“The paler ones skin the higher the class, and men and women went to great (and sometimes unhealthy) lengths to be pale” (Sun). Unbelievably, in ancient times this was the lifestyle. Pale was actually the thing to be. Pale skin depicted the upper, leisure class while dark skin indicated a life filled with hard, outdoor labor. Society was desperate to be as white as possible. In ancient Greece and Rome, lead poisoning took a number of victims due to women using lead paint and chalk to whiten their faces. In the mid-10th century, arsenic became the whitener of choice (Sun). The creator of Signora Toffana designed an arsenic based face powder that specified women to apply to their cheeks when their husbands were nearby. “Six hundred dead husbands (and many wealthy widows) later, Toffana was executed” (Madrano). As the times went on, the trend continued. Women were constantly concocting new methods to achieve translucency and eventually resorted to drawing thin, blue lines on their forehead to represent veins. It was not until the 1920s that the suntanned look was admired, when French designer Coco Chanel returned to the fashion world tan after a cruising from Paris to Cannes. “Soon fashionable women everywhere threw away years of tradition to be tanned” (Sun). Since that inevitable turning point, the popularity of tanning has rapidly increased, along with over a million skin cancers diagnosed, and 10,000 deaths resulting from them (Tanning-bed). Society is slowly, yet surely being educated on the risks associated with sun exposure, but to no current avail, nobody seems to be listening. Despite the claims of the tanning bed industry, exposure to ultraviolet rays CAN result in a number of health problems namely skin cancer, which can be fatal.

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