alt Hacker NewsExcessive UV exposure in general not a great time, tanning is just a way of speedrunning damage unless done in very short intervals.
I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker via tanning though. Theres nothing wrong with light skin, its only a few western countries that seem to have a weird fetishization with cooking your skin longterm to get darker short term. Meanwhile most other countries and peoples are willing to damage their skin in whole other ways trying to get the opposite.
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They're both imitations of status symbols
"wealthy people can stay inside while poor people work in the sun" vs. "wealthy people can vacation in sunny countries while poor people stay home in the cold"
I’m naturally pretty pale and don’t get much sunlight, I feel like I look like shit unless I get just a little bit of tan. What most people would consider just a healthy looking “baseline”. It also puts me in a better mood although that may be entirely psychological.
When I was younger I used to intentionally tan for short durations, but now I realize that’s harmful so I just embrace the cave gollum look
Cosmetic companies to blame? In the east, they fetishize white / fair skin, while in the west they fetishize dark skin.
You can always use Melanotan II instead to get a good tan while also increasing libido and sleep quality; )
> I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker
> ...
> Meanwhile most other countries and peoples are willing to damage their skin in whole other ways trying to get the opposite.
The grass has more melanin on the other side.
It's indeed, baffling, ignoring health consequences: Get fashionably darker skin now: Make your skin look (reasonably universally) irreversibly uglier/older gradually over time. This is perhaps the most controllable way to affect how old you look.
It becomes unmissable once someone is in their 30s: Some still have youthful skin, while others are wrinkly, splotched, and saggy.
The book by Dr. Seuss, “The Star Bellied Sneetches” explorers the phenomenon.
And what's funny is Western countries idolise tanned skin whereas Asian countries tend to idolise lighter skin.
> I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker via tanning though
While some darker skin people want to have lighter skin.
Maybe at some deeper level it’s something about being human. We always want something the other person has
The popularity of tanning is attributed to fashion designer Coco Chanel, who accidentally got too much sun on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. Since she was a fashion icon, this made the tanned look fashionable.
As an aside, the chemistry behind UV damage is interesting. You can think of DNA as a sequence of four letters: C, G, A, and T. If there are two neighboring T's, UV can move a bond, linking the two T's together (i.e. thymine dimerization). If you're in the sun, each skin cell gets 50-100 of these pairs created per second. Enzymes usually fix these errors, but sometimes the errors will cause problems during DNA replication and you can end up with mutations. Enough of the wrong mutations can cause skin cancer. So wear sunscreen!
https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/91