If the biggest beauty investment of your teens was accumulating more Chi Chi Eye Magic Instant Eye Shadow than there were Under 18s dances to wear it to, then you’ll remember the cultural chokehold fake tan had in the noughties. The holy trinity of the era – Paris Hilton, LiLo and the cast of Laguna Beach – all rocked an on-trend orange glow, and being pale was akin to destitution on the social currency scale. My own attempts to bronze with the best of them fell spectacularly short, and still glow somewhere deep in the Meta servers.

Nearly two decades later, tanning has again reached mass saturation. Miu Miu, Versace and Fendi campaigns feature synthetically bronzed models, celebrity spray tan artist James Harknett says he’s getting 200 requests a week, and Ken’s tan in Barbie was almost as much of a talking point as the film itself. Like many markers of style, the tanned ideal can be traced back to Coco Chanel, who accidentally got too much sun on a Mediterranean cruise in the 1920s and sparked a sunbathing craze. Before that, pale skin was aspirational in the West – the reserve of the upper classes who spent a life of leisure indoors or sheltered under parasols. But as the 20th century unfolded and commercial air travel took off, bronzed skin became synonymous with the glamour of spending winters

on the Riviera or in the Caribbean. And somewhere along the way, sun-kissed skin became shorthand for looking healthy even though, as we all know by now, a natural tan signifies skin cells in trauma.

Worryingly, a new generation of actual sun- worshippers may be rising. You only need to check out this year’s Euro summer humblebrag – a carousel comprising an artful bowl of olives, some twinkling water and a deep tan line across a hip bone – for evidence. Spend long enough on TikTok and you’ll see people splashing on beer or snorting nasal spray containing Melanotan – a chemical tan enhancer dubbed the ‘Barbie drug’, which stimulates skin cells containing pigment with intense side- effects – in order to supercharge their sunbathing. Equally concerning are the black market solariums and ‘collariums’ (a combination of tanning and red light skin therapy) accessible via secretive social media accounts as tanning beds have been banned commercially for almost a decade in Australia. Sun safety has come a long way since the girls of Puberty Blues tanned their boyfriends’ names onto their stomachs, but maybe not as far as we think. Non- melanoma skin cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in Australia, and about two in three of us will be diagnosed with some form of skin cancer before reaching 70.