How did British people approach suntanning and skincare in the early 20th century?

What do literary texts have to tell us about the medical and commercial histories of suntanning and suncare in the early 20th century?

Archives reveal a plethora of skincare creams and lotions that were used first to remedy sunburn and then, as the century progressed, to encourage tanning. Alongside the medical and commercial histories of these products, literary texts give us further insights into everyday attitudes and behaviours around skincare and tanning – sometimes with surprising results.

Skincare from James Joyce to Agatha Christie

The earliest products were typically multi-purpose skincare products aiming at softening, nourishing and “beautifying” the skin, and listing sunburn relief as one of a number of possible uses: a label for Boots’ Pure Cold Cream from the 1920s states that as well as “nourishing and beautifying” the skin, it “quickly relieves sunburned or chapped skin, making it soft and velvety”. Cold Cream appears frequently as a sunburn remedy throughout dermatology textbooks, and literature attests to a familiarity with its usage: in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Lydia Douce is described as having sunburnt “skin tanned raw”, and Leopold Bloom reflects that she “should have put on coldcream first [to] make it brown”. Here, Joyce in fact adds an extension to the recommended usage of Cold Cream: not only to relieve but also to turn the “raw” red of the sunburn to what is implied to be a more desirable “brown”.

Going into the 1930s, a huge number of new suntan oils, creams, and lotions catered to the growing desirability of bronzed white skin, which went hand-in-hand with a rise in sun-seeking leisure practices. Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941), set at a seaside resort in Devon in the mid-1930s, captures this in its opening pages showing tourists at the beach: “Some were in the sea, some were lying stretched out in the sun, and some were anointing themselves carefully with oil” – alluding to the suntan oils facilitating rapid tanning that became available throughout the 1930s.

But it is another sun product that becomes integral to Christie’s novel: a bottle of artificial suntan that – spoiler alert – is instrumental in a murder, enabling the disguise of a criminal accomplice. The application of fake tan swiftly transforms one woman’s pale, white skin into something approximating the “beautiful even shade of bronze” of another; after the crime has been committed, the suntan is just as quickly washed away in the bath.

The first fake tans

Early artificial bronzing products of this kind became popular in the 1930s for offering “suntan without sunshine”. These products used vegetable extracts to essentially stain the skin (it was only later in the 1960s that more advanced chemical formulas for fake tan developed) and were not without problems: one customer complaint found in product development files comments on an artificial bronzer “washing off too readily in seawater”. One can only imagine (and perhaps smile at) the aghast look on the face of the bronzed beach-goer stepping out of the sea to find their suntan dripping away, but it is this very feature that gives Agatha Christie an unexpected yet believable plot device.

As the 20th century progressed, the focus of suncare would in time shift to a greater awareness of the dangers of sun exposure and the importance of sun protection. In this respect, the idea of “suntan without sunshine” was ahead of the curve and we know now that the only safe kind of tan is a fake one. The history of the early 20th century is rich with these kinds of interactions across medical, commercial and literary cultures, and bringing these into dialogue has much to tell us about the cultures of suntanning from the past to the present day.

Charlotte Mathieson is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Surrey.