdoors. A dermatologist's poster child, I wear wide-brimmed hats, and while at the beach, watch the surf from a UPF-certified shade tent. But these actions only go so far. This summer I've spent more time than usual outside and find myself feeling almost apologetic, not just for the visible proof of my leisure but for admitting that, in spite of copious sunscreen, I still prefer to get a tan the old-fashioned way. But must looking golden thanks to the sun's rays leave one feeling guilty?

Over the years this modern penchant for a deep lifestyle tan has persistently been attributed to designer Coco Chanel who, whether sunning with boyfriend Boy Capel or, later, sailing with the Duke of Westminster, proudly sported a golden tan in the late 1920s. As such, having a tan was not only acceptable, but chic well into the 1930s. But that's myth. Certainly, Chanel sunbathed when most of the affluent did not, but it was American expats Gerald and Sara Murphy who first popularized the French riviera as a summer destination a decade earlier at their villa in Cap d'Antibes, which had a flat roof designed for sunbathing with friends like Picasso and the Fitzgeralds (not for nothing, the leading self-tan brand is called St. Tropez). Before these bronzed young things changed the course of the great outdoors, men and women took care to cover complexions – not only for modesty (the typical bathing costume at Victorian and Edwardian seaside resorts left everything to the imagination) but to assert leisure status. This was accomplished by keeping skin protected under large hats, gloves and parasols, not unlike how many of us, with rash guards, UPF clothing and shade tents dutifully dress for the sun today.

With all the sun safety education today, it's no wonder beauty brands opt to trade on nostalgia for the scent of tanning lotion (and the association of basking in the sun during a more innocent and carcinogenic time) with perfumes that smell like old-school suntan – literal iterations like Estee Lauder's Bronze Goddess or CB I Hate Perfume's At the Beach 1966, which like Tom Ford's Soleil Blanc, are the neroli, tiaré and a topnote everyone of a certain age recognizes: the telltale throwback pong of oily coconut Coppertone.

It's a beach bag of mixed messages. The visual association of a tan with the perception of health is about a hundred years old. Sunlight therapy and lamps were first in use in hospitals and clinics from the turn of the last century in the treatment of tuberculosis and rickets, and they begat at-home sunlamps for treatment and then recreational use. Today we know better, yet we still celebrate the tanned aesthetic with a chemically induced tint – the equivalent of decrying fur, then buying faux to emulate the same look anyway.

In the summer 1947 issue of Harper's Bazaar, beauty editor Dorothy Hay Thompson did the same when she answered reader questions about tanning. Her advice? "Be stingy with sun time and lavish with a sun-filtering lotion." When asked if mineral or salad oils are the quickest way to a good tan, Thompson appeals to vanity mentioning that a burn is "the shortest known route to a dry, wrinkled skin." Alas, her cautions were undermined by the fact that the text ran alongside a photo of a glistening model sunning in a barely there polka-dot bikini. Talk about a mixed beach bag of messages. At that, her lip service to sun safety fell on deaf ears.

By 1955, our first glimpse of soignée blond Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief is as she oils up at The Carlton's private beach in Cannes (presumably in a futile attempt to catch up with Cary Grant's deep walnut shade). That decade, suntan pills and chemical self-tanner also became commercially available.

By the 1960s, accelerants like Bonne Bell's Butter Up deep tanning oil and Coppertone Tanning Butter (equal parts coconut oil and cocoa butter) were top sellers, and Johnson's Baby Oil touted itself as a sun lotion – ad copy bragged that not only was it the same pure oil Mom used to use, "It has no sunscreens like tanning lotions and creams. So there's nothing to block out the golden sun. You tan faster and deeper than ever before." Then the first indoor tanning salon was launched in 1978, continuing the trend for a sun-kissed all-American look through the 1980s.

A generation later, even more fraught than getting any tan at all is the minefield of the fake suntan. There are increasing concerns over appropriation, racism and even erasure when caucasians opt to temporarily darken their skin. That tension came to the fore in the spring, when the extreme names like "Dark Chocolate" used by a Swedish tanning salon for its deeper spray tan shades made the rounds and were deemed racially insensitive. The privilege of trying on a different skin tone with none of the baggage is what every self-tanner promises.

So maybe Cindy Crawford is onto something – the only acceptable tan now is the one nature creates.

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