The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain

This open access book explores tanning culture: how the desire for tanned white skin led to the phenomenal growth in sunbed use and how the practice spread through Britain. By analysing the role of the media, medical experts, and socio-political changes, The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed exposes how sunbed providers, consumers and the ‘sunbed tan’ itself shifted from ‘healthy’ to ‘harmful’ in late twentieth-century depictions. Fabiola Creed examines print media, film, medical journals, trade directories, catalogues, and children’s toys to map this transition.

The book begins in 1970s Liverpool when an affluent beauty businesswoman introduced sunbeds as a ‘revolutionary’ technology. In the early 1980s, the sunbed industry boomed with the mass advertising and fitness industry, epitomising Margaret Thatcher’s entrepreneurial spirit. Advertised as an everyday luxury for wealthy consumers, sunbeds became the acme of self-improvement.

Yet, by the 1990s, sunbeds were a mundane technology associated with working-class people and ‘excess’ consumerism. Following the rise in Western countries’ skin cancer rates, and subsequent ultraviolet research and health campaigns, the media stigmatised ‘sunbed addicts’; these young white women and metrosexual men were condemned for being an ‘immoral’ drain on the National Health Service. Yet, tanning culture and its ever-evolving technologies remain popular to this day.

Ultimately, The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed demonstrates how popular culture can reciprocally shape public health. It also sheds new light on key political, economic, medical and socio-cultural changes within everyday life in Britain. The book will appeal to those interested in the history of business, mass media, advertising, popular culture, public health, policy, and medicine, science and technology.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust.