一个中国人定居印度的感受

www.readersdigest.co.uk/health/health-conditions/the-evolution-of-tanning

The evolution of tanning
Amanda Riley-Jones

When skin showed status



In the early 20th century, high-class ladies went to great efforts to protect their complexions from the sun


In ancient times, pale skin indicated high status and was much-admired. Ancient Egyptian men and women lightened their skin with yellow ochre powder. From the eighth century, Japanese women created a white mask using poisonous lead or mercury based powders. The Chinese choice was rice powder, while ancient Greeks and Romans used chalk or white lead to create that whiter shade of pale.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, high-class women took care to keep the sun off their faces and wore heavy layers of “ceruse”— a horrific concoction of white lead and vinegar or powdered borax that could lead to gout, anaemia, renal failure and scarring. To add to the ghostly, porcelain effect, some drew a thin blue line across their foreheads, while others topped off their painted faces with egg white.


"It was all about status.
White skin distinguished rich from poor"

In the 19th century, well-born women used parasols and face-whitening lotion to protect their skin. Flamboyant dandies followed women’s beauty routines and took to whitening the backs of their hands as well.

It was all about status, of course. White skin distinguished rich from poor. The upper classes stayed pallid to demonstrate their genteel indoor lives of leisure, while tanned skin was beyond the pale—associated with the lower orders who toiled outside in the fields.

This attitude held fast for centuries until the Industrial Revolution saw millions of the rural poor move to towns to find work in mills and factories.

The healing power of the sun

The second big change was when doctors started to see the light about the medical benefits of sunshine. In 1855, the natural healer Arnold Rikli opened a sanatorium in Austria to treat TB patients with light therapy.

In 1890, medical missionary Dr Theobald Palm made the breakthrough observation that huge numbers of urban kids, kept indoors from the industrial soot and smog, were getting rickets through lack of sunshine.

A year later, physician and health-food promoter John Harvey Kellogg invented the “incandescent light bath”, which he claimed had cured Edward VII’s gout. His contemporary Niels Finsen won a Nobel Prize for his work on phototherapy to treat diseases such as lupus.

Nevertheless, as the 20th century began, the British establishment still feared that the bright sun in the far reaches of the Empire was giving pasty Brits tropical neurasthenia—causing fatigue, irritability, and even death.

At home, a tan was still not fashionable in polite society. Well-born ladies bought beauty products that promised to remove accidental tans and pesky freckles.