"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"
It's not that it is a sign of wealth due to leisure. People who work outdoors are tanned too. It's the warmness. The glowing. The gradients. Something impressed upon me at a young age that this is the standard of beauty.
When I'm in Asia and I see people carrying umbrellas and doing skincare, their skin looks clinical and less appealing to me than those who aren't doing it. I logically know the anti-sun regime is healthier for their skin, but my primate brain tells me it's unattractive.
It's unfortunate that increasing melanin production from the sun causes DNA damage. Because it looks so good to me.
There are a variety of drugs that induce pigmentation or melanocyte production, but none are FDA approved. Most of them can lead to cancer, either by uncontrolled cell proliferation, impact on unrelated cell populations, or disrupting normal hormonal signalling.
Melanotan-II was popular some years back, but there are half a dozen others that use a variety of different mechanisms. None of them are approved.
It's unfortunate that we haven't developed something better than exposing ourselves to DNA damage, but it's probably not the biggest priority.
Like sometimes I watch American news and the fake tans are just yucky and kind of gross to me.
Same with western women I see in Asia occasionally, age in 20s but looks easily 30+ while it's the opposite with many Asians. Eastern Europeans tend to avoid the sun more.
It's very much the case that in the Philippines, lighter skin is viewed as upper class haciendero/mestizo culture (not having to work outdoors, not being a nanny, maid, or "helper"). It's the same in many other Asian cultures. Women who live in Asian countries with a high concentration of plastic surgery "procedures" and treatments (like South Korea, for instance) are often the standards of beauty for other Asian countries even though such procedures/whitening and eye/nose surgeries are out of reach.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664932/#:~:text=9....
Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals intended to offer it as a cosmetic, but abandoned this pursuit in the 2000s due to regulatory restrictions and concerns about the promotion of suntanning. Unlicensed Melanotan II is found on the internet, although health agencies advise against its use due to lack of testing and regulatory approval.
Melanotan is dangerous, sadly.
Tanning causes melanocyte production in your epidermis. Melanotan causes it throughout your body in an uncontrolled manner. In a wide variety of unrelated tissues.
It can lead to uncontrolled melanocyte production that doesn't shut off - cancer. Aggressive melanomas.
It disrupts normal hormone signalling which may downstream cause a variety of deleterious health effects and disease states.
There are also crazy reports of kidney failure, which may or may not be caused by the drug.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7148395/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23121206/
https://www.actasdermo.org/en-eruptive-dysplastic-nevi-follo...
They almost always just stick to tones within the realm of pantone's skin guide, treating it more like a skin bible instead.
Haus labs and their triclone in 000 is one of the few foundations I've ever had match.
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
This. Same with curly vs straight hair.
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
But I think on some level we naturally associate severe paleness with being sick or non-social.
I say this as the original commenter
To me personally, I like naturally tan skin (like Asian natural skin) > natural white skin > artificial tanned skin > heavy tanning. Tanned white people just do not look good to me.
If you asked someone else where I live now, I bet answer would be different
To me, something like RFK Junior skin looks disgusting. I always wince when I see a picture of him, like you could make that into leather bag.
Vitamin D deficiency is very common in Canada particularly during winter. The government recommends that everyone intentionally seek out vitamin D rich foods, or to take a supplement.
> ...
> 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.
The grass on the other side has a different amount of melanin be harder-to-achieve and thus more desirable because it previously signaled belonging to the higher socio-economical strata.
It becomes unmissable once someone is in their 30s: Some still have youthful skin, while others are wrinkly, splotched, and saggy.
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!
Blond hair with a tan or black hair with white skin are more contrasting so look more striking.
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.